“I hear it all the time, but I must admit, I don’t really know what a feed is,” she told me.

Mobile RSS is available for iPad and iPhone, with both free (with ads) and paid versions.

I started to explain, and suggested she read a post about feeds I had written a few years ago. But I found myself elaborating on the simple feed explanation given in that post, as using feeds in a website can be pretty powerful stuff.

I waste spend a lot of time reading numerous feeds — some for fun, many for work. My favorite method of feed reading is with a great iPad app called MobileRSS. It allows me to combine my personal Google Reader account with my work one, so that all my feeds are accessible in one place — VERY convenient! If you have a smartphone or other mobile device (like an iPad), I recommend installing a feed reader app. You’ll find yourself much more able to keep up with your favorite blogs.

But while feeds are geared toward the reader, they aren’t ONLY for the reader — they can be tools for a website owner to pull in content from around the web. Look to the right in our own blog’s sidebar to see an example. We have a lot of clients who blog, and with the use of an aggregate feed (see my previously mentioned post on feeds for more detail), you can see the titles and authors of the most recent ten blog posts from our clients. How handy!

An excerpt of Diane's most recent off-site blog post is displayed (using a customized feed) between her own blog's recent posts and comments.

If you blog in many places, and you want a central location to showcase your posts, you can customize feeds to display according to your needs. Diane Gaston, for example, has a blog on her own website, but she also is a regular contributor elsewhere. In her blog’s sidebar you will always find a little excerpt of her latest off-site post, to which you can directly link. Grace Burrowes, whose site we’ve just recently launched, is a regular contributor at two blogs, in addition to having a blog of her own. Because of customized feeds, she now has excerpts from her latest off-site posts in the sidebar of her own blog.

An integrated feed on your website can be powerful tool. You keep your site current; you keep your visitors well-informed. But be warned! If you are pulling your feed from a blog with a corrupt feed, or trying to pull only certain types of posts from a blog with inconsistent categories or tags, you might have to get a little creative. This is why, for a website developer, knowledge of more than just the basics of how feeds work is a must.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

But then I went to this site: The Internet Explorer Countdown, subtitled: Moving the world off of Internet Explorer 6. And I wonder what’s going on in in places where the percentage of people on IE6 exceeds 10%. With the Western World below 5%, I look at China (34%!) and South Korea (23%) and India (11%) and I wonder if there is a cultural tendency to avoid technological change.

Regardless, Waxcreative officially joins the cause. If you can see the bright orange banner below, please, for the love all all things digital, UPGRADE! It’s FREE!

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I spent some quality time at the Apple store recently. Our Airport was acting bratty then just quit. So I dropped in on Thursday and was directed to the semi-Genius Bar (my name for it — that table almost in the back where you can see the Geniuses, but you can’t get any face time with them.) The Semi-Geniuses perform tech support triage for those of us foolish enough to think that we can just drop into the Apple store without an appointment and be tech-support-saved. The Semi-Genius attending to my Airport helpfully ascertained that it wasn’t our power source and then apologetically said that was all he could do. I would have make an appointment — and they were booked solid for two more days.

So on Saturday I was duly back in Emeryville, waiting for my 4 o’clock appointment and as I was listening to name after name being called with no shows, I was amazed at how many people didn’t show up for their appointments. Who makes a Genius Bar appointment and then doesn’t show up?

I was in the middle of my own private rant, feeling sure I could have gotten in on Thursday when I was first there had people who weren’t going to show up had shown the decency to call, when it occurred to me that perhaps people just aren’t aware that they are screwing things up. So I ask everyone, a little more Miss Manners and maybe we can all get to a Genius in a quicker time — and just be more courteous all around, in tech support and in life.

And it wouldn’t kill whomever has The Sopranos Season Two Disc One to return it already to The Video Room. Thanks.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

“I’m really considering changing my email address, but how can I keep the new one away from spammers?”

I have had my main email address at Wax for almost eight years, and have never had spam sent directly to it, so I consider myself somewhat of an expert on how to keep the spammers away without having to spend extra money on server-based spam-blockers. It takes some forethought, but keeping your email address clean and pristine can be done.

Here’s the advice I give brand-new domain owners: pick your top ideal email address (usually one or two), and then never, ever use those publicly anywhere but on your own site. Your name is Jane and your domain is example.com? Never, ever use jane@example.com for anything but valid and personal emailing. For our clients who want their email addresses posted on their contact pages, we hide the mailto link in some javascript so bots can’t find the address in the code. Don’t use jane@example.com to make any online purchases, sign up for any newsletters, or post contact info on any bulletin boards, etc. You can set up secondary, throw-away email addresses on your domain for online purchasing, and you can always direct people to your contact page, if you have one, to get in touch with you.

