I've helped a local company do their web site over the years.  They have come to me several times with 'great ideas' for their web site.  From 'nice' blinking text to hiding text at the bottom of the page to 'fool Google'. 

When they come to me with these idea's I fill them in on why that is either a bad practice or a downright bad idea. 

And this isn't just this client that I've had these kinds of conversations with.  Most highly respect my technical skills and accept my answer.  Sometimes they listen to my reasons and decide differently.  In the end they are the boss. I've only had one client that seems to constantly override my thoughts, frustrating for sure. 

But this local company came to me with another 'great idea' and I again told them why it was bad.  So they decided to go with somebody else.  Honestly, kind of relieved.  But I wait for the day that they face some of the consequences of not having somebody willing to tell them no.  When Google's spider realizes the hidden text and drops them from their index.

So I guess the bottom line is, feel free to tell a client no.  But realize they are the boss!  And if it is in your power, and them telling you no just frustrates you to no end... drop them as a client.  Having them make you design a bad site or application isn't worth your reputation.

We are on the verge of two more browsers being released, IE8 and FF 3.  I've tested FF3 (as it was very easy to install without screwing up my current configurations), and have read up on IE8.  Both are aiming to be standards complient, FF 3 currently passes the Acid test, and IE 8 is reported to pass it.

Now here is the issue, IE 8 is not standard by default, you have to add a meta tag to your website saying it is compliant.  The thought is that they didn't want the web broken by the new browser.  

So here is my call to all developers... break the stinking web.  When you develop a site, make it 100% compliant to the standards and let the users stuck on old software deal with it.  We need to stop having to create hacks to work with the various versions of web browsers.

When I started out many years ago working in ASP I used GoLive; which my coworkers and I had two bits of fun with:
1. Had this saying: Be like Jesus, save often.
2. Called it GoDead due to its many crashes.

But GoLive was not standard compliant at all.  Now that I do my development in Visual Studio I make sure that all my sites are standard compliant.  So they should render perfectly in the new browsers.

But for those of you who develop websites, I repeat my plea: BREAK THE WEB. 

I do a fair amount of image creation for my church web site.  So I was happy to learn about CreativeMYK.com and repository of royalty free images for church audiences.  It is a new site so it should have more to offer over time in way of images and in features (currently searching is painful)

Credit to: Joel Young

Now as an addition I also use two other sites for my sources:

www.sxc.hu - A site with user submitted images.  Licensing varies but most images are free to use.  Their search feature is pretty good.

www.creativecommons.org - This is a search site that links a few sites together and you can check a box that will limit your search to royalty free images only.  Nice way to find good photos.

I've always wanted to find a pure CSS drop down menu, but never could find one that worked on the major three browsers (Firefox, IE 7, IE 6).  Until now!  CSS play has a purely CSS menu that I've confirmed to work on those three browsers. 

It is real slick and works without JavaScript. 

You can see it in use on my churches web site.

As my previous post alluded to, my blog has had an issue with FeedBurner.  Basically their site is not updating my feed when my scheduled post become visible. 

Matt Shobe (yep, co-founder of FeedBurner) told me that my If-Modified-Since header was inaccurate, and a potential cause of the issue.  So I went on searching for a way to test this header on my Windows XP box.  Couldn't find one, so I emailed Matt and asked him if he could point me in the right direction.

He said you could use Linux (don't have a version installed) or I could possibly use Cygwin.  And I can!  So I grabbed the latest version and looked through all the packages and found two that had curl in them (in the Net component).  Let Cygwin install then ran this line in the command line that appears when you launch Cygwin:
curl -H 'If-Modified-Since: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 05:59:00 -800' -IL http://www.ckurl.com/lifeblog/myfeed.axd (don't go to it, it isn't valid)

And sure enough my BlogEngine had a bug in it.  I've since fixed the bug and hope it resolves the issue.  We will find out in the morning as my LifeBlog has a post scheduled for six in the morning.

I am blown away that FeedBurner is as helpful as it is when it comes to support.  Thanks Matt!  Because regardless of whether or not this bug is the cause of my FeedBurner issue, it was a bug and now the BE platform is better since it is fixed.

Read today that Microsoft is fixing the dreaded 'click to activate' issue in IE.  It was made a problem due to a lawsuit, but apparently they have fixed it because in December a patch will be available and in April it will be release via Windows Update. 

The great thing about this fix is that it won't break the JavaScript fix that is out there!  Finally something done right from Microsoft.  Now if they'd fix that IE6 bug with DHTML menus and drop down boxes....