ICANN and Verisign have had lawsuits pending against each other for some time now. At issue are a number of things, not the least significant of them being that ICANN would like to increase the base cost of a domain name. I have not been buying domain names on a long term basis because I think that the cost of domain names should actually drop. This lawsuit settlement leads me to believe that the cost of domain names may double in the next five years because registrars will have to pay more. I guess it is still a toss up anyway because the renewal cost in tomorrow’s dollars probably will make the actual cost with time value factored in about a wash. However, it may make sense to buy it long term if for no other reason, just to be sure you do not forget to renew it — or if you auto-renew so that something does not get messed up in the process, like a card expiring.

We have written in the past about the effect on employment that blogging may have. Now we see a school district taking action to place a bright student in an alternative education program as a result of a parody site that he did on myspace.com.

From the limited facts presented, it appears to be a serious case of overreaction by the school. People sometimes need to vent. On the other hand, at what point are you disrespecting authority? Interesting questions.

Also in recent news, a Judge who had ordered several teenages not to drink posted pictures of themselves and friends getting wasted and made fun of the Judge in the process. He happened onto the blog sites, and given the picture evidence, he put them in jail for disregarding his orders.

One of the effects of this type of conduct is that kids are going from the open forum xanga.com blogs to the more restricted closed forums like facebook.com.

Let’s start today with a list of people who face consequences for blogging. Drop a comment below if you know of a case where someone lost a job, got sanctioned by an employer or school system, or got put in jail as a result of exercising speech on the internet. At a later time we can try to make sense of it. If you see the page, how about a screenshot of it? Say you have it and I’ll be in touch.

Update 1: Students are disciplined from extra-curricular activities as a result of pictures of a drinking party when those pictures are placed on myspace.

Update 2: Here is another one. Appears to be a growing fad. In this case two students are apparently jailed after posting threats of violence in their school.

Besides hiring me of course, you can spend a lot of time figuring it out. We have had good success in getting pages ranked well in Google quite quickly. We do not use any “word spam” techniques to do it either. In fact we wouldn’t do it. Anyway, we have tried in the past to share our thoughts on SEO – or search engine optimization – with others. We hope others have found it helpful.

Let’s get “Scientificish”

I regularly read Mike Industries as I find he has a lot of good information. He sort of wants to be the number one “Mike” in Google. Can he make it? To figure out how the rankings work (or don’t work) he tried an experiment that was a bit scientificish (I figure we have a shot at going one/two for that term). His research on what Google did with some newly generated web pages concerning the word “lodefizzle” generated some very interesting results.

Validate that Code

Go validate the code on your page, and then, have a read because as he says:

Conclusion: It’s not clear that validity helps search engine ranking, but it’s definitely true that certain errors in your code can get you completely removed from indexes.

I remember the first time I looked for my name in Lexis/Nexis back in the early 1980’s. The name Don was tough to find because of many sub-parts under the ancient indexes available at that time because I could be found under either Don or Donald, so you had to leave it open. I got donut, don’t, etc. Eventually I had to construct a better way to search for Don or Donald and my last name, allowing for the fact that I might or might not have an initial or middle name in there as well. It took a bit, but I did eventually find myself. I am sure Google has raised the search bar … and suffice it to say I am no Mike. I doubt I could count far enough down to find myself. So I’ll just toil on in obsurity.

Goodnight as I go cry myself to sleep…

Today a friend of mine, Richard Dooling, suggested that a note to the side of his webpage reminded him of a sticky note. So I say … why not actually use a sticky note? It makes sense to me. So I spun up a sticky note that is expandable and runs in a div done in CSS. It does require two images to work correctly. Feel free to donate a couple of dollars if you decide to use it … or just rip it off if you must.

Well over the 3 years we have existed, it has been our distinct pleasure to help a lot of people with our coding. Many have left a link or made a small donation using the form at the bottom of every page. We have hardly gotten rich in monetary terms — in fact many months we don’t cover our costs (hint, hint). Well I decided that more people might drop us a link if they had a nice 88 x 31 button to drop with it. So feel free to borrow this, put it on your site, and link back to us — no donation required to use this button. Not satisfied with this button? Then by all means design a better one and let us have a look.

Don & Franki
htmlfixit.com

Is it just me or are glish.com and schwa.com down? Is this temporary or did I miss them disappearing? Glish is (was) a good place to look for cutting edge css.

I was hunting and poking around over at Eric Meyers cutting edge css site, also a great CSS reference site. I followed his link to Glish … and it wasn’t there. I wish I understood css half as well as Mr. Meyer does.

I was having a difficulty with two of his designs in Firefox 1.5. I just pointed it out in an email to him (that may or may not get answered according to his faq *grin*) and now am realizing that the problem is tied to the font size. The pages (pop-up and pop-up icon) are working correctly at the proper font size, but broken if you increase the font size. The example doesn’t scale correctly. Look at one of those pages and hover over the left menu. Then increase font size and hover again. The icon or pop-up will move up the menu. Hmmm, should I try to work on something the master made?

Any ideas how to make it scale if you increase font size? He has it position absolute with a top: set to a fixed amount. If I increase the font size it expands the menu under the hovered visible image.

A worm virus called Kama Sutra is alleged to be on the uptick. It will supposedly hit infected computers on the 3rd day of a month, with many expected to start next month. The payload will be an attempt to delete all PDF, Powerpoint, Word, Excel and Access files. To be straight, we should all have those files regularly backed up to a cd or other removable media regularly anyway — now shouldn’t we? Of course we get busy and forget, so take this as your reminder. Take an extra step and use this weekend for a backup. Burn a cd. You may not have the worm anyway if, like me, you “you practice safe computing,” but your hard drive will fail eventually, you will delete something accidentally. So make this your backup weekend.