When I purchased my own personal domain years ago, I was so fed up with the amount of spam I was getting on the AOL address I had been using, that I decided to run an experiment. I set up a different email address for each type of online transaction I was doing. I set up amazon@, ebay@, paypal@, utilities@, phone@, banking@, orders@, etc. I wanted to see which email address started getting the most spam so I could figure out which company was not being careful with my information. Not surprisingly, many of those addresses are now collecting massive amounts of spam, but my main email addresses, the ones I use for personal and work use, continue to be spam-free. What I did by setting up all those addresses is pretty extreme, to be sure, but setting up at the very least ONE online transaction/activity email address is a wise move. If it starts collecting too much spam, you dump it and set up a new address. Sure, you will then have to change your contact info at Amazon, your bank, your favorite bulletin board, and that online shop with the cute shoes, but that’s far easier than having to inform your entire personal address book of an email change.

I always tell clients with brand-new sites that they are in the perfect position to start with good and safe email habits. “Make sure you practice safe-emailing,” I say, as I explain how their email system works. It always illicits a chuckle, but I’m quick to point out just how serious I am. “You don’t want to get to the point where you are swimming in spam but too attached to your email address to start anew,” I say. That’s when you have to start shelling out money for server-based spam-blockers.

And wouldn’t you rather spend that money on those cute shoes at that one online shop you love so much…?

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

First, What the Heck is WordCamp?
It’s an annual conference organized by our techie community in SF (though there are WordCamps all over the world), focusing on all things related to WordPress. There are great speakers, ranging from the original developers of WordPress to Google employees to eccentric social media advisers.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress (Thanks to Eva Blue for this photo!)

The State of the Word with Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, and I absolutely LOVE hearing him speak! His presentation was so creative, drawing similarities between WordPress’ open source environment to jazz, where everyone works together to create one beautiful piece, and even plugin developers are the jazz “soloists.” He uses four adjectives to compare WordPress to jazz:

• Improvised
• Independent
• Inclusive
• Inspired

His presentation was very inspiring and helped me understand how WordPress IS a collaborative community with its open-source nature, with folks helping each other out. There’s a reason why WordPress’ documentation and forums are so incredibly helpful!

The juicy news: What are a few new features in WordPress 3.0?

• WordPress Mu and WordPress will be merging! I believe there were a few features that weren’t available to WP Mu before, so this is pretty exciting! Many folks that use WP Mu are able to have separate blogs using one WP install—a lot of schools are beginning to do this with different blogs for each of their departments.
• Droplist subnav menus can be created/managed thru the WP Dashboard!
• There will be a new feature where you can upload an image as your “featured image” for your posts. This would be the main visual image used for your post.
• A new default theme! Kubrick has been WP’s default theme for many years now, and we’ll miss it, but it was great to see the new default theme, Twenty Ten. You can check it out here too! Definitely more modern, more visual with its large graphic header, and much more customizable to fit a vast audience with different site needs.


"Twenty Ten" — the new default theme for WordPress 3.0

Want to read up on more features that will be coming with 3.0? Check out BloggingPro’s recap with additional highlights.

WordPress, Audience, Engagement, and SEO with Vanessa Fox
Vanessa previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search. She gave us an update on current SEO trends and what we should (and shouldn’t) care about for our site searchability.

Things you should keep in mind when managing your site’s SEO:

• Search engines are now the primary method of navigating the web
• Consider the difference between “search” and “browse”:
  • Search — entails you have a goal and task to achieve
  • Browse — implies that you don’t have a set goal, but freely scrolling through. The new method of browsing now is via social networking. Example: checking your Facebook feeds and Twitter lists in the morning
• Titles: Be sure to title your pages/posts! This is the text that will appear in the search results. Ideally, make sure your title appears first before your site name. The reason why this works: when we scroll through search results page in a search engine, we scroll down the left side of the page to look for our key words. If those key words don’t appear on the left-most side of the search results, we usually skip and glaze right past results we think aren’t relevant.
• Google will be phasing out tags and keywords—these will not be the main determinant for your SEO in the future. My thoughts: This makes sense. Tagging and adding in keywords has become too arbitrary, where anyone can add any words to their posts, even when the tag doesn’t relate to the content of the post. e.g. spammers
• I’ve heard the same thing repeated at several tech conferences recently regarding SEO:
  • Write compelling content — it’s ALL in the content. This is the most important factor in getting people to come to your site.
  • Understand Your Audience — this means understanding the language of your visitors. For instance, if your site is about climate change, be sure to include related words like “global warming”. These are related words that people from your audience may use to search. You want to make sure you have these bases covered so they can find your post!
  • Community — link to resources and sites of fellow bloggers in your field while you blog and post. Everyone loves a linkback! It’s a great way to connect.

