A friend says the Casio EXILIM EX-Z750 is a superb camera. While I’m not in the market for a new camera, I keep my eyes open as I’m frustrated with my camera’s poor performance when I don’t use the flash. When the flash is off, the picture is blurry. A clear picture comes through in about one out of ten pictures. I know it’s awful, but there is no reason for me to go off and spend money on something like this.

But out of curiosity, I look around and compare prices. The lowest one I could find without shopping costs included is from Stargate Photo. The lowest price I’ve found with shipping is $350. I add the camera to the cart (as I can’t find shipping costs after 10 minutes of searching), and it asks me to enter my login ID or Sign up.

Two problems. First, it doesn’t give me a way to check out without registering. Many carts are abandoned because of this. Second, on the sign up page (the first page you see after clicking sign up), it asks for credit card information and the submit button says, “Submit order.” Hey, I never got a shipping cost!

On the shopping cart page, there is a drop down for shipping with four choices. The first one displays, “UPS-Ground 6%.” I assume this means shipping is 6% of the subtotal of the products you buy. But it could easily be something else. If I am right, the form shouldn’t make the customer figure out the shipping cost.

I tried in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. No difference except the formatting is better in IE. Even if I wanted to buy a camera, I don’t think I would buy it from this business because it has no reputation or reviews yet.

Better and more updated list of free tools and sites for writers.

This lists resources related to writing and for writers around the Web. It’s a growing list, so check back again to see new ones added. Though you can find most of these sites through your favorite search engine, it doesn’t provide you with a description of the site. Plus, searching for “writing resources” or “writer resources” could lead to results with many useless sites that abuse keywords for a better search engine ranking.

You can submit your site for review. Not all submissions automatically make the list. They’re reviewed for quality content.

A good place to start in finding many quality resources for writers is Writer’s Digest Best 101 Web Sites for Writers – 2005.

Absolute Write – contains more than 1,000 pages of content including articles, columns, interviews, book reviews, writing markets, and forums. It has two newsletters: Absolute Write Newsletter (info on home page), which goes out every week and the Absolute Markets Newsletter (free and premium editions available), they go out every other week with premium one week and free the following week. These contain (depending on edition) markets (U.S. and airmail), interviews with editors, and a long list of opportunities (premium, obviously).

Long Story Short – a magazine for writers includes book reviews, book excerpts, interviews, articles, poetry, and has recently added a writing school.

E-Write – offers a newsletter, E-Writing Bulletin, and an index of articles from the newsletter covering business writing, email writing / marketing, and web writing. It also includes a list of onsite writing courses along with the dates and locations.

Paul Conley provides detailed reports on the trade press.

Just Services with funding from Arts Council England set up Disability Writes to help disabled people who face barriers in getting support and encouragement to write. It promotes the work of disabled writers to a wide audience of disabled and non-disabled people through its Web site and printed publications. People with disabilities can post their work on the site and receive constructive feedback.

University of Wisconsin at Madison – offers guidelines and resources for writing proposals. Proposal references are sorted by diferent types such as non-government, research, and federal. The site also links to a list of recommended books on proposal writing.

Guide to Grammar and Writing has digital handouts on grammar and English usage, over 170 computer-graded quizzes, frequently asked grammar questions, and much more.

The Next Big Writer

Site that helps find undiscovered writing talent through feedback on writing work and reviews on existing works.

Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) provides superb resources covering writing, research, grammar, and MLA and APA style. Dumb Little Man provides a list of 40 grammar and writing tips from OWL, so you can quickly find what you want.

Clive Pyne Book Indexing has a list of writer resources similar to this one and others. The site also has a few articles on indexing.

Query Letters I Love has actual, honest to goodness query letters received in Hollywood. Thanks, David.

Resource Site for Authors of Historical Fiction

The books featured on this site are mainly historical works of fiction. Authors who submit their books have the chance to be featured for one week. Also contains writing and publishing tips and resources.

Publishing Central is a great resource to find articles from around the Web on just about every topic related to publishing.

