I’ve been attempting to sell some of my hot standard cards as well as some extra cards I have lying around. It’s difficult since I’m a collector as well - I don’t really want to part with some of them. My first go around didn’t go too well. I just finished uploading my second one.

Which brings me to the point of the post. I have provided a lot of content free of charge - I don’t post advertising (which may or may not change in the future) and I don’t ask for donations (same). It doesn’t cost me that much to run the site - there’s not much traffic (unfortunately).

However, if you are a reader and do want to help support the site indirectly - and especially if you’re a Magic the Gathering player like myself - feel free to browse my eBay auctions.

Even if you just offer some constructive criticism of how I might improve my auctions that would be helpful.

(Not) So Random Tidbit:  I am a fierce ma.gnolia user.  I finally got around to updating my interest area to show my ma.gnolia instead of my old del.icio.us bookmarks.  You should definitely check it out.  I have way too many magic the gathering bookmarks - don’t judge me.

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The point? He summed up Charlton Heston better than I ever could and I just wanted to give him some credit.  Maybe I can turn a few more people onto his work.  You may not like his personal blog but if you play Magic and ever do multiplayer his works on MagictheGathering.com are a must read.

Random Tidbit:  In case you don’t read Smashing Magazine they did an excellent article awhile back that asked some of the top designers 6 questions about their experience in the web design industry.

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I accomplished none of those - yet. Hopefully some will be checked off my list soon, but no guarantees.

The second reason was work. Don’t get me wrong - I love my job, a lot. They pay me a good salary to do something I love. I have basically full control over the UI so that I can design with web standards - something I’ve gotten progressively better at even though I’m no Meyer or Santa Maria. However, when you do something all day it’s hard to come home and relax by doing more of it - even if it’s for yourself and something you enjoy.

The product of this recent work is of course the Helium Marketplace. This is something we’ve had in beta for awhile, had been a big success, and that we wanted to launch with extended features. This is also something - along with our rating engine - that sets us apart from every other site on the web. Which I enjoy because that means my stock options might be worth more than the paper they’re written on someday.

The basic premise or buzzword associated with this sort of entity is “citizen journalism” - of which you can read a sometimes slanted view of here. This was started really by the blog surge of the past 5-10 years. Normal, everyday people could write about what they know and become a “citizen journalist” - someone who might not have formal training and is not part of the main media machine, but that still has an opinion or knowledge about a subject that may be of value to someone.

Although some blogs are huge, it’s a rarity. Some gather a good niche audience of friends, family, and people with similar interests - my friend Paul’s blog would likely qualify. Most blogs - as I have experienced first hand with mine - experience little or no traffic. So 90% or more either toil on in obscurity or fail.

Helium was originally founded to help with this. Instead of one person writing in obscurity they could come to Helium, write about what they know, and be ranked against dozens or hundreds of others who did the same. Helium would grow much, much faster than a blog, would have the resources to market itself much better, would have better SEO, and, therefore, would have a much larger traffic base. In return, Helium shares it’s ad revenue with those same writers based upon their contributions to the site. This was citizen journalism - except on a much more massive scale than seen before and with many voices instead of one - like Wikipedia.

It takes awhile to build a good knowledge base, to train your writers to think beyond the - typically short - blog post writing, and to market that resource to the web community. As we did, a new need in the writing community became apparent - freelance writing. For the most part, when a magazine or website needs an article that their normal staff cannot produce - either because of under staffing or simply using freelance writers to save on the cost of staffing - they turn to the freelance market. They use different sites and services that allow you to list what they’re looking for and in the end it becomes like a job posting. They “interview” many candidates, pick one, pay a fee, and get an article.

The issue is the freelance community is small and you pay before you see results. This was fine because it was the only method of supplying the need. However, we found a new method. We had a collection of motivated writers looking to become more legitimate and make more money. So the premise was simple. You, as a magazine editor, need an article on “Real life Gardening stories.” You can go the old route, pay $500 for a freelance and get 1 article. Of you can post that title on Helium Marketplace, dozens or hundreds of writers will write on the subject, we will rate the articles, and then for $25-100 you can have your pick of the one (or two, or three) you like most.

It’s a win-win-win situation. The magazine gets many articles to choose from instead of one at a fraction of the cost. The writer gets a - for them - hefty payment and a byline in a real media source. Helium gets a small percentage for brokering the deal and the ability to add any unpurchased articles to our knowledge base.

So far it’s taking off and there has been a lot of buzz. It’s a huge niche that needed filling, we’re the only one filling it, and we’re learning more every day. It was an awesome learning experience to help build it - even my small part in it. Most importantly the community loves it. We have community boards in which I get the privilege of interacting with the intelligent, active, fun, and (sometimes intensely) passionate “Heliumites.” It’s a learning experience for me as I’ve grown from someone who simply went on there to read what users thought, to someone who explained features and informed the community on things like social book marking and networking, and now to someone who (surprisingly for me) has become a respected voice in the community. It’s a rewarding, sobering, maturing, and sometimes downright scary feeling.

