Dave's Web Demo Blog

I had to upgrade my whole web site before I could upgrade WordPress this time.  As new version of the software used on web sites come out, people stop supporting the older versions.  That’s usually a good though sometimes irritating thing.  So now I’m up to WordPress 3.01 on my ‘new’ upgraded web site.

Here on the demo blog, just watched the last few Emmy awards.  Pretty cool, I like Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges.  Guess I’ll have to make it to the movies… make that the video store.  I don’t sit and watch movies very often (like once a year) but my list of movies I want to see is getting long.  Gran Torino, Avatar, Hurt Locker, and a couple others I can’t remember right now.  Had to post Something this year!

Two of the most confusing issues in web design for new customers are Fonts and Media Players.

Customers have occasionally asked for fonts that they have on their computer that they really like.  If it’s a common font like Arial or Times, no problem.  If it’s an uncommon font like Jester or Narnia BLL, most other people won’t have it on their computer which means that their browser can’t use it to display your page.

Now we can use your font in an image but that has it’s problems too.  If you want your text to be found by Google and the other search engines, they can’t read images.  They only read text.  We could convert the text to images each time someone asks for your page but if you have a lot of content, that can take a long time to process which makes your page take a long time to load, both because of processing and because the images are larger files than the text version.

Most of my customers believe without thinking about it that their computer is ‘normal’, just like everyone else’s.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Different people use different software.  I have on my computers here Windows Media Player, Real Player, WinAmp, Mplayer, iTunes, Quicktime, and I think Creative’s Realsound player.  Others I know of include InterActual Player, VLC media player,  Adobe Media Player, and Songbird.

When it comes to Media Players and media content on web sites, that’s important.  Though some players will play many different kinds of files, there is no ‘universal’ media player.  In addition, people setup their media players differently.  Audio and Video files are played on your computer or in your browser by the program that ‘you’ have designated to handle that file type.  And if you have not designated a program for a particular file type, it won’t play at all.

I try to encourage my customers to use common formats as much as possible so they can reach the widest audience.

For the New Year, I’ve updated this installation of WordPress from 2.5.1 to 2.7 to get ‘New Features’ and ‘improved security’.  I guess those are the buzzwords of the internet.  More!!  Betterer!!!?!?!

The American Motto:

If Some is Good and More is Better… Then Too Much is just about Right!

Organization is Not about having a place to Put something, it is about having a place to Find it. If you can’t Find it, it doesn’t matter where you Put it.

I have just about every web browser that I can find that will run on one of my computers. This is so I can check the web pages I design in as many ways as possible. I have Firefox for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, SeaMonkey, an old version of Mozilla suite, Flock, Opera for Windows and Linux, Netscape, and Safari. Oh, and Epiphany and Dillo for Linux along with Amaya and Lynx, the Text Browser.  I forgot Google Chrome, I have that too.

And, yes, I have Microsoft Internet Explorer… from version 3 to the most current Beta 8.  Supposedly IE8 is going to be closer to Web Standards than any version before which I applaud. Microsoft was going to make it more complicated and less compatible than ever before. Right now, however, it seems to ‘forget’ things. This shows up when you go ‘back’ to a page and not all the pieces are there anymore. If you do a ‘Refresh’ by pressing Ctrl-F5, it gets a new copy from the server and then it’s all there. I guess the IE team has some more work to do…

I have about a dozen themes available on my site here and there are maybe Thousands on the WordPress site.  Just about every style and color is available since this very popular blog software.  I’m going to try to remember to change the theme every week (or so…) so you can see some of the different themes available.

If you’re looking at the Default Theme, I’ve modified the header image above to include my website logo. It took some searching to find out where the codes were to do that. But I think I’m getting the idea.

I’m still figuring out how to use this thing.  Except for some stuff on Myspace, I don’t normally ‘blog’ about anything.  I figure if you want to know what I have to say, you’ll call me on the phone or send me an email.  But I guess this is for those things you want to Share with the whole world.

So what I want you to know on July 8, 2008, is that it is 104 degrees outside and it hasn’t maxed out yet!  Stay inside!

This is a demo of the WordPress blogging software that I can install on your website. There are many other themes and color schemes available on their website and I can modify one of them to suit you. This is also free OpenSource software though I will have to charge you to install it.

Dave Baldwin