I had a client recently tell me that she was emailing me “vector” images. The web, I thought, was made up of bitmap images - .jpg, .gif, .png - and so this confused me. I took some vector math in college - it was the math series right after differential equations - and boy was it confusing. So even to this day when I hear “vector”, I feel a little pit in my stomach.

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If you’re undertaking a new website design, one of the things to consider is whether you want to have a custom logo designed, or simply use clip art or stock photography for your website. Since one of my clients, Jefferson Coulter, is a trademark attorney in Seattle, I asked him to write an article about this topic.

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I wrote a post in February 2008 about a badly behaving bot (Limelight Networks in Tempe and Kavam in San Jose). This morning, I’ve received a comment on that post about a potential new badly behaving bot. Here’s the information:

I’m not seeing this bot yet on my web stats - but if any of you are seeing it, please leave a comment. I found some information on Wikipedia about the Savvis Communications Corporation, not very flattering stuff.

UPDATE:

After writing this article, I noticed a visit from the Savvis Communications Corporation in my own website statistics - to this very post - but unfortuately, they didn’t leave a comment. Maybe they’ll return.

Here’s the visit:

I had a client recently ask me to add some logos from other companies to his website. The logos were from news organizations, and his intention was to use the logos as links to articles that those organizations had on their websites. This raised a question about proper use of trademarked symbols and so, like I usually do when I learn something new, I wrote this article about what I learned. Disclaimer, I’m not an attorney and this isn’t legal advice. It’s just a blog article.

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Ok, so maybe this is unrelated to web design, but on several occasions clients and friends who are on a mac have received .docx files (2007 Microsoft Word) and have been unable to open them.

Now, don’t even get me started on why Microsoft would release a version of Word that is not backwards compatible…

But they did, and here’s a tool they are offering to help solve the issue:

Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac

Note this requires OS X 10.4

I’ve also tried out that docx-converter.wdgt, the one that adds a widget to your dashboard, but it doesn’t always work. The one above worked just fine for me.

Additionally, I noticed that I could upgrade my version of Word to 11.35 that would enable me to open these docx from Word - but when I tried to use the Microsoft updater, it wouldn’t work for some reason. So I’ll just stick with the XML File Format Converter to convert Word docx.

Enjoy!

I had a client recently ask me whether or not his hosting company was backing up his website files. At first, I thought this was a silly question, because I thought the answer would be “of course!” I host my own website and have nearly all my website clients hosted with DreamHost (for a bunch of reasons listed here), and I have, on occasion, become overzealous and accidentally deleted something I shouldn’t have. Yes, even web designers make mistakes

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Are you receiving contact forms from your website that are full of spam? Are you sick and tired of getting these contact forms filled with junk, or worse, offensive content? Are you wondering if there is anyway to protect your contact form from spam? The answer is YES, and it’s known as “CAPTCHA”.
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I watch my website traffic closely, and this morning I noticed a strange thing: many hits to my website, always only one page, and they all came from different subdomains of Kavam.net, all from an ISP named Limelight Networks LLC, and all from Tempe Arizona. I remember a while ago reading about Kavam being connected with a search engine robot, so I looked into this traffic.
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If you’re in the market for an online forum, this article may save you time and trouble. I recently had a client with a dog forum. She had to abandon her phpBB forum because of a bug so severe, it literally corrupted the entire forum database…three times! We were able to transfer the entire forum to SMF…with no loss of data. Simple Machines Forum to the rescue!
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While I don’t design websites using Flash, there are occasions where using Flash is recommended, such as when a website client wants to add video to their website. My hosting company, DreamHost, has made converting video to Flash and configuring your HTML code easy…DreamHost says: “DreamHost has licensed Jeroen Wijering’s excellent Flash Media Player. This tool enables all DreamHost customers to embed streamed audio and video into any of their web pages!”

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