I don’t cross link too frequently. However, since this has become a cross between a “Helium History” post and a press release I might as well :). You can see my Helium articles here - most, if not all, have been dual posted on this site in the past (granted with formatting, links, and in some cases revisions). You can see my board contributions here - though you are warned some of my early ones are bad and I freely admit to making mistakes.

I look forward to working at Helium as long as they’ll let me. I definitely feel I would wear out my welcome before I would decide to leave. Besides doing something I love and getting paid for it I also get to work with some really great people (best development team, or team period, I’ve been on, ever, by far), learn a great deal about new technologies (Git, Ruby on Rails, working on a Mac…), drink beer at work (paid for by Helium == awesome), and when we need a break (work hard, play hard) break into a game of Nerf war or hackey.

And now back to my regularly scheduled insomnia.

Random Tidbit: In a truly random tidbit, my favorite pastime Magic the Gathering is releasing it’s new set Shadowmoor soon. Which means I will be spending way too much money on boxes of tiny cardboard cards and way too much time opening and then sorting said cards. Perhaps too much time placing them on Ebay as well - a painful subject I may yet expand upon in the future.

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In the end though, the more I think about it the more I come to the same conclusion. The Giants simply outplayed us. They wanted it more. This very thought frightens me.

The Patriots always won because they wanted it more than the other guy. They might have less talent, less speed, lack of star players - it didn’t matter. Somehow they’d pull it through at the end. My fear is that after 3 Super Bowls, after years of success, and after being labeled as the new dynasty by everyone else that they started believing their hype.

We’re used to seeing Brady with the ball, under 2 minutes on the clock, and seeing fear in the other teams eyes. They know he’s going to drive down the field. They know he’s going to pull the come back. They know that their worst nightmare is about to be realized.

The last 2 years we’ve gotten used to a different sight. Brady with the ball, under 2 minutes on the clock, and the other team stopping us.

Maybe it’s just other teams catching up. Maybe it’s parity catching up. I really hope it’s not us losing the core of our team. That hard work, blue collar, underdog philosophy that made us all proud to be Patriots fans. I’m thankful for what the Patriots have given us and for players like Bruschi. I realize we can’t win every year. But to get so close to the perfect season, to the greatest season in football history, to Mercury Morris finally shutting the hell up… and to fall short. I just don’t know.

Sadly, I find myself for the first time in a long time not wanting to watch football. Not caring about the draft. Not caring that we let possibly one of the best cornerbacks in the league go to sign an aging and (playoff) under performing wide receiver. Not looking forward to next season.

I miss that anticipation and love for the sport. I want it back. I fear it’s death on a Sunday in early February when the undefeated became perhaps the greatest disappointment in football history.

I wish I knew where we went wrong.

Random Tidbit:  Being a self-proclaimed - ok maybe publicly proclaimed - geek I found this blog post on why geeks make good lovers to be self-satisfying.  Is it true?  Find out.  Date a geek.

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In order to SEO a site a dual strategy is needed.

Internally, a site must have good technical design and well-written content. This makes it more attractive to search engines and helps with “natural indexing” a search engine spider finding a single link to your site and being able to traverse the entire site tree to add it to it’s database.

Externally, a site must rely on strong inbound links in order to build the trust factor associated to its domain by search engines (mainly Google). Means of accomplishing this include using social book marking sites (Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia), social news / technology sites (Digg, Reddit), popular blogs (TechCrunch), and niche link building (inbound links from other sites that rate for the same search terms).

Internal Design

Internal design should focus on semantic web design and well-written content. On the web, it’s said that “content is king.” Well-written content will trump any attempts at “keyword stuffing”, hidden keywords, or any other “black hat” SEO strategies (those frowned upon and/or banned by search engines). While black hat strategies might earn a short term gain inherently the search engines catch onto the strategy resulting in a long term loss either in reducing the site’s trust so they rank lower or simply banning them from the index altogether.

Semantic design is the process of writing HTML code so that content on the page is contained in semantic elements. This movement came about after the fiasco of 1990s web design including “table-itis” using tables and other semantic elements non-semantically in order to display the page the way the designer wanted. With the widespread acceptance of CSS and the (mostly) widespread implementation of it in browsers such as Firefox, Opera and IE 6+ the move to semantic design seriously began and started gaining a foothold in the web standards community.

At it’s heart, semantic design is basically wrapping content in elements that describe it semantically paragraphs in p tags, lists (many times navigation links) in ul (or if ordered ol) tags, tabular data (like graphs or excel documents) in tables, definition lists in dl tags, and headers in h1-6 tags. The use of non-semantic tags divs and spans mostly along with liberal use of classes, ids and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) then allow the designer to have semantic content in semantic tags but still display it in any manner that they wish.

