As promised, we have a new Trade Secrets article on how to Resurrect an External Hard Drive - a look at the issues and a panic-free solution for a drive that may just be playing dead.
LauverSystems.com made it to page1 of Google local search results for "computer durango, colorado" - wooHOO! And from purely organic methods and back-links - without hacks or link farms, and without paid rank placement or advertising - and a lot of work. We'll enjoy it while it lasts.
Concurrently, our global Alexa ranking actually went down; so we're not as popular in Timbuktu or Antarctica - boo hoo. Oh, right ... we don't work there.
We joined more social, bookmarking, and sharing sites. You'll find the prominent ones on the About Us page. Three of them are now centralized on the main menu where you can bookmark this site, or any page loaded into the center or right side panel, from the mini menu "Bookmark & Share".
This mini menu is dynamically created when you mouse over it, so it doesn't add to the site load time; and it's central location makes it unnecessary to add the same code to every other page. Who says Frames are passe?
Other site enhancements include adding a "human test" to our contact form to inhibit misuse by malicious programs. Instead of trying to read badly distorted characters, it asks you to solve an easy math problem.
After more SEO tweaks, we started a social networking drive. We're now on Buzztown in Durango, as well as Digg, Lifehacker (highly recommended), and Twitter (and seeking sound-byte revelations), plus various free directory listings.
Also, we have a new Trade Secrets article in the works on external hard drives. Stay tuned ...
... but first we must say: Happy Mothers' Day!
We just signed up for a local listing with Bing. Their terms prohibit listed sites from (...urk...) interfering with browser history. That is to say, if you find us on Bing, and click their link and land on our site, you should be able to simply click your browser's Back button to return to Bing.
We agree. We don't like going to a site and being trapped, unable to easily get back where we came from - including ours! Do such people think they own your navigation? In our case, it was unintentional, and even annoyed us; but fixing it was low priority until yesterday.
Once again, we searched for answers, found a lot of complex, bewildering stuff, and finally fired up the K.I.S. machine - that's Greg - who fixed it in one short line of code (and gobs of tests). The site loads a bit faster too.
So, for those of you who like going backwards ... >•)
In our Trade Secrets page, "Easy on the Eyes", we discuss fonts and provide samples. We originally used code to display once-popular fonts, if you had them installed on your computer, and briefly mentioned how to tell if they weren't. Not much help if you don't know how they look. Time for an upgrade.
We went to major font sites looking for popularity ratings on well-formed, legible, elegant, and artistic free fonts. We sifted through over a thousand of the best rated, downloaded and installed around 100, threw out those which were incomplete or damaged, and ended with a set of fifty nice ones. (Sorry: "Baby Kruffy" didn't make the list.) Now, how to present them?
If you have visual difficulty distinguishing colors of similar intensity (especially on an older monitor), and if you're using the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, you can switch the scroll bar coloration to light or dark from the Color Themes menu at left:
hover the mouse pointer over Color Themes to expand the menu, then click Scrollbar Color.
WOW. Just in time for ... no, wait: it's still March. Remember that button we said we might put back on the main menu?
On the day of that post, 2010/03/22, we used the URL Submission page in Bing's Webmaster Center to manually submit 51 or our non-listed pages. Six days later - BOOM - 46 total pages, including the original 7, were not only indexed, but also had the rank of established pages. Today the total is 51.
"Why on Earth didn't you do this a long time ago?" you ask. Well, it's complicated. Really. First there is a certain etiquette to ranking based on natural ("organic") search results, rather than being pushy ("greedy"). OK, we already know what you think of that one, so here's the real reason.
We did try this last year. On the URL Submission page was a form with 2 fields: one to type a page URL, such as
"http://LauverSystems.com/News/n200902051729IRSrefund.htm",
and one to type a set of characters visually read from a warped mess on the page (to verify that you're a human being with highly distorted vision).