Joe Wikert’s Book Publisher Blog

Joe Wikert is a Vice President and Executive Publisher in the Professional/Trade division of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. He shares advice about writing, publishing, and technology.

Writers Write is a massive resource for writers that you can get lost and spend all day there. It has everythng books (reviews, giveaway, blog), job postings, community forums, and specialty sections covering different genres.

Updated: July 17, 2007

This book is for CSS haters, people frustrated with CSS, and those making the transition to CSS-based design. I fall under the frustrated crowd. My site has been using CSS for a few years now and yet, I still waste a full day trying to get something to look right. Other resources are better served for those who haven’t touched an inkling of CSS. Once you have basic grounding in CSS, then come back to this one.

While reading the book, I wipe away my history with CSS so I can see it from it perspective of a person new or relatively new to CSS. Based on the title, it’s true you don’t have to read the book from front to back; however, it flows well so it is possible to read it cover-to-cover.

The introduction indicates the book is not a tutorial. The first chapter uses a different format from the rest of the book and provides a CSS refresher. The chapter is also useful for getting your CSS vocabulary straight with its describing CSS selectors, tag selectors, pseudo-class selectors, and class selectors.

Every item in the book begins with “How do I…?” with the solution following. Tips, important notes, and warnings are sprinkled throughout the chapters. The book’s layout is friendly for scanning and finding what you need. Screen shots and sample code support the content to help those who appreciate visual aids.

A good way to use the book is while you’re working on a site and you get stuck. For instance, you’re working on a form. In the old days, many of us used two-column tables to organize the form. You want to do the same thing with CSS. Here you would refer to Chapter 6: Forms and User Interfaces and check out “How do I lay out a two-column form using CSS instead of a table?” Or use the index to look up “forms” and underneath is “two-column forms.”

While my background gives you the impression that I expect sites to follow Web standards 100 percent, I actually don’t. Mega-sites like ESPN and ABC News would fail standards validation, but I give them much credit because they’re massive and dynamic. So in Chapter 9, Andrew shows how to do scrollbars and rounded corners, which only work in Internet Explorer and Mozilla respectively. No harm comes to anyone who can’t see one or the other.

Andrew also helps you create CSS drop-down menus, something I don’t encourage because it’s problematic in many ways. Even so, I’ve written articles showing how to do this because it’s a foundation for designing with advanced CSS techniques and helps you become more comfortable with CSS.

The first four chapters are available at no cost as a PDF file. To get the chapters, you will have to give up an email address. That’s generous considering there are nine chapters in the book. Plus, the site has the codes from the book for downloading. What about the rest? Yes, it’s worth it because the later chapters cover forms, CSS positioning (a biggie especially for designers struggling to drop the table habit), and techniques such as creating rounded corners with CSS that works across browsers.

The announcement of IE 7 coming out late this year will have little impact on the book except in the areas covering browser-specific issues. It depends on what Microsoft does with the new version of IE. I suspect Andrew will release a new edition when the time is right. Meanwhile, right now is a great time to get this handy book.

If you order the book from SitePoint, you get a $9.95 CSS Reference Poster free of charge.

Title: The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks
Author: Rachel Andrew
Publisher: SitePoint
ISBN: 0957921888
Date: November 2004
Format: Paperback
Pages: 376
Cover Price (of course, you won’t pay these prices. They’ll be discounted): US: 39.95
CDN: 57.95
UK: 20.79

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Stop already… you’re writing a review, not adding another joke into the database. Sorry ’bout that. The book put me in a joke state of mind since it uses a jokes database as the content to Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL.

This book is for those who like step-by-step directions accompanied by explanations of how things work. I learned many things using this approach, which is a stepping stone to creating dynamic Web sites.

Yank does a fine job covering a little of everything without overpowering the reader with too much. Anyone who has experimented with Perl, PHP, ASP.NET, MySQl, Access, some of them or all of them will like the book. Those who can write PHP and MySQL with little help are at a level beyond this book and it wouldn’t be a good fit.