The reason semantic design is important is because it tells search engines what the data means it outlines header hierarchies to allow for keyword sensing and allows it to sense how data is formed and related (paragraphs under a header being a “section” etc). Since search engine spiders can only parse and not actually read the data this allows them to parse the site more intelligently and results in better keyword matching for the site.

The final internal design facet is likely one of the most important the title tag. This is a tag that is only shows at the top of the browser window, above the address bar and is thought in the SEO community to be the most highly weighted element by spiders. Having unique, meaningful, concise, and useful titles on each of your pages is the first step to being indexed for the terms you want.

After the title tag is surmised that the header elements h1-h6 are the next most heavily weighted internal element because they perform a function like a “table of contents” for the page. These should be used intelligently and not abused though as this can be considered “black hat” as well.

External Link Building

Beyond good internal design, a well-executed inbound linking strategy is key to SEO. In the SEO community it is thought that this is actually the most important overall part of the process. Search results tend to sway towards this thinking as many times a site that has poor internal design but strong inbound linking for terms will rank higher (many times much higher) than well designed sites with poor inbound linking.

Google is the largest search engine and likely the one that values this most. Although it’s algorithm is unknown many hypothesizes have been put forth by the SEO community and results seem to provide validation.

The first hypothesis is that search engines (specifically Google) place an amount of “trust” on a domain and page (sometimes confused with PageRank). This trust for search terms shares a one-to-one relationship with how that page and domain rank for those same terms.

In order to build this trust, a site must be thought of as an expert for the terms. Typically this is show by inbound links that meet a combination of criteria. The most important is number of links combined with some sort of freshness multiplier. The more inbound links for a term the more trust. The freshness multiplier comes into effect when, for example, an older site might have more links for a term however has not had any recent links for those terms. A newer site with less overall links but many recent links for those terms might then have more trust. The logic is that data is timely so more new links earn more trust than many old links.

Beyond total number of links is links from other sites that have trust for the terms. So, for example, if a site wishes to rate for “dog breeding” having inbound links from other sites that rank well for “dog breeding” show to spiders than those trusted sites consider the linked to site a peer.

Finally, the terms in and around the anchor text of the referring link assign terms. So a link set with the text “dog breeding” in the previous example would pass on trust for that keyword phrase. This is thought to be the least heavily weighted method.

There are many other hypothesizes, however these seem to be the most prevalent and well trusted.

Inbound links are typically generated though networking in the niche community a site is looking to enter as well as using popular social networking sites (Digg, Reddit, StumpleUpon, Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia) to increase the exposure of the site and, hopefully, gain inbound links from various sources. A campaign of using social networking sites intelligently to garner inbound links is typically referred to as “viral marketing.”

In conclusion, SEO relies on both internal and external methods. The most important is a strong campaign of collecting links from valuable sources preferably in the same niche. The second most important is strong internal design so when a spider reaches the site it has the highest chance of success to index it correctly and rank it for preferred terms.

Random Tidbit: Want to learn more about SEO?  Try reading some of the 15 most popular SEO websites.  If you use Wordpress learn more about improving it’s SEO - I actually use a different plugin called Add Meta Tags. Finally, check my SEO page on Ma.gnolia for more interesting sites and tools I find.

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I had lost 3 other ferrets at this point. Mugsy had been the first in my family and the last to go. She was the most loyal pet you could ask for. She would always cheer me up when I was down. Somehow she always knew how I was feeling.

People will judge you for being too attached or close to a pet, but I don’t really care. I had her for 7 years and, except for a few trips I made, was responsible for her care every day. She came with me to Virginia Beach and kept me company in a place where I knew no one. She was my navigator for the many trips home as well.

Like any pet owner I have many regrets - things I should have done or shouldn’t have done or should have done more. But you do the best you can and hope that it’s enough. I think my ferrets had a good life. I hope so.

Unlike my other 3 ferrets who died from cancer, Mugsy had survived cancer for several years. She had a different type that we were able to control. But she was getting old and her vision and hearing was not as good as it used to be I think. A friend was holding her, I picked up a plastic bag and the noise was enough to startle her. She leapt from my friend’s hands and hit her head on the floor. I think he blamed himself, but I never did. I did blame myself for a long time because I scared her and because I didn’t check her well enough after. She seemed ok, but shortly after my sister said something was wrong and when I looked at her my heart broke.

I spent that night with her on my chest, talking to her. I couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t really move. The vet gave me hope - I thought she would be immediately put down - but as I mentioned before that hope was dashed one year ago today.

I thought after losing the other 3 ferrets, after almost losing my dad and after my brother’s accident it would somehow be easier. It wasn’t. After I said goodbye and saw her fade, I went numb. I don’t think I felt anything for a week. I had to puppy sit for the next 2 weeks and I was so numb that as my friend lost her dog - the mother - and 5 of the 6 puppies I just couldn’t grieve anymore. I felt bad for her but my heart couldn’t hold any more pain.