"And?" The URL field did not permit copy and paste operations. Successful entries landed on a "Thank You" page with no link back to the Submissions page. When all the manual typing and typos and page loads and record keeping began to resemble a Darwinian process, life's little demands took precedence. No worries. Google and Yahoo were doing a great job; and Bing was new and would probably surpass its predecessor, Live Search (wherein we had a nice listing).
Whatever. This time, the Submission page had evolved, though it still induces RSS (Repetitive Squinting Syndrome), Fish Eye and, in rare cases, catatonia (and silliness, another side effect). We don't know if Bing is actually fixed, but most of our pages are listed (no SEO changes needed) and searchable; so the button is back. Seems fair.
A few days ago, we tweaked this site for more consistent cross-browser display using JavaScript. However, many of you disable JavaScript for safer surfing. When we tested this, we found our content was still a jumble of displaced and/or cropped elements, depending on the browser.
(We'll pause here, while experienced coders chuckle.)
The most obstinate problem was to get each browser to uniformly stretch elastic box elements <<these>> to the bottom of the viewport, to fill 100% of remaining browser window space regardless of resizing it (known as a "liquid layout"), with internal (IFrame) scrollbars only if needed, and no viewport overflow. Certainly someone else had wrestled with this, so we searched, read, coded, and tested - repeatedly - and got zip.
Much sage advice was untested, and proffered code contained limitations (usually fixed page sizes or browser-specific code), or cheats (usually scripts or bad DTDs), or failed miserably, and was atrociously complex. Ostentatious forum gurus mocked lesser beings: "Good coders know better! ... It just isn't done! ... Why would anyone do this?"
Why? Because we like it this way. Our special thanks to those elite who actually said "It's impossible!" That bit of heresy turned disappointment into resolve.
After some long days and short nights, we cooked up a new batch of pure XHTML1 (transitional DTD) and CSS2 code with IE "Conditional Comment" magic which is very compact and quick, uses no scripting, and renders a uniform layout in each of The Browsers That Really Matter.
(What's that sound? It's the Zen of No Chuckling.)
We removed Bing Search from our main navigation menu. Unlike Google and Yahoo, which list all (about 60) of our pages and report no coding or content gaffes, Bing has found only 7 pages in a year's time - and reports no coding or content issues. Among those 7 are 2 menu pages which contain direct links to all other pages.
SO, for those of you who loved using our Bing Search tool to find very little of our content: we're terribly sorry (not). If you really can't live without it, here's the button. If Bing is ever fixed, we'll put it back.
Update: The button is back, per the 2010/03/31 log entry, above.
A systems analyst collegue once quipped, "I just love standards, because there are so many standards to choose from." Makers of the Firefox and Opera browsers proclaim ("evangelize") that their products are in strict W3C Standards compliance (unlike other evil browsers). So they should both display the same web page the same way, right?
Wrong! And some gurus frown upon browser-specific coding as unprofessional. True, if every browser conformed to somebody's standards then all that extra code would be unnecessary. Entirely reasonable, but where's the competitive (proprietary) advantage?
While most of our code is browser-independent, we decided to fix the nonsensical displacements and discolorations produced by those fundamentalist browsers. So today, for your viewing pleasure (if you have JavaScript enabled), this site will display nearly the same way in The Browsers That Really Matter - Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari - as intended. >•)
More speed upgrades: caching objects used in JavaScript to reduce calls to the slow HTML parser, as well as fleshing out explicit location references so the client doesn't have to go fishing for them.
Upgraded LauverSystems.com for faster graphics loading speeds. Initially we ran several trials of a graphics laden page with current versions of four major browsers, emptying their caches each time, and found them to be comparable. Firefox 3.6 was the fastest, followed by Internet Explorer 8, then Opera 10.10, and finally the Windows version of Safari 4.0.4.
To be fair, most of Safari's lag probably happens during DNS name resolution, before actually loading the requested page; and it does have the fastest spinner! Google Chrome appears to be a work in progress; it can be very fast, but trial results varied too widely to be useful, even with cached data.
