Sites of interest

Published: October 29, 2009

Calculator: Gas volume and density
— uses jQuery, ASP

Web Layouts: Examples of Effective Design

In the news

Published:

Broadband provider sues city of Monticello

TDS Telecommunications sued the city of Monticello, Minnesota after residents passed a referendum to roll out their own fiber optic system.

TDS had earlier denied the city’s request for the company to provide fiber optic service. During the ensuring legal battle, which prevented the citizens from following through with their plans, TDS Telecommunications took the opportunity to roll out a fiber system.

– Via SlashDot

Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong – SXSWi 2009

Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after 10+ years web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design’s print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything.

Dan Willis

Sites of interest

Published: October 20, 2009

Consider these sites. Discuss.

Johns Hopkins ABX Guide

Gradient Typography in Web Design

In the news

Published: October 13, 2009

Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

… Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

Derek Powazek (via BoingBoing)

On The Value Of SEO

To succeed in attracting that audience, she should have a great site and great content — agreed. But does she have individual listings? Then she probably needs to kick them out into Google Base, in order to fully be listed in Google. Does your mythical web developer deal with Google Base much? And where’s her web site now? Is she running it off Blogger? Using her own domain? These have impacts on how both the search engines may see her as well as how she’s perceived.

Does she have a blog in addition to a main site? That has an impact. Has she considered some unusual, creative ways to create content around real estate in her area, perhaps some catchy link bait, which may pull in the links she needs to rank better (which, by the way, is a recommended Google practice).

Does she have a local office? If so, has she claimed her listing in Google Local? If so, has she updated her title to reflect that perhaps she has “newport beach homes for sale?”

Danny Sullivan @ SearchEngineLand (via BoingBoing)

Entire .SE TLD Drops Off the Internet

The SE tld dropped off the internet yesterday due to a bug in the script that generates the SE zone file. The SE tld has close to one million domains that all went down due to missing the trailing dot in the SE zone file. Some caching nameservers may still be returning invalid DNS responses for 24 hours.

Slashdot

Yoko Ono Embraces Creative Commons

We’re very pleased to announce that thanks to the helpful advice of Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing and Eric Steuer at Creative Commons, the audio elements for Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band – The Sun Is Down (remix) are now being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. We firmly believe that releasing the elements under a CC license embodies the true spirit of the competition.

Imagine Peace (note: site uses jQuery) (via BoingBoing)

In the news

Published: October 6, 2009

Researchers Hijack Mebroot Botnet, Study Drive-By Downloads

The researchers managed to intercept Mebroot communications by reverse-engineering the algorithm used to select domains to connect to. Mebroot infects legitimate websites and uses them to redirect users to malicious sites that attempt to install malware on a victim’s machine.

SlashDot

Flash CS5 Will Export iPhone Apps

Adobe announced that the CS5 release of Flash Professional, due in beta later this year, will allow developers to write applications and compile the code to run on Apple devices. Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.

SlashDot