It’s funny because all the things I used to get irritated about sometimes - having to take hours out of my day to let them out and make sure they didn’t get hurt, stopping them from getting into or breaking my stuff, etc. - I miss. They could break anything I have if I could see them one more time. I still wake up sometimes and think “ugh, I have to get up and let the ferrets out.” When I realize I don’t have to it only depresses me.

I don’t know what else to say other than I miss my ferrets everyday and I hope that this will never change.

Mugsy and Me - taken just a couple of weeks before she died

All 4 of my ferrets in happier times

Compilation - scanned from 35mm prints, forgive the low quality

Not So Random Tidbit: The Rainbow Bridge

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Anyways, his site is called Blog de Purée and, like mine, topic hops a bit. He does have a lot of unique insight into the tech and web 2.0 world. Not only because he works with me and can harness my vast volume of knowledge (laugh track goes here) but because he has worked for several other web companies.

Some good deep reads:

1. Online rating systems can be manipulated by crowd-hacking
2. Can an online brand support gated or average content?
3. Helium member writes about being a member and earning money on the website
4. Wordpress as a content management system for niche communities
5. Social networking is no fish story on Angler’s Web site

Paul is a funny guy who I enjoy working with immensely both for his good attitude and irreverent sense of humor - which comes across in some of his writing. Definitely check out his blog.

Random Tidbit: So posting a link to my friend’s site isn’t random enough? Ok, how about a wiki composed of video game wikis? Pretty cool stuff.

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The book was quite simply awesome. It’s amazing that they did all that and are still alive to talk about it. From overdoses and car accidents to prison terms and insane groupies - they lived the rock star dream.

I thought the way the book was set up was kind of interesting as well. They keep switching view points between the members of the band and key members of their entourage. So every chapter is in a different tone from the last and many times explains events from multiple aspects.

I thought the key thing that I took away from it all that was even though they had made millions of dollars, sold millions of records and lived a life of excess - deep down they still felt like the goofy kids they were in high school (in some cases, Nikki Six sticks out the most as he admits this several times).

Makes you feel a little better knowing that even rock stars can be insecure.

Random Tidbit: Some interesting thoughts on Silicon Valley.

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I’m not an expert on web 2.0 values, however I do remember the web 1.0 bust (just in time for my college graduation with a shiny degree in Computer Science… but bitterness aside…).  I think Facebook is awesome, that it’s much better than MySpace, and possibly one of if not the gem of the current web 2.0 crowd (bigger than del.icio.us and/or Digg).  However, that just seems way too much.

The good news though is that if they’re worth that much, then my stock options with Helium will probably we worth a decent amount.  We’re no Facebook but the totals are only going up.  Barring another bust - which is always a possibility - I think I chose the right horse (my only other option at the time being Eons, which is laying off people).

Random Tidbit: Google has several new ideas percolating including a possible competitor to Second Life.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a tricky subject but one of the most widely accepted processes is having numerous, quality links from outside sites builds trust in a page and domain, helping both page and domain to gain value in rankings for the keywords associated.

There are a few widely accepted facts (since there are no certainties in SEO) I’ve discovered and seen in action that follow in (relative) order of importance (and not comprehensive):

1. Deep links are better. Using a blog example a link to a post is better than a link to category page. A link to a category page is better than a link to the blog’s homepage. Why? Because each link gives a little “link juice” (value that search engines associate with a page) from the referring site. Typically the more broad a page the stronger it’s natural link juice. Basically your home page naturally has more link juice than a new oist on “Why kittens are cute.” This is because of the way web page hierarchies are setup (it’s too long to go into detail here) so the “link juice” passed from the referring site will make a bigger impact on an post (which has very little “link juice”) than the home page (which already has a lot of “link juice” both from internal and external links). Think of it like this – you have an ounce of real juice to share. Your home page is a swimming pool, a category page is a kiddie pool, and an post is a cup. In which one would you see the biggest impact? The cup.
2. Niche links are better. An article about “Why kittens are cute” will get more “link juice” from a site about (and recognized as being an expert – ranking in search engines – for) animals (good), cats (better) or kittens (best) rather than a site about golf. Why? Because search engines (SEs) give more value to links from perceived experts in the niche. If you were buying a computer and one friend you had was a computer programmer and the other was a ditch digger in whose opinion would you place more value? Probably the computer programmer – same thing with SEs.
3. Links from sites with greater site age and trust are better. Trust is built through many ways, but basically it’s a catch 22: if other sites trust you (link to you) for keywords, you are trusted for those keywords (and can then pass on that trust). Site age refers to how long a site has been indexed in the search engine – the longer it’s been indexed the more trust. Google especially weights in site age and trust more than any other SE. Trust is also built in part (it seems) by how often your site is updated. Sites that have been stagnant for a long time (months, years) gradually lose trust to more recently updated sites under the impression that the information goes state and/or becomes dated on updated sites over time. This can be offset if others sites are regularly linking in to the site. Example: on a certain keyword a site that has been updated recently and regularly gets lots of incoming links is better than a stagnant site with lots of fresh incoming links or an updated site with few fresh incoming links which are both better than a stagnant site with few fresh incoming links.
4. Links with keyword built text are better. This does not mean make a link that says “cats, kittens, animals, ….” etc. SEs can pick up on that and call it “keyword stuffing.” This does mean that a link to the kitten article is more valuable if the link text (the words between the opening <a href=”..”> and closing </a> tags) says something like “an article about why kittens are cute” than “kittens” or “cats”.
5. Links with titles are better. The anchor tag (<a>) has an attribute called “title” in which you can put further keywords. This is especially good for links that are auto generated. A good example is “read more” links you see sometimes on blogs that link to the whole post. This can also be used to make a normal part of a sentence a link but still get the keyword effect. Example: … Check out this <a href=”site.com/kittens” title=”Why kittens are cute”>great article about cute kittens</a>.

