I looks like Verisign’s plans to take over the web have been thwarted (at least temporarily) by ICANN. Since September 19th, if you made a typo while trying to connect to a website ending in .com or .net, you would be taken to a search page controlled by Verisign containing links to paid advertisements, rather than receiving an error message. While this may not seem like a big deal, many saw it as essentially the first step in plan to control all unregistered web space. It also caused all sorts of problems for the average internet user, who was confused...… →

Redesign in progress. When in doubt, reload. And let me know what you think; I’m going for a cleaner, more elegant look. … →

I am on a neverending quest to find an email client that doesn’t drive me bonkers. I spend at least half my work day dealing with email. This is by design. I am a support administrator for the faculty, and I prefer to work through email rather than on the phone. That way, I can prioritize requests; the phone ringing usurps this system, giving all calls the same (high) priority. Plus it drives me nuts. So. I need an email client that can handle the job. To me, this does not seem like too much to ask. What I require...… →

I finally got my hands on DWWS by Jeffrey Zeldman. We had to wait for both the state of California and HSU to get their budgets in order before we could do any ordering for this fiscal year. I am enjoying reading through it and seeing well-detailed, lucid explanations of the design strategies I take for granted. This is very timely, since the university is starting to re-think its approach to its web presence. I am hoping that they will heed the good advice offered in this book and by the designers within their institution. Who exactly they are has...… →

I am doing a lot of work behind the scenes, getting all the MT (Movable Type) templates styled. I will then move on to linking up the rest of the stuff in the sidebar, and building out some of the supporting pages for this site. I am having trouble getting this page to validate; I keep getting an error stating cannot generate system identifier for general entity “entry_id”. I need to do some research to figure out why the template markup isn’t validating. Any info on this from you old hats out there would be great. I am having fun...… →

Working for a governmental institution in the State of California (please don’t ask me about our future governor…), web accessibility has been on my mind of late. I am a member of our campus’ Web Accessibility Group, and we a charged with coming up with a plan to make our extensive, and frankly, poorly designed campus website accessible. This is a daunting task, to say the least. I bring this up because I am in the somewhat privelidged position of being a web designer with access to JAWS. I have the ability to test my sites in a lab on...… →