Punktress

Oh productivity! Where have you gone?

// January 26th, 2012 // No Comments » // Nothing In Particular

I’ve had an amazingly productive week – even while fighting a stomach bug – but today it feels like it all came to a standstill. Somehow I managed to rollback my CS installation from 5.5 to 5 (doh!), get sucked into a Windows Update (double doh!), and make ZERO progress on anything that actually mattered. So, still at my desk 11 hours later, I’m trying to catch up on some of the missed work from today. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little. I did finish cleaning a large (250k+) email list. That was a pretty swell accomplishment.

Moving right along…or continuar, as my Spanish professor used to say (as if I were young enough to have had a professor of any kind in the last-almost-decade)…

Lexxie can say the word paparazzi perfectly. That is either a sign of living in SoCal for too long or of her listening to too much Lady Gaga. I’m thinking it is both. Although, it is really cute watching her sing along to the songs she likes. Tonight at dinner she busted out with “ey oh no no!” (her way of singing Blitzkrieg Bop). That was so super cute. The other kids tried to get her to say “let’s go” but I thought “no no” was cuter. It was much like Madison counting at that age: “one two second nine.” Ahh, those are the moments we, as parents, never forget.

It has been a good few weeks for business. I’ve managed to bring in several new clients and now I have a profit sharing mobile app deal in the works. I’m pretty excited about the latter. I’m always tinkering around with new apps but I don’t have any unique ideas. So now I’ve met someone with the ideas but without the know-how…and he has met someone with the know-how and not the ideas. Ahh, a business match made in heaven…or Lancaster…(not the) same difference.

Well, Adobe Edge just finished installing and my HTML5 patch for Dreamweaver is almost done. It is time to get busy again…

It was just in the cards

// January 22nd, 2012 // No Comments » // Nothing In Particular

Yesterday afternoon as I was working my Saturday away, Maddox (my 4 year old son) comes to me holding a deck of cards. He can barely hold them all but he somehow managed to (somewhat) fan them open.

“Pick a card,” he tells me.

I fool around with him a little and try to grab the entire deck. He gives me the “c’mon mom” look, so I carefully draw one card from the deck. 10 of spades.

“Ok, now put it back.”

I place the card, face down, on the top of the deck.

Maddox cuts his cute little eyes at me and then begins to mess with the cards a little. After a few seconds, he grabs the card on top and asks “is this your card?”

I almost fell out of my chair laughing. It was so adorable – such a little boy, in here practicing his first card trick. He was really excited when I told him that it was indeed my card. He didn’t quite understand the mechanics of what happened, he just knew that he succeeded. A few minutes later I heard him telling Madison, “this was mama’s card!”

1995 called…

// January 21st, 2012 // No Comments » // Nothing In Particular

I was reading a pretty funny article about what you should not include in your website – or common web design mistakes – tomato, tomahto. I don’t think the author intended for the article to be humorous, but some of the explanations really had me laughing. I wasn’t laughing at him, but definitely with him. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it all. So I figured I’d put a few friendly web design tips out there…

1. For the love of all things good and pure in this world…please step away from that <blink> tag. I can’t believe how often I still come across websites using this. I want to call up the developer and say “hey, 1995 called…they want their deprecated HTML back.” Really. Blinking text is annoying anyway you look at it. Chances are likely, if you are using blinking text you are trying to sell something people really don’t need to waste their money buying. It you absolutely must have an annoying little blinky-thing on your website, do yourself a favor and class it up with a little Flash or something. (Or…really tacky it up, either way…)
2. Use compatible fonts. I can promise you that most web users don’t have an arsenal of fonts. If you aren’t using standardized fonts, you should be aware of how your website looks to others. There is an awesome solution for this though – Google web fonts. Google really does think of everything. So, instead of using the font that you have on your computer, browser their font families and find a compatible alternative. Just a friendly note: don’t pick something that is hard to read. Make sure your content font is easily legible. Save the fancier fonts for headers or emphasized text.
3. If you are still deploying a pop-up ad system, I will put your site on my “no-fly” list. Pop-up ads are absolutely ridiculous and painfully annoying to the user. Please stop using them. I don’t see a problem with having ads on your web page – we see them, we acknowledge them, and if they strike our fancy, we click them.
4. ^ That brings me to a similar, yet different point. Do not use so many ads on your page that it is difficult to find the content. Also, don’t deceive your users into thinking that the ad IS the content. That is just bad business practice – and if Google catches you doing it, you can kiss your traffic goodbye.
5. Don’t spam me or sell my email address. I know the CAN-SPAM rules inside and out – in fact, I teach a class on it once a year. If I catch you violating
   the rules, I will expose you.
6. If you are still using frames (and I don’t mean iframes), you should do the following: ftp into your website, right click your primary directly, press delete.
7. Why are you still using an intro page?
8. Seriously, dark background and dark text? Oh wait, I get it – it is like invisible text and you can only view it with a special decoder device.My kids get those in cereal boxes all of the time. :-/ Don’t be ridiculous.

Okay, useful advice (or ranting) time is done.