vanderwal.net

Digital Web needs your help

Are you looking for a great project to volunteer your time? Digital Web Magazine is still looking for people with the following skills to help with the redesign and weekly publication:

• graphic designer (print and web / Illustrator / Photoshop)
• information architect (site flow / Visio)
• logo designer (branding / Illustrator / Photoshop)
• web designer (layout / Photoshop)
• web developer (markup / hand-coding)
• web programmer (backend / SQL / PHP)
• writers (word or text)
• curators (linkbot, webtrends)
• editors (word or text)

Site map with Apple Script and OmniGraffle

A very nice approach to sitemap generator with Applescript and OmniGraffle. [hat tip Michael]

Meetup launches

I am very intrigued with Meetup, a new company/organization to bring people together face to face (f2f).

IIS on XP Home

Those who have XP Home and want to run IIS (perhaps to build and test ASP) should read 15 seconds IIS on XP Home hack. This is an inexpensive solution to Microsoft not stating anywhere in their marketing materials for XP Home, or in their early tech papers, there is no official way to run an IIS server on the box.

Domain follies

The move of vanderwal.net off of NetSol (Verisign) seems to have gone over with very few bumps, if any. Verisign sent a nice parting note, which stated they would love to have me back at any point in the future. We shall see over the next few days if the bumps stay away.

In the transition I picked up a couple other domain names, which I will work with in the coming months. One may possibly replace v-biz.net, which I do not have any of the valid contact information for it to tranfer that domain. I may have to say good bye to that one when it expires. One of the others is somethings I wished existed.

NYC bloggers by subway station

NY City bloggers by subway station is a great idea. This greatly adds depth to some of the sites I read regularly. This brings to mind I really need another trip to the great City soon.

5k Contest is live again

Yes, it is that time of the year for the 5k Contest. Yes, 5kb of wholesome goodness with which to work. That is graphics, HTML, scripting, and all the the ones and zeros you can pack in.

Verisign

Begin learning about Verisign before you go to them and their domain name provider Network Solutions to get a domain name. It may not be yours for long.

Removing the www

Jeff Lash writes Removing the Ws from URLs over at Web Word. Jeff has some good reasons behind not needing the "Ws", but you must really understand your user's browser use before removing the Ws. You see some browsers do not respond to "vanderwal.net", they need the "www". Microsoft IE 5 and above and Netscape 6 and above understand that a person is most often trying to find a Website if they type a link into their Web browser. Older browsers do not make this assumption and the user must type the "www" and often also type the "http://" to get to the site. This is much more confusing. The administrator for the site must also ensure their DNS tables that route URLs to the site, do not require the "www". I personally find the lack of the "www" problematic as many browsers now also can handle FTP services and become the default viewer for the file structures when FTPing. This requires typing "ftp" rather than "www" in front of the "www". (I have used my rationing of " marks so I must stop)

WYSIWYG in browser part two

The second part to theWYSIWYG editor in a Web browser is available. This section gets into implementing the HTML portion from the first section into the storage components of this article.

Blosxom offers RSS aggregation with perl

Blosxom is a Perl RSS blog aggregator that works well on Mac OS X.

Intelligent gripes about AOL

WSJ's Kara Swisher, in her last Boom Town Exchange, posts readers comments about AOL. Many of the comments are critical, but it is a good look at how users interact with services. Many of these folks writing in have been AOL users for years. Services is important and keeping a broad user group happy is really tough, as you will see if you read.

Related to using the proper URL in the doctype, IE 6 renders table content as centered when wrapping the table with center tag. The article explains when this happens and how to work around the problem. One option is not using centering (either in a div align or in the deprecated center tag). It seems setting the CSS is the best work around. We have found using the center tag to be far more problematic than the div align usage of center. (Yes, we have to support "older" browsers at work).

Zeldman explains proper Doctype usage to have the browser use the Doctype you intend it to use. Many Web development applications leave off the URL from the Doctype statement, which renders the lowest common denominator in many browsers.

Of conference interest for Web and mobile types: 9th International World Wide Web Conference in Amsterdam, NL; Thunder Lizard's Web Design World 2002. These look to be interesting, particularly the International WWW Conference, which offers the mobile perspective.