We will be unavailable for service calls this week. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Happy Holidays To All
and best wishes for a
Bright New Year
OK, that's it - Google Translate is outta here! Non-English readers agree that automated translations are ba-a-a-ad, and actually compound confusion when articles are referenced in multiple languages.
As an experiment, we added Google Translate to our pages. We'll see how it goes, and hope the translations aren't too embarassing.
Update: Thanks to the following reviewers for valuable advice:
Luis Miguel Arteaga, Sr. Software Quality Engineer at Continental Automotive Systems (Spanish)
Dmitriy N. Gaevoy, CEO at Applied Med Therapy® (Russian)
Randall Goya, Web Developer and Project Manager at netsperience
Lyubov Ignatovsky, Experienced Information Technology Professional (Russian)
Kimberly McCabe, Marketing Consultant at Oshyn, Inc. (French)
Feedback indicates the translations are rough to mediocre, and understandable with varying effort.
Added an About Us page - it's about time!
Completed several broad site enhancements, including addition of Google Analytics code and "Canonical Links" - the result of a recent collaborative effort from Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo - which reduces the appearance of "duplicate content" caused by search engines' fly's-eye view of the same page accessed via differing URLs.
Yep: they see "http://someplace.com/" and "http://www.someplace.com/" as "duplicate" sites, even though those addresses reference the same site! And, of course, there is a ranking penalty for duplicate content. •._.•
A new e-mail contact form is available for visitors who don't have access to their default e-mail service.
Long overdue, Acronis is now an affiliate. Back in May, we got a taste of their medicine during a flawless system drive replacement.
We upgraded our long Business Direct page into a new side bar menu. Local small business can benefit by exchanging ads and links with us, and we'll do free ads for non-profits.
Hello again. One week became two; but we're back to our normal schedule. Thanks for your patience.
We will be unavailable for service calls next week. We apologize for any inconvenience.
We now offer advertising for locally owned small businesses. See our Small Business Advertising page for details.
Added "Loading ..." messages since some pages load resources from slow external sites, such as Amazon, PayPal, and our Affiliates. Also there's a nice little self-correcting digital clock at the top of our News & Alerts page.
The Opera browser accurately calculates nested Table and IFrame measurements horizontally but overflows the window bottom by about the height of its tool and status bars. A new JavaScript workaround compensates by extending frame bottoms. They still overflow, but everything can be read. If the Opera window is resized smaller, hit Reload to see everything. •._.•
Site performance upgrades - there's even a little load time gizmo above the navigation menu to help monitor results. Speaking of search engines, visitors can now quickly search this site with Google or Bing.
Reincarnation. Ouch. We've nearly finished optimizing LauverSystems.com for search engines.
Our Fees & Payment page can now initiate online payments by credit or debit card through PayPal.
Our Fees & Payment page can now initiate online payments by credit or debit card through Amazon.
We now have Affiliates, but not just any dog & pony show. We're advertising top products from reputable companies with whom we have experience, and whose products we use or have tested.
Visitors who arrive via external links are now served the page they requested, rather than landing in the initial presentation scheme. >•)
Several improvements, pages completed, and new Trade Secrets pages added: Recycle Bin, Security, Under the Hood, and a harmless example of a fraudulent "phishing" page, accessible from Security.
This site has been recoded to render reasonably well in the Gecko/Netscape WebKit engine used by the Firefox and Safari browsers, and we've heard it looks good in Mozilla too.
This site design is now stable as DHTML, using CSS v2.1, a mix of XHTML v1.0 Transitional and Strict, and JavaScript - entirely tested and W3C compliant.
It has morphed considerably from its simple HTML v4.1 beginnings in 2006, due in part to Clover Greene's insistance and confidence that we could do something we knew almost nothing about - building web sites.
To top it off, she wanted to add content! What's wrong with blank pages? They load faster! But for a survivor like this lady, we had to try.
With further prodding (Hey!! Is that thing loaded??) by our gracious web host at Advanced Digital Media, we overhauled the site to pass W3C validation.
Its next incarnation will be . . . later.