Some of those are basic and more for beginners (my intended audience when I crafted it) but there is still some value for the intermediate SEO out there.

Conclusion: there’s more to SEO than to simply have a lot of sites link to you. One good site (a trusted authority in your niche) is worth dozens, hundreds or even thousands of links from smaller sites, blogs and web directories.

Random Tidbits: Sticking with the SEO theme I found 2 great items on SEOmoz (view source for an example of title tag use on that link - not that SEOmoz is going to get a lot of link juice from the likes of me).

1. Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories - Matt spreads some knowledge on several hot button SEO topics including use of nofollow, which is sometimes misunderstood. Matt works for Google (SEOmoz calls him their “spam guru”) and is one of the best sources to understand Google.
2. SEOmoz’s SEO Expert quiz - test your SEO mettle in 75 questions. See if you can beat my horrible impressive 55%. Seriously, the best part is at the end it shows you the correct answers along with a brief description. Unfortunately, you can’t save that page to keep that information - unless you print it as a PDF to your computer.

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Let me say that what he did was wrong and we were punished severely - to the point that it went beyond what we deserved because I feel they wanted to make an example that not even the Patriots can get away with something like that.

What stands out most in my mind is all the people that said this has been going on for years and that the Patriots don’t deserve the reputation they’ve gained and the Super Bowls they’ve won.  In my mind it’s obvious that there are too many coaches and players that have left the team - McGinest, Romeo, Mangini, Givens, etc. - that would have had to have been in on it for this to have been a long running thing.  Someone would have spoken up before now - even Mangini just last year - if we had been cheating all along.

We proved tonight that we have quality players, superior coaching, that we’re hard working and are simply better than anyone we’ve faced so far.  We don’t need any edges - which by all accounts we didn’t even get from the taping - to plain and simply outplay you.

With the Bonds and the McGwires making us so cynical about our sports heroes has it come to the point that a team that has defined what makes football great, that has been a model franchise and has grown to take the Cowboys spot as “America’s Team” can make one mistake - granted a big and stupid one - and blow all of their goodwill in one shot?

Watching the Patriots’ players crowd around Belichick after the game and congratulate him you know those closest to him believe and trust in him.  I think if Tom Brady and Tedy Bruschi - two of the finest players in the NFL - can vouch for him then we should too.  If I’m wrong and we did really get this far by getting an illegal edge than there really is nothing good left in sports.  But I don’t think I’m wrong.

Random Tidbit: Andy Rutledge provides another strong argument to design with web standards.  I know one of my goals is to continue to make my code better and more standards compliant for many of the reasons he mentions - is it one of your goals as well?  Trust me, when it comes to making large site wide changes down the road, you won’t regret it.

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I did have a thought the other day, as I try to get back into the swing of things, about video games. I read several gaming magazines and of course most of the discussion lately has been about the next generation systems and the slow dying of the last generation systems. An idea spawned in my head that I’m sure someone must have thought of before but if not I figured I’d take credit.

A big push lately has been for retro gaming - bringing back SNES, Sega Genesis, etc games to XBox Live and the Playstation equivalent as well as smaller new games that come out in these formats rather than as a full retail release - Geometry Wars comes to mind. My thought was that many people can’t afford the next generation systems - especially considering to take full advantage of them you must also have an HD television - but they do have the last generation. I’m thinking specifically the Playstation 2 and XBox - both robust, powerful systems.

Would it not make sense then for a newer and/or smaller developer to put out titles for these systems? It would seem that the cost of development and publishing would be much lower. Even better would be if that after the parent companies considered the life cycle of the system to be over that they would open this avenue by providing free or low cost development and publishing kits.

They would lose some money because as I envision it they would not be taking in a royalty with these games. However, they would be supporting an audience that probably wouldn’t affect their sales any. My theory is those that can afford the next generation would and wouldn’t buy these games.  Those that can’t afford the next generation wouldn’t and, therefore, would not be giving them any money anyways.

