Category: Digital

Call To Action, a book just released, authors Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg discuss online “eye-tracking” studies. These studies show a pattern that all web visitors use (at least in the West). It's true for newbies or a long-time Internet users, whether they’ve been to a site before or not. Bryan Eisenberg says:

Here's something else that's unusual. With newspapers, people look at the pictures first. But it's the exact opposite on websites. Web visitors look at the text first. They look at graphics last...if ever.

Read more at When it Comes to Websites, People are the Same

Even the biggest sites have issues sometimes. 

An undisclosed "DNS-related issue" late Saturday knocked several Google services offline, prompting widespread speculation that the Web search giant fell victim to the recent wave of DNS cache-poisoning attacks. The outage lasted for several hours and affected the Google.com home page, Gmail, Google News, Froogle, Google Images, Google Groups and Google Local. The outage also caused service failure on advertisements from Google's AdSense service.

Read full story: Google Knocked Offline by 'DNS Issue'

Here is an interesting affinity card fundraising idea. A nice marketing technique for school and other non-profits:

Read More

Most business opportunities come through word of mouth. Now word of mouth referrals are becoming automated!

Referral networking organizations such as www.linkedin.com and www.bni.com can help you get the connections to land your next opportunity.

Everytime you log into your account while an external disk is attached, you can get all your preferences and documents from there. Logging into your account with no external disk present, you will work with your home folder on your internal disk.

The benefit? MacOSXHints says:

What's the use? My PowerBook has to be repaired, so I backed up all my data to another drive. While I am waiting for my PowerBook to return, I can work on either my sister's or my girlfriend's Mac, depending on whose Mac is free. Instead of copying my complete home folder to two different computers, I just use the external disk and can switch computers whenever I need to.

Read more: Enable multiple home folders on different disks

Hopefully you've been good and have backups in place. But if that fails, here is a service that can help you out:

http://www.datarecovery.net

Some notes on how to do create menus using the WordPress CMS:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_Horizontal_Menus
http://codex.wordpress.org/Dynamic_Menu_Highlighting

Some great bullet lists for menus, etc.

My favorites:
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic2/vertical03.htm
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic2/vertical05.htm
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic2/vertical13.htm

And details on the lists browser support:
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic2/browser-support.htm

Some great web developer tools:

http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/default.asp

List-O-Matic - Generate navigation bars based on list items (<li>) that are styled with CSS. It's as easy as falling off a chair, only less painful.

Accessible Form Builder - A new version of the form builder tool, this time with more advanced features, including the option of selecting what type of input you need.

Pop-up Window Generator - Following the tutorial 'The Perfect Pop-Up', comes the Pop-up Window Generator - a tool to quickly let you generate a link that is both accessible and XHTML compliant.

Form element generator - Lets you easily build individual form elements that are accessible (requires JavaScript to work)

Accessible Form Builder - A hybrid of the Form Element Generator and the Accessible Table Builder. This tool lets you enter a number of fields for text input, then creates a table (or CSS-based layout) to lay them out in, and puts in the necessary mark-up for accessibility. Forms have never been quicker!

How to Get Into Blogs, 101 is a great starter article for those who are not familiar with blogs and blogging. If you're not using Bloglines or another reader to read RSS blog feeds, you should read this very basic, step-by-step blog reading guide. Reading from a news aggregator is a *much* quicker way of reading news, and will give you a competitive edge as a writer or in any vocation.