The Blog Doctor sums up Vanessa’s points in a handy list of 12 Quick, Easy Tips to Optimize Blogs / Websites for SEO if you’d like more info about Vanessa’s presentation.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

It’s a straight-forward challenge, with a not-quite-as-straightforward solution.

NOTE: if I get too technical for you in this post please comment below and I will do my best to de-tech-ify my reply.

In WordPress, the code is set so that when the Enter key is hit, it automatically inserts what is called a paragraph tag (or <p> tag) in the underlying code of your post. Line spacing in WordPress is so deeply established to the point that <p> and <br /> tags (single space) don’t even show up in the HTML view of the Edit post page.

SOLUTION A: Fix it at ground level. It is likely that I could go into the source code for a WordPress installation and alter it such that when editing a post, hitting Enter on the keyboard would produce a <br /> tag instead of a <p> tag, but that would make all future upgrades to the installation very cumbersome. I would either have to do a manual upgrade (time-consuming) and then do a line-by-line comparison of the code specific to where I did my customization (cumbersome, room for error) or do an automatic upgrade and then go back into the code and re-customize for the single-space (time-consuming, cumbersome). Any client with this customization would never be able to upgrade her own WordPress installation, as the customization would be over-written at each upgrade.

SOLUTION A is therefore not an option.

So what is a blogger to do? I Googled the issue and found many heated discussions about line-spacing in WordPress… far more on the topic than I would have expected. People are upset that

1. WordPress automatically assumes a <p> tag whenever the Enter button is hit; and
2. WordPress automatically removes from view the <p> and <br /> tags in the the HTML tab in the Edit Post page and that you cannot insert more than just a double space between paragraphs.

SOLUTION B: install a plugin. I searched for ways around #1 that did not involve some intense code hacks, and surprisingly found no plugins! Weird.

SOLUTION B isn’t an option either.

SOLUTION C: train yourself to adapt. What I did find is exactly what I was expecting. You have to live with the automatic double-spacing and when you want a single-space you have to train yourself to hit SHIFT-Enter, like I will do right here:
This will produce a <br /> or line break (single-space) tag in the code. (Hitting SHIFT-Enter again here.)
It is good for poetry, or maybe also for creating lists when you don’t want to use the ordered or unordered lists features.

• By the way
• this is an example
• of an unordered list

1. And this is
2. an example
3. of an ordered list

What your lists are formatted to look like (the bullet for the unordered list, the line height in the list, etc.) is determined by your theme’s stylesheet — it can be altered for your own customization without getting messed up whenever your blog is upgraded.

SHIFT-Enter is the way to go for this. Though I suspect (and hope) that because so many people have been frustrated with this issue for so long, it may be something WordPress addresses in a future update. It would be great if they created an on/off checkbox for this.

SOLUTION B, revisited: install a plugin and use it as a workaround. In my search for plugins I did find one that resolves problem #2 from above “WordPress automatically removes from view the <p> and <br /> tags in the the HTML tab” called PS Disable Auto Formatting. It is a good plugin for folks who like to use HTML view — bloggers who want a little more control over their code. It is also good to have if you want to force extra line breaks into your post. Why would you want to do that? Read on…

Let’s say you are inserting an image that you want text to wrap around, but you don’t want the next paragraph to start until below the image. If I am limited to one double-space (a <p> tag), then it looks like this.

Here is my next paragraph. Notice it starts higher up than I want.

And here is the paragraph I want associated with my picture, but I want my next paragraph to start lower down. Why? Maybe have more photos and I want paragraphs to be associated with each photo as opposed to captions.

.

(Note: I’ve had to do a little “hack” to make this post look like I am actually using the plugin I mention, because I’ve chosen not to install the plugin on this particular blog… yet. Can you figure out the “hack?”)

With this plugin that I discovered, your post retains as many <p> tags as you specify — it doesn’t force them all down to one as the WP default does. Liberal use of the Preview button is advised if you are going to do this, as your edit window is invariably going to be a different width than the width for content in your live blog.