This would also enable people to create their own video games, thus going back to the roots of garage development - a few friends trying to make an original, cool intellectual property.

I’m pretty sure Sony and Microsoft would never go for it, but it seemed like a cool idea to me. It’s very disappointing that I can no longer get any new titles for my XBox. Even when a new graphics/processor chip or new operating system comes out my computer still is able to play many (though of course not all) of the new games coming out. You would hope that consoles would work similar - I seem to remember hearing about people having kits to make SNES games. I suppose that in our profit driven world that’s simply too much to ask for.

Random Tidbit: Don’t know why I never visited this site before, but since I hadn’t thought of it until now, maybe you feel the same.

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My uncle was a deacon, a father, a husband, a brother and above all else a good man.  I didn’t know him as well as I wish I had, especially considering the fact that he was my Godfather and my father’s big brother.  But from what I do know about him I know that I respected him a great deal, that he had a great sense of humor that could make you laugh at the oddest times at the oddest things, and that if when I die if they say I was half the man he was then I can consider my life worthwhile.

My uncle wanted his 4 brothers to be among his pallbearers but my father suffered a stroke a few years ago and was not able to.  I was given the honor of taking his place.  At the reception afterwards, my aunt thanked me for what I had done and I was too overwhelmed at the time to correct her - that I should have thanked her for letting me pay my respects to him and honor him in that way.

When my father had his stroke, I prepared myself mentally because for awhile, it looked like he would not survive.  I was lucky in that God saw fit to grant me more time with him.  After many years of bad blood between us we had just recently, at the time, started to make amends.  The passing of my uncle led me to think of the fact that soon my parents might follow.  I wish I could say I am a strong enough man that the thought didn’t scare me to my core - but I can’t.

My uncle was a man of faith and his faith in the face of cancer strengthened my faith.  I hope that he knows that.

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The added irony is I added a friend from high school… and they didn’t believe it was me.  If that’s not funny, I don’t know what is.

I know, MySpace is horrible.  I actually use Facebook more, but I keep the old MySpace around for I don’t know what reason.

As for everything else, no I’m not dead or have given up on the site.  It’s been heads down at Helium and we’re helping my brother with my niece nearly every night.  That plus other stuff has caused my site to drop in priority unfortunately.  I do have some new templates photoshopped - I just have to code them up.  They’ll probably go to OSWD or OWD as well.

Random Tidbit: Use Wordpress to host your site/blog?  Check out Smashing Magazine’s Wordpress Plugin and Tutorial article.

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In the hopes that maybe this was just something that could be corrected I followed the instructions of the last FAQ and contacted Comcast.  It seems the corporate standpoint is that because it was duplicated in 2 packages they corrected the duplication by removing it from  one of the packages - the one we have.

I mentioned, having previously done sales, that it’s bad to remove products and services after a customer has already paid for them and was told we had been notified in our bill - which I can’t confirm or deny, but I’m willing to take at face value - and that besides the duplication the reason was that customers that had our package did not necessarily want NFL Network.

Seems like good reasoning, so I asked what it had been replaced by to appease those customers.  The response - nothing.  So, the people that didn’t want the channel and simply didn’t have to watch it to correct this get nothing in return due to this change.  The people that did want the channel will now have to pay $5 more a month to get it and a bunch of other channels we don’t want.

Sounds like good customer service to me.

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I did want to announce that I am the proud uncle and godfather of one Victoria Madison.  She was born around 5pm.  I have never been more proud of my little brother - which is saying a lot because though I may not tell him enough, I have always been proud of him.

No random tidbit today.  Possible pictures once I get permission and my Flickr integrated.

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Then I discovered ma.gnolia. I had written it off as a sort of neat little lower 2nd or higher 3rd tier entrant into the field but had heard good things about it. After signing up and using it for a week now - I’m hooked. It has a much better UI than del.icio.us or blinklist, it imported all of my links no problem, it generates your own link blog that you can claim on technorati and just overall I am really impressed. It’s designed by the smart people at Happy Cog Studios who employ one of my favorite web designers / developers / people - Jason Santa Maria. If I could half the design skill and coding expertise (along with a little Meyer knowledge) I wouldn’t be half bad.

So feel free to check out my link blog or my about me - and yes, that picture with the two people is me and my girlfriend. More on that later in the week.

Sorry I’m not better looking. Don’t judge me.

Random Tidbit: Check out the LEGO Digital Designer.

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Anyways, the sites are:

• Grinding Tapes Recording Company
• Mobile Man Boston

Get well soon Jason.

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If you’re not familiar with it, StumbleUpon let’s users save sites which then other users can, literally, “stumble upon.”  It’s a unique way to find good sites out there without resorting to the sometimes slanted opinion of sites like Digg and Reddit.  I heard not too long ago that they were adding features to allow users to focus on certain tags - web design, politics, etc.  That would set them apart from a feature like the del.icio.us randomizer which has much of the same functionality as the StumbleUpon I first encountered.