I rarely ran into problems while following the examples. I’ve worked with other technical books and hit a brick wall at times requiring a call for help or serious research. While working with this book, I only got stuck once and immediately figured out the problem with a little research.

My brain jumbles whenever I try to create databases. It’s not able to function and compute as well as it does for other geeky concepts. Yank uses visual aids and avoids jargon when explaining the process of laying out the database tables.

All the necessary components of building a Web site using a database are covered. While adding data, viewing tables, and querying the database, you’re learning tasks that will come in handy for future projects.

Not only do you get instructions for PHP and MySQL, but also advice on structuring code so that it’s used effectively.

If you’ve never installed Apache, PHP, or MySQL or can’t recall how to do it, the steps for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X are in the first chapter. Since the latest edition covers PHP 5, the author addresses the differences in PHP 4.3. When working on the first PHP script, there is no “Hello World!” for a change.

The early chapters provide a good overview of PHP and MySQL. By Chapter 4, the contents of the earlier chapters are integrated as the backend database connects to the Web page with PHP. The next chapters show how to use forms to manage, add, delete, edit, and search data. By midpoint, the reader has designed a database, organized it, created Web pages for the data, added administration pages, and administered the database. Yank also explains how to generate cookies and build a simple shopping cart.

The appendices include MySQL syntax, functions, column types, and PHP functions to use with MySQL. The book has an accompanying Web site that includes errata and four free sample chapters. Having edited a few tech books, I know how easy it is to miss things when you’re working on different computer set ups and application versions. Check the site especially since it has the code from the book. When running into problems, compare your code to the code from the site.

One chapter has a challenge along with the solution (a couple of pages later, so you’re not tempted to peek). Having a challenge like this in most chapters, I believe, would help cement the learning. All in all, it’s a hit.

Title: Build Your Own Database-Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL, Third Edition
Author: Kevin Yank
Publisher: Sitepoint Pty Ltd.
ISBN: 0975240218
Date: October 2004
Format: Paperback
Pages: 359
Cover Price: USD: $27.97 CDN: 40.57
UK: 19.59

If you’re not familiar with O’Reilly’s cookbook series (image of layout), they’re books with a basic formula: Problem, Solution, and Discussion sections for every ‘recipe.’ Each recipe is a script, program, command, or piece of code for implementing within a large part of a whole.

Simple example, you’re creating a Web site and you need to add a form. You can look up a recipe for creating just the form. In CSS Cookbook, get recipes for using CSS to create pull quotes, to add a background image, to build various types of layouts, and to manage forms.

This book is for those who know HTML and have a basic understanding of CSS. Like any food cookbook, the recipes are there when you’re ready for them. It’s not for reading from cover to cover. When you get stuck on a problem or want to know how to create a printer-friendly page, refer to the recipe.

The main issue with the book is its use of tables in some of the recipes. With the growing number of Web sites moving towards Web standards compliance, tables are finally going away as a layout tool. Their only purpose is for organizing data.

Don’t expect recipes on fly-out or drop down menus. This is not a bad thing as CSS is not the ideal way to create such menus as there are many problems with implementing them. However, the book could use more recipes as others in the Cookbook series have 400, 500, and even 700 pages. This one is just 270 pages.

Schmitt does an excellent job of explaining each problem and solution with his minimal jargon and easy writing style. The table of contents provides the list of the types of problems covered in this book. If these are things you wish to implement, then you’ll be happy with the purchase.

Title: CSS Cookbook
Author: Christopher Schmitt
Publisher: O’Reilly
ISBN: 0596005768
Date: August 2004
Format: Paperback
Pages: 270
Cover Price (of course, you won’t pay these prices – they’re the original cover prices and they’ve been discounted):
US: $34.95
CDN: $50.95
UK: £28.50

Chris Pederick has created the Web Developer Extension for Firefox and Mozilla, which adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various Web developer tools. It’s a fabulous tool for learning and doing development work. Install the extension by clicking on the download link and following the dialog boxes as with installing any extension.