I think I like this plugin. I’ll keep it on my test blog and play around with it for bit. A word of caution should you decide to use it: you do have to be careful as the plugin also allows for hitting the spacebar multiple times. The default always took more than one character space and culled it down to one, but with this plugin, if you hit the spacebar five times the plugin will allow the post to retain that spacing. Could be a good thing, could be a pain in the tush.

This all being said, a work-a-round could PROBABLY be arranged by combining the plugin above plus some fancy stylesheet coding to make your post content’s <p> tags look like they are single-spaced. Then, hitting just Enter would produce what LOOKS like a single-space and you would then have to force two <p> tags (hence the need for the plugin described above) to create the look of double-spacing. The catch is that you would have to go through all your past posts to manually add that ‘double-space’ in wherever you want it.

Anybody out there using this plugin — or one like it — and have more to add?

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

But before last night I have never received an OMG ARE YOU KIDDING ME? email — from a lawyer, no less — about keywords. I mean, keywords. Seriously!? But I get ahead of myself…

With the rise of the Google State, meta data keywords fell in importance. Google made it clear that they were far more interested in contextual keywords. What Are You Actually Saying? vs What Do You Want To Be Associated With? — this was the new benchmark. Kelly and I even removed the tool from the book’s second edition (©2004) and the download from the book’s companion website. At Waxcreative, we stopped allocating resources to putting keywords into site code. It was hard enough to get “real” content from clients.

Lately keywords are back in discussion. With the world dominance of blogging platforms (all hail WordPress, amen!), “tagging” — really just a way of adding meta keyword data — has become vital in search functionality. In January one of our clients submitted her own keywords to us, so we popped them in her head code. Her position advanced on Google by pages within weeks. Once again, the keyword is important. What You Want To Be Associated With is back on par with What You Are Actually Saying. (Take note Wax clients: we will be contacting you shortly to update your meta data.)

What keywords you choose is up to you. You still shouldn’t spam — meaning if you sell feather bracelets, you shouldn’t list “feather bracelet” in your keywords sixteen times. That’s just poor manners and Google will snub you for it.

But here is something you should always do: include common misspellings of your name. My name is EMILY COTLER. I should have these keywords:

Emily Colter, Emily Kotler, Emily Cotter, Emil, Amy… You see where I am going. This helps for when people are looking for you but might not have it correct. Search engines are like playing horseshoes in this way; getting close still counts if your keywords are helpful.

Which brings me to the lawyer, the email, and the “Seriously?!” moment from last night.

One of our long-standing clients — let’s rename her Karin Jones for privacy purposes — has a site that we originally built well before tweeting had meaning outside of birds in springtime, and thus her home page Head code contains keywords. Last night Karin forwarded this email that she received:

Please ask your attorney to contact me regarding the apparent embedding of my client’s name (Karen Jones) in your web sites metadata.  I do not believe this is proper and I request that you cease and desist from this illegal practice, forthwith.

We are reserving all our rights.

And then signed with all the heft of legal letter.

Seriously? Does Karen Jones really think that she can control whether her incredibly common name is used as a keyword? There are over 6700 Karen Joneses on Facebook alone.

We recommend that Karen Jones include “Karin Jones” in her meta data. It’s good strategy. And we are happy to share.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I don’t think it’s my computer, because it only happens with the database – but when I try to check the info link on each member, odd things happen. The first few times I click on info, it opens with no problem. But by the 3rd or 4th person, it starts taking a very long time for the link to open, and then pretty soon, it just freezes up. I’ll have to literally shut down IE and then go back and restart all the programs I use (twitter, facebook, etc…) and start over.

image courtesy niponwave.com

Our advice to her: Break the IE habit.

Internet Explorer, due to monopolistic market activities, is the default browser for most people despite its notorious (and well-earned) reputation for poor web standards. And while it has gotten better in the two major releases since the piss-poor IE6, IE remains a faulty browser that requires a host of hacks. Web designers regularly curse IE, and this should tell you something. For instance, javascript, that basic necessity on the web, has intermittent problems with IE (undoubtedly the cause of our client’s issue above).

All due respect to my Microsoft friends out there, but y’all know it’s true. Over drinks at a Seattle conference two years ago a Microsoft wife confessed that several developers in her husband’s division (Sector? How doth mighty Microsoft call out its minions?) felt that creativity was more important than web standards.

In a browser? I sputtered into my drink (and it was an expensive Cosmo).

