This morning a co-worker received a “virus warning” email in her inbox. After reading the email the individual decided that the email warning seemed legitimate enough and decided to pass along the information. Instead of passing it to her I.T. department to get the information validated she decided to email it to all of the employee’s in the company via a private corporate employee list.

Every now and then a user needs to edit the partitions on their hard drive. This could be to make room for a new operating system or to expand the 130GB partition that Microsoft Windows XP (Pre SP1) forced them to setup. Normally at that point users have two options for repartitioning their hard drives. These options are to format and reinstall their existing operating system with new drive partitions or pay the $69.95 for a copy of Norton Partition magic to resize the existing partitions on the drive. Now thanks to open source and Linux we are presented with a much nicer, and cheaper, solution.

In the last entry we learned how to put a CSS style sheet into a web document, today we will look at the structure of CSS file and how it relates too the HTML file. A CSS Style sheet can have three different types of style blocks in it’s contents. There is a HTML tag block, an ID block and a class block. All of these blocks are identified in different manners in the style sheet.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a method of adding or changing styles on web based documents. CSS allows web designers to change the way a page element is displayed in the browser. This can be as simple as changing the font, colors or even the spacing around the element. Due to this CSS is extremely powerful and can be a great addition to any web designers arsenal.

Earlier today David A Utter, author for WebProNews, posted a article about American Express Guide Calling SEOs A “Waste”. The article quotes two eBook PDF’s from AMEX’s OPEN book program that are targeted at small business owners. One of the PDF quotes clearly states:

“Finally, don’t waste money on so-called Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques…”

This quote seems like American Express is telling small business owners that all SEO specialists are just tricking search engine filters and causing sites to get banned.

Almost every web designer out there at some point during their designing has run into problems with cross browser compatibility problems. These problems are caused by web browsers such as Internet Explorer and FireFox going into “quirks mode” when displaying the website. Quirks mode is the browsers code compatibility mode that it uses to interpret and try to fix problems in the website HTML code. For a web design quirks mode does more harm then good. There is a solution to keep web browsers out of quirks mode when displaying web sites.

Anyone who has worked on computers has inevitably heard the sound of a hard drive “clunking”. Those who have heard it know that it is the undeniable sound of the hard drive getting ready to die. More often then not this sound comes just after the point in the hard drives lifetime where Windows stops letting you read and write data to the drive. At this point your heart starts to pound and you rack your brain for the answer to the only question that matters at this point.. When did I last backup my data? Not to worry though, there is most likely a way to recover at least some of your data from the hard drive using Linux’s dd command.

So I have been using the internet for over 15 years and have never had a personal web site. Now all the sudden I decide to start one. Well while getting frustrated during the setup and config of the site I pondered the following question. Why am I doing this? Really who is to blame? Then the answer came to me, there is someone to blame.