What makes the toolbar outstanding is its ability to do things with any Web page. It offers many features and we’ll cover a handful so you can see what it can do. Let’s work through the buttons from left to right.

Disable

Turns off cookies, images, Java, JavaScript, colors, etc. To show you what some of the options can do, I use Amazon as our guinea pig. Fig 1 is the original page. Turning off images animation stops the treasure box from rocking back and forth.

Fig 2 is what happens when disabling page colors. There are still colors from the images. These are the colors from the borders, backgrounds, and fonts.

Turning off the styles results in not much of a big difference, but it’s harder to see the links. Style disabling is more prevalent on pages relying on heavier CSS. Try it in CSS Zen Garden.

CSS

To see Amazon’s CSS, use “View CSS” and it appears in its own tab. It’s no wonder why turning off styles didn’t look different. The style sheet covers fonts and little else.

“View style information” provides style information about whatever the mouse cursor rolls over in the status bar. See fig 3 for an example.

Here’s one feature where Firefox has an advantage as Mozilla doesn’t have this option. It offers the “Edit CSS” option and this is a great way to experiment. I went wild and changed a few colors on the meryl.net home page. You can do more, but it’s a simple example.

Forms

The form’s GET and POST methods operate differently. If you’re experimenting with them or want to see what happens if you switch them, use the “Convert POSTs to GETs” and “Convert GETs to POSTs.”

To see the form’s code, select “Display Form Details” and you see something like fig 4.

Images

For “Image Dimensions,” click on it to get the height and width of every image on the page as shown in fig 5.

When images on a page are broken or you want to know their paths, instead of using the “View Source” and scrolling through all the code, use “Display Image Paths.” And to find all broken images, click on “Find Broken Images.”

See how your page looks for those who surf without images or people who are visually impaired by using “Make Images Invisible.” See fig 6. You can also “Replace Images with Alt Attributes” as well as use the “Outline Images” to help you quickly find images with or without certain features.

Information

Information is also good for testing and identifying parts of a Web page without searching for it. “View ID and Class Details” puts blocks around Class and ID. Green for ID and red for class for easier identification.

Here is an example output of “View Response Headers,” which puts the information in a separate tab:

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Sun, 03 Oct 2004 22:25:08 GMT
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 21272

“View Speed Report” links to WebSiteOptimization’s Web Page Analzyer and provides details about the page you’re on.

Miscellaneous

“Show Comments” makes ! appear where there are comments. Here’s one from Yahoo! with the comment expanded by clicking on the !. You can copy and paste the comments.

From the source code:
A readable screen shot

From the Web page:

“Visited Links” allows you to make all links as visited or unvisited. It’s like resetting the colors (if there are different colors for visited and unvisited links).

“Zoom” makes the text larger.

Outline

No fretting. This isn’t the outline you learned in school. The feature puts a border around block level elements, deprecated elements, frames, links without the title attribute, and table cells. If you’re trying to get rid of tables, ensure you have titles for every link, and dump deprecated elements, use this to find them without scanning the code.

Or create your own using the “Custom Elements” option.

Resize

Self-explanatory. “Display Current Size” puts the info in a pop up box while “Display Current Size in Title” puts it at the top of the browser.

Validation

One-click validation of HTML, CSS, accessibility (WAI and 508), links, and create your own.

View Source

Click it and get the page code.

Options

If you want the changes you’ve made using the toolbar to apply to another page, click on “Persist Styles.” To reset the mess I made, I click “Reset Page.” This erases all the things I’ve done to the page with the toolbar.

“Options” controls the hiding / unhiding of the toolbar and how you want the windows / tabs to behave. ‘Validators’ is for adding another validator that isn’t on the list or replace an existing one.

Add frequently used window sizes in ‘Resize’ so you don’t have to customize it every time.

Don’t like red and green for identifying class vs. ID? Change it in ‘Colors’ as well as the tooltip colors.

