This is always tough - the only things I really read religiously are the WebProWorld and WebProNews emails that I get several times per week and I know how fast things change in this field. Sad to say, I’d never thought of turning my Google homepage into a page full of RSS feeds - but I read about that today and that’s really a great idea.

Now my personalized homepage is full of SEO, web design and small business marketing news. I can see a few stories at a time and pursue them if I want, but in any event I get a nice daily overview of what’s going on in just a few minutes. This is much better than occasionally visiting some of the sites I’ve collected every couple of weeks, which is just about pointless.

Anyone else have other good ideas for staying on top of things?

I just found G.T. McKnight’s site with an excellent collection of badges for websites - those little rectangular ones for RSS, XHTML, etc. Search feature here and everything…

I moved a piano downstairs this morning all by myself.

Well, not really a piano. It’s a Yamaha keyboard I received as a gift last Christmas.

My parents had a small piano, a real one, when I was a kid. I played around with it from time to time, and made a few concerted efforts to learn from the pile of old instruction books stored in the seat, but that eventually faded in lieu of the guitar. I took a few years of guitar lessons but never got better than adequate - although I still have two guitars… Read the rest of this entry »

I’d love to go to Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Seminar and Workshop in Minneapolis this coming March. I’d love to. But it’s kind of expensive… even with the early bird discount.

I’m still thinking about it, though. I plan to go to one of her conferences this year, because I’m sure it will provide me with a stronger background in SEO. Maybe not this first one, though… Unless I get a great big SEO job between now and then…

I did take an online class in Search Engine Marketing a year or so ago. I found it helpful, but nothing’s been as helpful as the trial-by-fire of actually doing a large SEO project and having to learn by the seat of my pants by reading everything I can get my hands (or my browser) on.

This site belongs to a fellow member of the Women Designers Group, a good group to belong to if you are female and are (or want to be) a professional web designer or programmer.

Aneko Studios’ blog is full of useful tidbits and scripts for using CSS in your website. For example, I came across this the other day following a discussion on the group mailing list - clear easy instructions for disjointed image replacement using only CSS, no JavaScript.

This is typical of what I’ve found on this site - step by step instructions, web standards well-regarded. Be sure to check out the tips and tricks section for tutorials and more goodies.

This information was gleaned from a number of websites and my own trials in getting this to work, but I thought it would be useful to have it in one place for other HomeSite users who may not be overly familiar with server configuration.

Why map servers? The reason I do it is because it enables me to browse and view PHP includes live right on my local machine. You can see the results of server side includes without having to post the site online, a big timesaver.

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This is a post I made in an old blog over a year ago, but that blog no longer exists and I had to go hunting for this information again today. So here it is.

October 19th, 2005

I have been through hell trying to figure out how to permanently delete the annoying little PDFMaker toolbar that Acrobat 7.0 installs in Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. This toolbar cannot be turned off by any ordinary means. It pops up in different places in the application, sometimes making a two-tiered toolbar set into a three-tiered one. It’s in the way, it serves no purpose when all one has to do is print to PDF anyway.

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I had the privilege of being interviewed for a large article published over the summer on the IT Business Net site. The article is by Edith Schindler and is entitled “Becoming Clueful: What You Should Know Before You Redo Your Web Site.”

This is a big one, but it’s something I recommend that all my clients read if we’re doing a web design makeover. It’s a discussion among designers and developers about what to ask, what to expect (and what not to expect), and what they wished clients understood about our business.

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