It will be interesting to see where Ebay, a company not really focused on this type of service, will take it.

Random Tidbit:  Two for your viewing pleasure.  Summer is upon us and theme park season is in swing - I wonder how many people will try this?  Also, remembering my younger days, this might have been a fun, if mischievous, game to play with my brother.

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People don’t respect bikers much.  You have to realize that we have no metal cage around us and are much more susceptible to vehicle malfunction, bad road conditions and accidents.  Injuries from bikers are much higher in an accident - and if you didn’t know that please raise your hand and a small gnome will stop by and bonk you on the head with a mallet.  So we might take that extra second, or give the guy in front of us a little more room because we’re not going to hit an air bag if we crash - if we’re lucky we’re going to land on the car in front of us.  If not, we’re going to rack up some frequent flyer miles.
Seriously though, respect us.  We are mother’s sons, father’s daughters and someday maybe your kid.  I’ve seen my brother get hit and tossed right in front of me because someone tried to pass him while he was turning.  I still have nightmares and, though I’m a pretty calm guy, I still have urges to hunt that person down and maim him.

The worst part about bikes though is that people pull this stuff at intersections usually - the place where you’re most likely to be shifting, so it’s that much harder to give them the finger.  Luckily, the traffic slowed down and I was able to salute the Liberty driver in the proper manner and let them know what how I felt about their driving skill.  Here’s hoping you get a flat tire in the rain very soon.

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It has many uses and benefits that are worth looking into. I will focus on my personal choice del.icio.us - however other sites such as blinklist and ma.gnolia do almost exactly the same thing (and in some cases better from what I understand).

First, and most important to me, they serve as a central hub for all your bookmarks. Once you become a regular web user and get past the 20 or so range for bookmarks it becomes cumbersome to sync your home, work, laptop, etc. bookmarks. With del.icio.us you can post them in one place and access them from any computer anywhere. And using their tag feature you can sort your bookmarks easily so that you, your friends and even complete strangers can find them. You can add notes - which I need to do more of - to remind yourself why you bookmarked the site. For anyone that is into tech news, web design or blogging having this resource is a must.

Second, they’ve become a social search engine. I saw an interesting article about the new search engine that’s better that Google. Basically, it’s about using tags on del.icio.us to find interesting and relevant sites. There are some issues - recently I’ve noticed spam trickling in - but overall it’s a great way to find cool new sites and articles. Add the fact that you can get feeds from it - giving you SEO or CSS content daily right to your RSS reader/site of choice - and it’s almost a no-brainer. Will it ever replace Google? Probably not. But it’s an awesome substitute especially for cutting edge and web related topics.

Third, they allow you to increase your audience if you’re a blogger or webmaster. Basically, by bookmarking your own pages you are indexing your site the way you want it to be. The loss is so is everyone else, however, for a new or smaller audience blog/site it’s a great way to expand your audience and pick up potential regular visitors. It’s something I’ve always meant to do with my site but never gotten around to. If you use Wordpress, your tags naturally flow with the tags on del.icio.us - so someone should (or likely already has) invent a plug-in to do this automatically.

Finally, they allow you to share your bookmarks. You can build friends on del.icio.us (they call it your network) and when you tag something one of the tags will be “for:<username>.” So if find that awesome new CSS site and want to share it with your designer friend - you can. You can even give links to people not in your network (as a reader of my blog did in the past).

You can also share your bookmarks through tag and link rolls - which is how I built my interests, web design and graphic design pages. They also have released an API I believe to be used in mash-ups.

Random Tidbit: I found an article awhile back about 37 Steps to Perfect Markup. Pretty interesting.

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The basic idea of microformats is to design a standard XHTML template for common items - for example a hcalendar for events. That template is then the standard for all items of that type. Since all of those items share common elements - in the hcalendar example a h3 with class = summary would be the event description - they are easily able to be encoded into XML and can be aggregated. So sites or programs could aggregate sites using microformats and parse them into easily understandable and standard (hence web standards) displays.

It opens the doors to easily sharing contact information, events, resumes and people relationships with friends, family or even across the web. There are even, already, some microformat plugins for Wordpress and noted blogger and CSS expert Eric Meyer uses them for both his tags and his blog watch. I definitely need to track down a rel-tag plug-in to start getting indexed in Technorati - any suggestions?

I realized I’ve only scratched the surface here. With that in mind I’m going to forgo my usual random tidbit and list some links to sites I found filled with microformats information. Before I do, note that already there have been concerns about identity theft with things like hCards and hResumes so there are many bugs to yet be worked out. It’s a powerful tool though with lots of possibility.