She just shrugged.

I applaud creativity, but adherence to web standards is a far more important goal for a browser. IE’s problems are the inevitably unfortunate result of its overwhelming market dominance. Microsoft placed IE on every PC for years, and 95% of the market share just got comfy with it.

Break out of your comfort zone. Firefox is better.

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

~~~~

I finally did it. I took the plunge and reformatted my computer. I had MEANT to do it two weeks ago, but well, you know… life happens. As I’ve mentioned before, reformatting a computer means a time commitment — if you want to be able to be up and running in the same day, that is!

Feeling confident in my preparations, I opened up the chassis, blew out about five pounds of dust, installed my newly acquired 2G of RAM, plugged keyboard, mouse, and power back in, and started in on the reformatting, which took a lot less time than I thought it would. I managed to get all the appropriate updates done, drivers installed, and my security suite and other essential programs installed in just a couple of hours. The only casualty of the reformatting? Windows 7 doesn’t like one of my printers. Someday I’ll work on that issue.

The real “fun” of reformatting is getting to work on a computer which is – for all intents and purposes — brand new. It is a chance to start fresh. Don’t like your file structuring? When you reformat, create a structure you like, and then transfer your data into that structure, weeding out the extraneous and non-necessary files along the way. You may re-discover a forgotten photo, or find that essay you wrote seven years ago. It takes time and patience, and you certainly don’t need to do it all in one sitting. My data files, as I mentioned in my previous post, reside on my home server, but that didn’t stop me from starting a restructuring process this time around. My programs still have their default go-to data folders, so when I set those, I started the data restructuring. I’ve found some long-forgotten gems, and well as many (many) duplicates. I suspect I will still be sorting through files and “re-filing them” well into the summer (maybe beyond), as I’m managing to get about thirty minutes done a day, but it is well-worth it.

Now, if I could only re-organize my house in the same manner!

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.

And oh! How I would love a new computer. While it would bring me much joy (I am such a nerd), I have to at least attempt to put some life back into my current machine. But how does one do that? How do you start fresh?

You re-format your hard drive, and start over. (Note: if you are going from Windows XP to Windows 7 — which is what I’m about to do — you have no choice but to go through this.) It is a long, arduous process, but one that results in a machine with more pep. A result that can buy you another year or two before your absolutely must get that new quad-core, hyper-threading, dish-washing (I wish), state-of-the-art new computer. My current machine is almost five years old — ancient by some standards — but with a little TLC can likely serve me well for another year or two. It has lasted me this long because I make it a habit to reformat the hard drive at least every 12-18 months. It’s giving me more trouble than usual right now because I am behind on my latest re-formatting by about a year as I was a little busy having twins! And then I wanted to wait until Windows 7 to came out. And then the holidays came. It’s always something…

Before I set out to re-format a computer, I always run through the following:

• Where is my data? We recently acquired a home server, so I’ve been in the process of moving all my data over to it. Next week, when I dive into the reformatting process, I won’t have to even bat an eye regarding the backing up of any of my media and work files, as they are all housed on a separate machine. I do have one or two programs, though, that store data on the local drive, so I always make it a habit to go through those and make the appropriate back-ups.
• Where are my applications? Some self-encompassed programs can be backed up just like data, but more often than not you need a disc or install file to re-install an application. I make a list of all the programs on my machine, determine which ones I want to keep, and then triple-check to make sure I have the install disc or file somewhere safe. Some programs only allow a certain number of licenses, so I will de-authorize a computer from use of a program in order to be able to use it on the fresh install.
• Note that some programs can always be acquired on the web (think Firefox, Chrome, Adobe Reader, Flash, Quicktime, etc.). I usually don’t bother downloading the install files for these types of programs until right when I’m ready to install them so I am assured to have the most recent version.
• I make special note of what security software I’m going to use. As a PC user, I know my machine is vulnerable, so before re-formatting, I always make sure I have a good security suite on-hand.

After I’ve triple-checked that I’m all ready, I unplug the machine from everything, including power, and open up the chassis to blow out any dust. I then plug back in only keyboard, mouse, monitor, and power, and start the re-formatting process. In many cases, re-formatting entails popping your OS disc into your CD drive and having your machine boot up from it. You then follow the prompts to do a new install (rather than repair a current one — I won’t go into all the details on the how), and then sit back while your machine wipes out all that was on it and starts a fresh install of your OS.

And then the real work begins.

Continued next week in part two…

©2012 Waxcreative Design Blog. All Rights Reserved.