I had a little “fun” this weekend, in between bouts of illness, making a style sheet for the mobile version of this website. If you have a PDA or a cell phone that lets you see the web, check out the mobile version of my website at www.electric-webs.mobi

I am guest blogging today on Wet Noodle Posse’s blog. The article is all about how to get the most out of your website: how to design it right the first time, get more traffic, keep visitors coming back, and use statistics to monitor your site.

Have you ever wanted to know just exactly how many background processes were running on your computer, and what files they had opened? Process Explorer is a new freeware program available now from Microsoft.

 And I have to ask a question of my fellow computer junkies:  How do you fix an IE 7 install that doesn’t ever connect to the net, it just hangs and says ‘connecting….’ forever?  This is on a Win XP SP2 computer that I am trying to update with all the latest Windows updates.  I have tried installing IE7 as directed by this helpful website:  http://ict.cas.psu.edu/training/howto/comm/ie7/installie7.htm and this website: http://www.ie-vista.com/known_issues.html, but upon opening, it just hangs.

I have run CrapCleaner first, I have disabled the AVG anti-virus, I have run IE7 in no add-ons mode, when I try to go to ->tools, ->internet options, ->connections, the program hangs.

 When I open IE7 for the first time after the new install, it hangs on the ‘runonce’ page, just saying ‘connecting…’ forever.

 Can anyone help me?

Well, after using Microsoft Expression Web for a while, I am changing my opinion somewhat… This program has a few significant bugs that need to be fixed before it will be useful at all.

1) Undo function:

Undo does not take you back one step in operations, it takes you all the way back to the state of the file when you opened the file, as if it were a ‘revert’ function, not an ‘undo’ function. Other people have seen this problem and some fixes are mentioned here, but I haven’t tried them yet:

http://blog.by-expression.com/index.php/undo-goes-to-far-in-expression-web/

2) Expression web inserts these characters: 

When EW saves a file that is PHP or CSS, it changes the encoding to  UTF-8 (BOM) from UTF-8….and there is no way to choose the encoding when you save…and this causes those 3 little characters to appear all over your website wherever the PHP pages are…

Thankfully, frontpagewebmaster.com found a solution.

I am pretty upset because I just wasted about 4 hours on these bugs, and I won’t be using Epression Web again for a while.

Go to SnapShots.com right now and set up your blog to show mini snapshots of all the links mentioned in the text.

This is so cool, and it’s free, and it’s extremely easy to set up. No brainer.

Well, I finally got most of my web design software installed on my new Vista computer. The first really big compatibility issues I have noticed are with Flash, specifically versions MX2004 and version 8, and WS_FTP Professional.

When opening movie clips in older versions of Flash, the program goes into a weird slow-motion mode, wherein a dotted box slowly expands and contracts around the movie clip you are trying to open. If you have this problem, here is a link explaining the solution.

Also, I upgraded to the supposedly Vista-compatible version of Ipswitch WS_FTP Professional. Well, I was happily coding along in another program when I suddenly got an error message out of nowhere: “WS_FTP does not appear to have been installed correctly for the current user. WS_FTP will now exit.” I wasn’t even running this program!!! To fix this problem, right click on the WS_FTP icon, click on properties, and choose “run this program as administrator.” This seems to have fixed the problem for me. Even though my login IS the administrator.

Microsoft has finally come out with totally new website design program that allows you to design compliant sites!!!

Expression Web lets you do website design with CSS-based layouts, and has a new, awesome rendering engine that lets you truly see how your code will look in the browser as you are working on it.

I have just downloaded and installed Expression Web on my computer, and I will write a more detailed review of the program after I have had time to play with it.

UPDATE: I have just finished using this program for a little over an hour and a half, AND I LOVE IT!!!

If you have resisted learning Dreamweaver because you thought it was just too complicated or difficult to use, give Expression Web a try. Those of us who are used to the Microsoft interface for programs like MS Word and Excel will feel at home right away.

Expression Web highlights  non-compliant code in yellow, like Dreamweaver, and tells you what’s wrong. It lets you edit PHP pages within the design-view window. Also, if you hightlight a section of the page you are working on in the design-view window, it shows all the CSS styles associated with that class or ID, and you can change these styles on the fly….

For those of you who have ever used Frontpage, one of the biggest improvements of Expression Web over Frontpage is the ‘add hyperlink’ interface: when you highlight text to add a hyperlink in Expression Web, YOU CAN FINALLY PASTE THE LINK URL into the pop-up hyperlink dialog box!!! This alone makes it worth upgrading to Expression Web if you currently use Frontpage.

Also, if you are used to Frontpage, the learning curve for Expression Web will not be very steep.

If you code websites, try the demo version of this program and see how you like it.

In my former life, pre-kiddie-winkies, I used to be a radio engineer.  I love all types of radios: AM, FM, shortwave, digtal, amateur, VLF that let you listen to things like ’sprites’ and ‘whistlers’ and other phenomena that is not completely understood by science… I used to design car radio electronics at Delco Electronics and this was a job that I loved very much.

So anyhow, we rented a car that had a Sirius satellite radio in it.  OK, I am sold on satellite radio now.  I never thought that I would want one of these for a lot of reasons, like the monthly subscription fee for starters…  But after a couple of days of playing with it, I was hooked.  You can listen to BBC Radio 1, and also to Fox News, and even Radio Sweden was on for a while…along with a mind-blowing selection of music.  Don’t like what you are hearing?  Just tune to a new channel and you are basically guaranteed to find something you like, with NO COMMERCIALS.  And with CD-quality sound. 

There are weather and traffic reports for major American cities, along with some NPR classic programming, like ‘Car Talk’, and loads of sports programming.  And Howard Stern, too. (But don’t let the kiddie-winkies listen to Howard because he’s not censored on Sirius and the F-bomb is dropped every other second…You can turn on Radio Disney at this point.)

Too cool.  Gotta have it.  Hope it catches on so I can get one someday. Try Sirius online free for 3 days…

Today we spent our Sunday in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the beach, after visting the battleship USS North Carolina, which is moored in the Cape Fear River. The names of all the soldiers killed in WWII who were originally from North Carolina are listed on plaques in one of the ships many holds, and there are also photos and commentary from some of the sailors who served aboard the ship.

Very, very interesting and wonderful memorial.

…to setup a blog. OK, I resisted thus far. I really don’t read a lot of blogs, I admit. I read my clients’ blogs, and a couple of random blogs here and there.  

So what do I have to offer the blogging world? I am not a wordsmith, unike most of my author clients. But I thought that I could share some really good music that I am pretty sure not too many of you out there are familiar with, and I could talk about the books I am reading. This could get me into trouble in multiple ways because most of my clients are romance authors!!

Before I started in this website design endeavor, I eschewed romance novels completely. Never would have picked one up. I preferred just straight fiction: Stephen King, John Irving, Tom Robbins, etc. Lately, I have become enamored with Nick Hornby. See a trend?

Now I really find I enjoy the chick-lit and the romance novels that my clients have led me to read, so I will keep you posted.