For more microformats information check out the following or my microformats tag on del.icio.us:

• Microformats: What They Are and How To Use Them | Smashing Magazine
• posh - Microformats
• Add microformats magic to your site
• The Big Picture on Microformats
• Markup as a Craft

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Getting off my “web standards” soapbox for a moment the main reasons you want to avoid using tables for layout is that they bloat your markup. This makes it difficult to change and update your site and it hurts your ratings in search engines. By using the correct tags you naturally tell search engine spiders what your content is - a keyword rich header, a content rich paragraph or a navigation list. This allows them to better match your site to keyword searches and increase your audience. You also don’t have to change multiple pages of markup when you want to redesign your site - you simply edit your CSS and never touch the markup.

There are some instances where you want to, and should, use a table.  When designing the table you still want to keep standards in mind. In the old days you would use inline tags like “align” or “valign” for td’s and “cellpadding” or “cellspacing” for the table itself. Now all of that can be done through the CSS. Simply place a class on the table - or use the containing element of the table and apply the rules that way.

For example if you have a table inside a div with class “mySite” you could vertically align the td’s simply by using the following rule:

.mySite table td { vertical-align: top }

If you had used valign = “top” on all of those elements and then later on you decided you wanted to change them to centered you would have to go back and either do it by hand or via a find and replace. Using CSS and web standards you could simply change that one rule and affect all of the elements. That is the true power of it.

In conclusion, the most important thing to remember is to only use tables for the purpose they were created for - tabular data. When using them for this also remember to use the least markup possible. No presentational elements should be present - only semantic elements like content and semantic images (one that add value like logos or photos rather than are used for display like rounded corner containers). Also, if you find yourself placing tables within tables reevaluate your markup - you’re probably using this to create layout or presentation and could get away with a single table and CSS to style it.

Random Tidbit: Having trouble selling web standards to your boss?  The Web Standards Project can help.  Plus they have probably the best example of a site using web standards in every facet - which makes sense.

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Fixed

What is fixed design? Fixed design is essentially defining a width on a page - no matter the size of the browser window. You can find fixed designs at sites like Helium, CNN and Yahoo. A typical fixed layout has containers, text, images and most other elements defined in pixels.

The main benefit to designers in using fixed layouts is that they have total control over the design. Unlike traditional media outlets - like newspapers and magazines - the web can be viewed through a large variety of devices from cell phones to PDAs to computer screens to widescreen HDTVs. With traditional media you always know how your page is going to appear. With the web, the same page viewed on a cellphone and a computer can appear vastly different - or even 2 computers with different screen resolutions. Fixed layouts give a designer more control over how their content is viewed. Finally, because you are defining the layout of the page you have more freedom with background images - if you notice the examples above all but CNN make extensive use of background images for design.

There are 2 main faults of fixed designs. One is that users with large screens and resolutions viewing sites with small widths have lots of wasted space. This is a bad user experience because you are dictating to the user how they should experience your site. The second is that if a user is using a smaller screen or resolution some of your design might flow outside the window - causing the dreaded horizontal scrollbar. This also creates a bad user experience.

Fluid

What is fluid design? Fluid design essentially allows the user to decide the how the page looks based upon the size of their browser window and display settings - the page “flows” (hence fluid) to fill the entire available space. Fluid designs can be found at sites like Google, Wikipedia and Reddit. A typical fluid layout has containers, text, images and most other elements defined in ems or percentages.

The main benefit to designs using fluid layouts is that they can use all of the space available to them. The philosophy is that you can’t predict the user’s setup so you want to make your design as adaptive as possible in order to increase the user experience. A fluid layout puts the control of the design in the user’s hands.

There are 2 main faults with fluid design. One is that if someone has a very large/small screen or resolution your site can appear “wonky” - extremely long/short lines of text and distorted containers. The second is that fluid design makes it extremely hard to use background images because of container distortion. They require vast amounts of testing in order to function properly - if at all. In the examples above none of the sites use background images extensively - which severely limits your design creativity.

Hybrid/Elastic

A new design not mentioned in the title goes by several names and is basically a hybrid of the two. It uses min and max width (using javascript for IE6) to try and get the best of both worlds. Basically it defines a range of values in which the design can flow - so that you still have some control over the design (like fixed) but users with larger screens/resolutions can expand the width somewhat. 456 Berea St and Digg use something along these lines.

The main benefit of hybrid/elastic is that it gets some of the benefits of both fixed and fluid - users and designers split control over the design. It’s main fault is that like any hybrid it doesn’t do either of those things as well as the original.

So which is better?

If you haven’t figured it out by now, there is no right or wrong answer. The correct choice depends on the purpose of your site and your design preferences. The sad fact is that any choice you make is going to alienate some user. The old saying is that “You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”

Typically if you have a site with shorter blocks of text and/or you are more Web 2.0 you lean towards a fluid design - utilizing large font sizes to lower the impact of some of it’s faults. If you have a site with long blocks of text - like a news or article/blog based site - then you lean towards a fixed width design.

Random Tidbit: Speaking of design what about Time.com’s 50 coolest websites?

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