One of the most overlooked aspects of web page authoring is the title html tag. This tag is important because it does each of these things:

• displays on the application bar
• is the text shown in a bookmark of the page
• may assist in finding it in a search engine because it displays in most cases
• may be given key priority in search engine keyword searches if it matches page content

There is a good article on how to write good title tags here.

At year end, everybody and their brother (and sister) issue the best of lists. There are hundreds of them. Somehow by following a link in one of them from some guy named Red, I wound up over at a site called Duct Tape Marketing. Now as may be obvious, I am not all that much into marketing (you can donate to keep htmlfixit up and running by the way — how is that for actually marketing us?), but I followed the link because I like duct tape — in fact, it has often been described as man’s best friend, and I happen to agree.

Two interesting things struck me, first, the lead story suggested that you give something away to get people into your location. The best part of the advice, to my way of thinking, was what he said — do not ruin a free offer with small print. That is something we do well here at htmlfixit.com. We give away our statistical hit counter and a download script free of charge. There is no hook, period. You can use them freely, modify them, give them away to friends at the holidays if you are strapped for a gift (and you didn’t find a good idea in da Yoopers song, everybody can use some back bacon, eh?). Our only hope is that you either donate volunantarily to us, or that you buy one of our advanced scripts (that are only $10 by the way). I am not sure if we do a good job of selling you something once you get here — although that also isn’t our primary purpose, but we do need to pay the bills to stay up and running.

Rick Dooling just pointed me towards the Ruby on Rails project. It is an open source web framework that will allow a programmer to rapidly work though a project with less effort in minor semantics of coding. As it says, it favors convention over configuration. I look forward to digging in a little further, but this reminds me of when I first heard of PHP. This thing looks like it may have traction to go big. Who wouldn’t want to use this thing? It appears to be overtaking .net and Java deployments.

That led me to this random site called Quimble.com where you can get a survey up and running in minutes. Interesting site, supposedly built using Ruby on Rails.

Open Office business suite of productivity software has been updated from version 2.0 to 2.0.1 just eight weeks into the run. The minor update is primarily to fix a few things and add some nice improvements. It now allows an IT manager to control whether users have access to all componants by permitting custom modifications to the configuration menu, and allows you to either resume in a document at the cursor position where you left off (great for authors and the default) or at the start of the document (great for readers). Most significant of all, it now has a new mail merge feature!

They have added better support for bullets when opening Microsoft product’s files, added improved drag and drop OLE behavior in the Impress/Draw componants, and now allow you to configure your default font size.

As you know I am likely going to review Prentice Halls book, Point and Click for Open Office right here in a few days. I like it a lot thus far. When I review a book, I actually read it. I am about 2/3rds of the way through it … and I don’t know how carefully I will read the two chapters on Thunderbird and Firefox to be honest, so probably in a couple of days. My first take at this point is that it is a good book, especially if you are switching from Word, or giving the program to your mother, friend, spouse, etc. hoping that they will actually use it. For heavier users of Office products, it is too light to be honest. Still, a book like this is a good starting point for most people.

If you want to buy a copy please use my link so I get a few pennies for my trouble 🙂

I recently did a makeover to two sites, TraverseLaw.com and WardropLaw.com. I was given the design to use for the first and used a friend to help me with the creative spark on the second one. I of course did all of the coding for both of them. I would appreciate any coding and usability comments about the sites. Are they usable? Do you experience any difficulties navigating around them or experience broken code? I don’t really need feedback on the looks of the sites as that is now set for the most part.

On that same thought process, a friend of mine over at em two design just showed me this site called YourSexyLife.com that they have completed. I really like that design. I think it is probably on my top ten list of all time favorite looks. The site is interesting because it is about living a full life, with sex or celibate, in a way that is sexy. As her tag line says, “sassy, yet classy”. It isn’t the typical type of site I would visit, and yet it somehow drew me in for a read. I was disappointed that she didn’t permit comments, but I guess with a name like that she is worried what she might get back. My friend was showing me the site to show me the quality she was able to obtain on the main gif image on the site. Impressive work!

We are often asked it is necessary or prudent to validate your pages according the the W3C standards. Some say yes, and some say no. I guess to my way of thinking good coding cannot be bad, but bad coding might, or might not, be good. Why take the chance? Your comments are welcome below.

A new site of mine Storm Trumpets is receiving some attention for the expanding / collapsing site menu. Visit the site and click on the menu items “Trumpets” and “Trombones” to see the menu in action. It creates the illusion of movement as if driven by DHTML or JavaScript, however to the contrary it works in CSS and is really quite simple. I have been asked to explain how it works, so thought I would provide a brief tutorial for it here.
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