Content Notes

I started my business five years ago mostly because I got tired of commuting and being “out of control” of my fate in the company by which I was employed. You see, after experiencing layoffs personally and witnessing friends in the same situation, I learned that no matter how skilled or personable you are nor the amount you produce, a “captive” employee is every bit as dispensable as a contractor or consultant. We’re all a commodity and fickle winds of the economy determine our fate. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.

If we care to recognize the signs, we often have a good idea that our situation is going to change before it does. Everyone that I’ve talked with can point to warning signs that they cared not to acknowledge when they arose. It seems that hindsight is indeed 20-20.

As a consultant, it is in my best interest to look for those warning signs so that I can prepare my business for their impact. With the media’s current feeding frenzy over the economic changes, it is no surprise that I’m getting a little nervous. I’ve talked to several other consultants, contractors, and even captive employees who are starting to get an uneasy feeling in the pit of their stomach.

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For all your wordy types out there with time to spare…. Or anyone who wants to improve their vocabulary.

You can help feed the starving as you test your vocabulary on the FreeRice website.

Here’s how it works. You are given a word and four choices for a synonym. Each time you select the correct word, 20 grains of rice are donated to those who need it. That’s truly all there is to it.

The site will rate you and keep a running total of how much rice you help donate. In addition to supplying food to the hungry, the site aims to help facilitate learning the English language.

So, no matter how you look at it, you’ll be feeding someone and teaching him or her a skill.

Enjoy!

The browser of choice at our office is Mozilla Firefox (here’s why). When we updated to version 3 recently, we’ve been enjoying several updated functions and add-ons which make surfing the internet easier and more efficient.

As we were conducting some search engine optimization processes, we discovered that our alt tags would not pop up when we hovered over an image or link.

Why do we care? Why should you care, for that matter? Well, alt tags are short descriptions of a web graphic or link and are usually previewed by rolling the cursor of your mouse over the top of an image on a website.  “Alternative text” appears as a small box containing a brief explanation of the photo you roll over. Web designers use alt tags to make their website more accessible. Alt tags allow adaptive users to be able to “read” rather than view the content of an image or link. In addition to providing an additional avenue for keyword integration, an accessible website ranks better in the search engines.

We quickly learned, however that Firefox that shows alt tags as they are meant to function rather than as a popup. The alt tag description of the picture is stored as an alternate text and is visible only when an image has a problem loading or the user has turned a site’s images off. They are, of course, always “visible” to screen readers.

Some of the Search Engine Optimization gurus are asking themselves, “How do the alt tags participate in the pages ranking if you can not see it?”

Well, Firefox still allows the alternate text on the photo to help raise the page rank in search engines. Even though you cannot necessarily see the alt tag when rolling over the picture, it is still being factored into your search engine optimization and ultimate page rank.

A few weeks ago, we posted the good news that Adobe has released the Dreamweaver CS4 beta for aficionados to play with and test out. There are several new things that users will enjoy. With the help of the online tutorials at www.lynda.com, we have been discovering all the new features Dreamweaver CS4 will offer.

Over the next few days, we’ll share some of the most exciting features you’ll find. We’ll add links below as the posts are published.

• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta New Interface (Part 2)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Related Files (Part 3)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Code Navigator (Part 4)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Live View (Part 5)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Editing CSS through the Property Inspector (Part 6)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta JavaScript Extractor (Part 7)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Photoshop Integration (Part 8 )
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Spry Validation Radio Group (Part 9)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Password and Confirm Validation Widgets (Part 10)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Spry Tooltip Widget (Part 11)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Customizing Spry Tooltips (Part 12)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Understanding Spry datasets (Part 13)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta HTML Datasets (Part 14)
• Dreamweaver CS4 Beta Master/Detail Region (Part 15)

In the meantime, go download your beta version and enjoy!

I discovered an interesting tidbit of information on the Lifehacker blog this week.

Mozilla officially announced today [July 2, 2008] that Firefox 3 set the Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours, totaling at an impressive 8,002,530 downloads.

As Firefox is my browser of choice, I had to check it out! I downloaded it immediately and have been enjoying using it. The look and feel is cleaner and, while I haven’t had the chance to use all the top new features in the last 30 minutes, I have little doubt that I’ll enjoy them.

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