You can access the toolbar through Tools > Web Developer or right-clicking on the browser window and selecting “Web Developer” from the context menu.

Like candy for Web design, isn’t it? Play and test Web pages without worrying about screwing things.

Jennifer Niederst follows her recently released Learning Web Design, a book for those just starting Web design, with an updated Web Design in a Nutshell that takes novice to intermediate designers to the next level and is also useful as a desktop quick reference.

Many buy such books and end up never opening them or maybe a few times before it’s outdated. I admit I’m one of those people, but not when it comes to the Weasel (picture on the cover) book. This is the book the professor assigned for one of my first Web design classes and it is responsible for my learning tables, CSS, and knowing when to make a graphics file .gif or .jpg.

It’s the most well worn Web design book I have in my collection and the only HTML book I ever bought. Thankfully, there is little that’s changed in the format of the book because it wasn’t broken. Niederst takes the appropriate steps to update it and expand the sections that are more relevant today such as HTML 4.01 and new versions of browsers including Netscape 6 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.

Expect an entire orchestra of instruments relevant to Web design, along with the specific details and tricks you should know. It may seem a bit much that Niederst covers HTML, CSS, SSI, graphics, multimedia, JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, WAP, and WML. However, she appropriately magnifies essential things while the advanced or “you may want to explore” topics are touched upon to give an idea of how it works with suggestions for further reading

The book starts off by addressing the biggest challenge of designing a site that looks good in every browser and version. “Designing for a Variety of Browsers” has a two-page chart of various browsers and versions for the Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX environments, showing what each supports and doesn’t support.

The next chapter covers another source of frustration for designers, “Designing for a Variety of Displays.” If you monitor your Web visitor stats, then you’ll probably notice that no size leads the majority especially with WebTV, handheld, and cellular devices accessing the Internet. There are screen shots of browser and system measurements and tips for designing for various displays.

Chapter 26, “Flash and Shockwave” explains what it is, advantages and disadvantages, introduces you to the Flash interface, adding a Flash file to a Web page, and integrating it with other technologies. Flash is a whole different animal and the book gives you the big picture of how it fits with designing Web pages. The following chapter on SMIL covers the same basics.

Part V addresses the advanced technologies including JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, and WAP and WML. It’s useful to have these all close together at the end of the book to help you figure out which you may want to use for a Web project.

As useful as special characters can be, I never remember what to type to make the symbol appear, though I know these now. Finding the special character chart is the only complaint I had from the original edition and not even the index helped me find it, so I had to tab the page. This has now been remedied with one of the best improvements of moving the special character reference chart to the appendix for speedy access. Other appendices in the book are listings of HTML tags, attributes, deprecated tags, proprietary tags, and CSS compatibility and support.

As your design skills and knowledge grow, there is always a question that prompts you to open the book and get your answer. It holds true today as I retire the worn out book with a loose page thanks to a certain child and happily replace it with its new younger sibling.

Highly recommended.

Title: Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Ed.
Author: Jennifer Niederst
Publisher: O’Reilly
ISBN: 1593270321
Date: October 2001
Format: Paperback
Pages: 640
Price: USD$29.95
CDN: 44.95
UK: 20.95

Draw your customers in with a handful of powerful copy. No, no, you don’t have to go to college to make it happen nor do you have to buy a doorstopper-sized book, which gets dusty before you muster the strength to crack it open.

Are you like me? A kid in a candy store when it comes to books? You buy every self-help or non-fiction book to bring in more business. One problem. When do we have the time to read them? This book simply won’t let that happen with its short chapters, personable style, and valuable information on how to keep visitors clicking until they make the buy. This book is the how. How to take all the theories and whys discussed by other authors and make it happen. I have trouble with theories because they don’t help me visualize the application of such theories. This book stays away from whys and shows you how.

Don’t believe me? When I started reading the book, several big projects got thrown my way leading to late night reading being replaced by late night working. Every now and then, I took a break and breezed through this book reading many pages in a brief time while gaining new knowledge and a refresher in creative writing as it applies to online copy.

