The Flickering Problem Google Adsense
If you have been to this site in the day and a half since I made the switch to the new design, then you might have noticed a very weird problem that I have been battling today. “The Adsense Flicker” For some reason, that I still don’t understand, when you hovered over a link on the right side of the page, it caused the ads displayed by Google’s Adsense program flicker a ghost of itself where your mouse was.
Initially I thought this was a by product of not removing all of my javascript code I was toying with earlier, but after removing any reference what-so-ever to the fact that I ever thought about that, the flickering still remained. I played with my CSS file for quite a while untill I got serious and did a Google Search. I returned a lot of message board postings, which ususally return results, but are more often than not, buried in mindless drivel. After reading through those I saw a lot of different guesses and “soltions” all of them different in some way. However there was a common thread: Link hovers with border manipulation.
Turns out after a quick search of my CSS file, I had left some ill-concieved lines of CSS in my a:hover tag. Once removed, the flicker was gone.
color: #990000;
border: 0; <-- Bad CSS! Bad!
}
Mystery solved. But now the question remains…what the hell was I doing with “border: 0″ in my hover anyway?
Don’t code websites drunk kids!
Make a Life Poster With iPhoto
Leave it to one of the creators of Delicious Library, one of my favorite pieces of software, to come up with another very cool idea. This one utilizes the new iPhoto 5, and it allows you to make a “life poster”.
Basically it is a poster you can print from iPhoto (20″ X 30″) and its includes 98 photos. Ends up costing about $29, and if it comes out as well as his did, its looks worth it.
Check out his quick tutorial.
You know its things like this that make me want to take more pictures.
Hell Yeah Bitch.com v3.0
As you can see the site is a bit different, unless you are blind, in that case ask your dog, he will tell you that its true.
The entire site has been re-created from scratch. For one, it should load faster now becuase it is all in CSS, and yes, I’m aware that I might be the last web designer on the planet to redo their site with CSS.
There is more to come however, I just thought that I would put what I had up now, so that way I would stop picking at it and just settle on a design. So the Media and the Front Page with all the subsequent entries are newly designed. But there is more to do and that will hopefully be up soon. So keep checking the tabs in the top left to see if I’d added anything new.
Hopefully you will all like the new design in general, not to mention the little touches that I have added all over the place. (The tab-order is finally right on my comment form, for one!) If anything is not working or not displaying right leave a comment here and let me know. Also, I would be more than happy to read all of your thoughts, good or bad on the site and any other suggestions you might have. Let me have it!
Maybe Its Time to Change Majors
This video of a college weather man on his local broadcast is just about the saddest / funniest thing I have seen in a long time. It really makes you uncomfortable at times, and at the end you are just begging him to just say “F*ck it!” and sit back down.
Funny though…really funny.
Link: Bad weather rolls in…
Movable Type 3.15
Well that figures. I drag my feet and then I decided to drag them some more on updating the Movable Type installation on this site and then barely a week later, out comes a new version. Damn.
Apparently this update / patch has been released in order to fix an issue that allows someone to spread spam via your site if you have comment notification on. Now, I don’t use that feature, mainly becuase I really don’t care what people say in my comments and because I get so few as of late that I’m not about to kill any of them. However, I should (and will) install this upgrade anyway. And so should anyone else out there that runs Movable Type.
From their “alert“:
Version 3.15 fixes a vulnerability in the mail sending packages for all Movable Type versions in which the user has enabled comment notifications. This vulnerability allows a malicious user to send email through the application to any number of arbitrary users.
All Movable Type users should install this update.
By the way, to install the upgrade you have to get it from your Movable Type Account.
“…and she became The Nanny”
For some reason today, I have the theme song to “The Nanny” stuck in my head. I don’t know why. I haven’t seen an episode of “The Nanny” for several years (yes, I believe I have seen at least one full episode). But now the theme song is playing on an endless loop from hell in my head.
If I kill myself, someone should step up and continue Hell Yeah Bitch.com’s work.
The RIAA Gets Their Coal
I wrote about a month or so ago(RIAA: Heres your lump of coal), about how the wonderful site, Downhill Battle was sending a peice of coal to the RIAA or MPAA for every $100 donated to their cause. Well, you can’t call these guys liars. They just recently sent the coal out, and posted a little photo spread for us all too.
Microsoft Tightes Grip on Windows Update
Later this year, Microsoft will require that you verify your copy of Windows before you are allowed to use its Windows Update website and its happening sooner that you think. Feb 7th, marks the day that the required checks will be begin for users in China, Norway and the Czech Republic. The good news? Well if you are found to be using an unvalidated copy, Microsoft will kindly give you a discount on a legit copy. Isn’t that nice? By the middle of this year, the policy will be rolled out world-wide. Requiring all installations be verified before downloading any updates (new functionality or security updates).
I think that last part, just might end up kicking Microsoft in the ass. Yes there are a lot of priated versions of Windows out there, and no, they really shouldn’t be getting any new functionality for a peice of software that they didn’t pay for. But these people still need security patches. Not for their sake though, if their computer gets fried, fine…who cares right? But what about the people that did buy Windows? If the other, farily large, percentage of people that didn’t pay for it are wide open to a attack like the blaster worm, then the paid machines are going to get blasted by the rouge machines. Lets not assume here that just becuase someone that paid for Windows, and can update, will…and sooner rather that later, they will get blasted by a machine that can’t be updated.
…plus, I give it 3 days after this goes into effect that someone sets up a “Pirated Windows Update” somewhere.
Navigation Is Lost on the General Web User
According to recent stories and two of the biggest experts on web design, those ubiquitous navigation bars on the left, right or top of pages are completely ignored by the average web user.
According the this article, the vast majority of the users out there work the web with a “click-link-or-hit-back-button” mantra. Meaning that they have no interest what so ever in being able to go to another section of the site from a subsection. They go the front page of your site with a distinct mission. They click on a link to find the solution to said mission, then if they want something else, they will hit the back button to go back to the front page and begin again from there. Got it?
The problem is that from the inception of the web, designers have always had a “navigation” menu on their page somewhere. whether it is a pull-down menu, just a string of links at the top, or a bread-crumb method, there is always a navigation somewhere on each page. So how do we, as web designers, break this habit?
1. Identify users’ goals on each page
2. De-emphasize or remove any page elements (or areas of a site) that don’t help to accomplish the goal
3. Emphasize (or insert) those links, forms, or other elements that either take users closer to their goal, or finally accomplish it.
…
Jared Spool has formulated what he calls the Move-Forward-Until-Found Rule:
“…a web page can do only one of two things: either it contains the content the user wants or it contains the links to get them to the content they want. If a page doesn’t follow this rule, then the users stop clicking…” (from the article The Right Trigger Words)
I think things like this study are very interesting and worthy of noting. That being said, I can’t believe that this study will have any effect on the amount of navigation areas on websites in the foreseeable future.
Link: Navigation blindness: How to deal with the fact that people tend to ignore navigation tools
MovableType upgrade complete
So after much thought and a few scary seconds I have finally made a decision in my web-publishing software. Movable Type 3.14
More on this is a bit..but I want to reload this entry to make sure all is well.