Gradients and drop shadows were the name of 2004’s web design game. Everything from high-end corporate sites like Mac to upscale blogs such as designer Cameron Moll’s utilized, and are still utilizing, gradients, drop shadows and other “soft effects” in web design.

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Stick around htmlfixit for any length of time, and you’ll soon find we like and endorse web standards around here. Yet, that’s such an ambiguous statement to make, as many people, including web designers, are still in the dark as to what standards are and why they matter.
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Godaddy.com is a favorite or ours for purchasing domain names. They are buying two commercials during the Superbowl this weekend. You can also view an add rejected by Fox in the post Janet Jackson costume malfunction era. However, in order to view the commercial they require that you to enter a captcha, a random image that must match what you enter in a text field. That got me thinking, isn’t a captcha before download a great way to slow down the crawlers who use up bandwidth. What do you think? Leave a comment with your thoughts, but first satisfy our captcha.

We are regularly asked how to copyright web content. The best source of United States Copyright information is the Copyright Office web-site. You can register on-line literary works or writings for the cost of $30 U.S. While you can register a copyright for your web-site content, you CANNOT copyright your domain name.

While you can register your copyright, and gain several rights (statutory damages, attorneys fees and prima facia evidence of copyright to name the biggest of them) from doing so, you don’t need to to be protected. You are automatically protected on publication if the work is unique and your own. Even non-United States parties may be protected by U.S. copyright laws if their country of domicile has reciprocal agreement (see pdf formatted list of such countries) with the United States.

Here at htmlfixit.com we follow many sites using RSS. It allows us to follow and track things without needing to navigate numerous sites in a day in our effort to stay abreast (random link spurred by that word) of the news. Counting hits generated by RSS syndication is a tricky thing. Many sites have taken to using a query string in the url to try to track hits generated from RSS followers, for example this one: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66374,00.html?tw=rss.TOP. Notice the tail end of that … “tw-rss.TOP”. The URL works the same with or without that string. The problem with that type of query string tracking is that it alters the actual URL, so if I copy the URL, press it to my blog-roll, or forward it to a friend, you will get all of these secondary hits shown as coming from the RSS. Of course that is what originated the hit, but it is not what caused the hit. It may cause you to figure more people are following RSS than are really doing so.

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Franki and I try a lot of software and install and uninstall things regularly on our Windows O/S Machines (Franki: hey! I dual boot OK.). One of the problems is that over time they tend to slow down. Today we happened onto a great system optimization tool and registry cleaner that meets our criteria for great software: (more…)

Many writers and students struggle to find the right syntax for bibliographic citations. This Calvin College student’s project makes it simple to get the right syntax for your citations.