Non-fiction is my thing when it comes to writing. Over time, I have forgotten creative techniques for adding spice to copy. The authors jolted memories of high school English classes where we learned about the different poetic styles (iambic pentameter, alliteration, meter, etc) and to avoid using passive verbs. Not only that, but also they cover how to write for different personalities.

Already getting high traffic to your site? Good for you! That means you know how to draw attention and interest. But, how are you doing in building desire so that they take action? Hmm… could that be the challenge? The authors drive toward long-term results by engaging your visitors and leading the way for them to get what they need and be satisfied with it.

I’m familiar with a few techniques discussed in the book, but many may not be. It depends on what you do with regard to the Web site. I understand making a Web site usable and getting visitors to the site. My Web site’s weakness is converting visitors into customers. Marketing pros may succeed with creating a desire, but have trouble with visitors taking action. The authors cover all the areas needed to persuade via the Internet from “notice me!” to “be happy with me!”

Are you thinking, “More technology! We need more technology to make this work?” We’ve taken technology for granted, but all it can do is what human programmers program it to do. Technology doesn’t know human nature. It doesn’t know how to feel or need something. People do and can convey what they know with words. Words make the sale. Technology ensures the words get their say (by quickly loading the Web page and functioning the way it should) and to push the sale through the back-end process (taking the order, managing inventory, etc.). This is where conversion principles apply. The authors share simple processes for improving conversion rates.

A splash page is the “introduction” page to a Web site. It’s flashy, colorful, and cool. But it’s a waste of time. It gets in the way of the core material. Customers don’t care how good your designers are, they care about what you can give them and that comes through words and good online copy. It’s time for the online world to get what print mastered many years ago. The authors’ witty writing style makes the book enjoyable to read without sacrificing wisdom. They practice what they preach and it’s no wonder that GrokDotCom.com, the site behind Future Now, Inc. is a success.

Time has come to let go of what’s in it for the company and think of what’s in it for the customer. In time, you shall reap the rewards at the bank.

VITAL STATISTICS:
TITLE: Persuasive Online Copywriting
AUTHOR: Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis
PUBLISHER: Wizard Academy Press
PUBLICATION DATE: September 2002
ISBN: 0971476993
FORMAT: Paperback
PAGES: 176
PRICE: US$18.00

Take out your designer’s scapel and prepare to give forms an extreme makeover without <tables>. Slight exaggeration, but adding a splash of color and changing the layout dramatically changes a room and the same concept applies to forms. The form code is also accessible. Note the <label for>, <id>, and <name> tags. See Quirksmode for an excellent explanation of name vs. id.

Read the tutorial.

Once, I attempted to create a favicon (the little graphic in the URL address box) for this Web site, but never did finish the work until now. I used a free program that allowed me to copy and paste an image to create an icon, but I believe it has spyware so I won’t share its name. There are many icon creators out there.

In Photoshop (or whatever drawing program you have), I created a 16×16 pixel workspace. Added what I wanted in the icon (never could come up with a logo for the site, so I stuck with the m), select all (CTRL+A), copy (CTRL+C), and pasted it into the suspicious program. There, I saved it as “favicon.ico” and uploaded the file to my server.

It won’t work yet. First, add a line to the <head> of the index page. Here’s the line to add using XHTML standard formatting (if you’re using HTML, leave off the / at the end of the line):

<link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”/images/favicon.ico” />

If you keep the ico file in the root, then use this instead:

<link rel=”Shortcut Icon” href=”favicon.ico” />

That’s it. The first time you try it, nothing might happen. Give it a little bit to take effect as that’s what happened with mine. You don’t have to specifically create a 16 x 16 pixel image to make it into an icon with the program.

Other sites with favicons for inspiration:

• Big Pink Cookie
• InformIT
• Lockergnome
• Webstandards.org
• Zeldman

Update: Photo Matt has a nice favicon tutorial in which he points out a free tool. I love his icon! Dang, why can’t I come up with something that fits meryl? -sigh-
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