Kimler Adventure Pages (http://randsco.com)

We have a "new" twitter update status tool for our blog. See how it works (will be followed-up with a detailed discussion of how we made it, modified the JavaScript that comes with the Twitter API and some other nifty tricks we added). Some assembly required.

Twitter This, Twitter That

When the blue bird chirps, we've Tweet'd w/in the past hour.

It seems that the whole world is a-flutter, over little blue birds (which are the universal symbol for "Twitter", a increasingly popular "micro-blogging" service). Twitter is used to make 140-character comments about what you're doing. You can even embed photos, videos and links - to be rendered in-place, by browser add-on applications. Use it to keep in touch with "friends", for time-delayed "conversations", social networking, staying on top of important (and not-so important) breaking news, popular topics, wasting your employers time or digging deeper into research: trends, keywords, news and other things.

We started tweeting early this year and I finally got around to customizing a "twitter status update", which you'll find in our "Site Tools" section of our blog sidebar. It's a bit different than most Twitter status updates I've seen and here's how it works:

Twitter Status Message: When you hover over the twitter status "bird", you'll see our latest "tweet". Here's an example. When you click, our last 5 "tweets" will pop-up in a list and include a link to "follow Randsco" on Twitter.

IF you see the blue-bird a-singing (animated musical notes), it means that we've "tweeted" within the last hour or so. Hovering over this little blue twitter bird will reveal a stylish pop-up containing our latest "tweet" (140-char story-line of "what we're doing right now"). It's a great way to see what we're up to, see how witty we can be and we think it's a nice add-on (a mini-blog, if you will).

If you CLICK the blue-bird, whether he's singing or not, you'll get a pop-up list of our last 5 tweets. Each tweet may - or may not - contain links to web-pages or our fellow twitter friends, with whom we're "conversing". Follow the links to learn more. At the bottom of the 5-tweet list is a CSS-rollover link that invites you to "follow us" on twitter. It even degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled. We think it's pretty cool.

Coming Soon: A Twitter-torial covering "How to add a Twitter status update to your own blog", which will include detail about using the Twitter API, modifying the JavaScript, make a Twitter status list pop-up and some of the other cool stuff involved in making our own twitter status update tool.

Sometimes we include a list of "additional information" links at the end of our articles. Generally, they've been styled on the fly, but we thought it was high time to spend a bit of attention on this detail. The resulting CSS-styled ordered list looks nice, includes a block hover effect, a "visited" status indicator and is XHTML/CSS valid. We thought people might like to use it on their website, so included a tutorial and ZIP file.

Adding Pizazz to an Ordered List

Ordered List: Advice on getting things done around the house ... in a simple ordered list.

A lot of online articles include, at the end of the article, a list of "additional resources" - or links - for further reading and research. Several Randsco articles have such a list, but styling them is generally an afterthought, because most of the energy goes into the article itself.

Ideally, additional information links would be contained in an ordered list. It's semantically correct and allows visitors to reference a particular link by number. Unfortunately, we don't always follow our own advice and some of these links are held in simple paragraphs which may, or may not, be numbered.

We thought it was about time that we come up with a proper "additional information" list. By melding together some existing design ideas and adding our own CSS touches, we have constructed an ordered list that not only looks nice, but also includes a number of other features: a hip CSS roll-over effect; compatibility with fixed-width or liquid layouts; toggle-able ":visited" link status images; pure CSS (no JavaScript, AJAX or jQuery); and it's cross-browser friendly.

Have a look at the demo page and read on to get the ZIP file, learn about the design, look at the code and see the live example.

Styling an Ordered List

Randsco is "published" in a French textbook, a Florida reader sent Scott a Penn State baseball hat and Oklahoma's Red Dirt Emporium donated generously to Randsco. (Hmmm ... maybe it's time I find a way to say "thanks" to everyone that's helped Randsco ... here's a start)

Some Recent Kudos

October has been another milestone month for Randsco.com. In addition to setting new records for visitation and Google AdSense revenue, there have been a number of other, off-site developments.

Two of those arrived by mail. First, we received a hard-back book. Randsco.com is now "published"! (One of our online photos was used in the book). Second, just yesterday, Scott received a surprise package. (No, it wasn't a bomb ... it was a Penn State baseball cap! We surmise that it's a "thank you" for the Geographically Challenged article, since it arrived without a note).

The other recent event was an generous, unsolicited donation - (donations of any kind, are a rare event) - by a company in Oklahoma, for the use of the Photo-caption Zoom technique.

Over the years, we've received a variety of unsolicited, creative "thank you's" for helping with HTML code, PHP scripts and/or our CSS techniques. Two that come to mind are a hand-made Afghan rug, which we received from a U.S. Army helicopter pilot stationed in Afghanistan and the other, an Opera CD sent by a Dane, living in Spain, who's wife is a singer.

We've had it on our "to-do" list to add a section that says "thanks" for all the people that have donated, contributed or helped Randsco.com in a meaningful way. This post is a way of biting the bullet and just "starting", though it will take some time to construct something more finalized and formal.

To find out more about our plans for "thank you's" and the story behind the book, the hat and the Oklahoma PZ3 donation ... carry on

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Article updated with new information from the W3C - July 2009

I've advocated for XHTML and CSS, thinking it was the future of the web. I'm no longer convinced of this. We've decided to go back to well-formed tag soup XHTML after realizing the price for serving the "application/xhtml+xml" MIME type wasn't worth the cost. Find out why

Back to XHTML v1.0 Strict and text/html
In other words: "Well-formed Tag Soup"

Since late 2005, we've been serving our pages as XHTML v1.1, using the application/xhtml+xml MIME type for those browsers - notably FireFox, Opera & Safari - that understand it. (To do this, we used server-side scripting to set the MIME type in the header. For more about the technique, read this 2005 article - "Are You Serving XHTML with the Wrong MIME Type?")

XHTML v1.1 has only negligible coding changes from XHTML v1.0 strict. However, unlike XHTML v1.0, its supposed to be served as an XML document (hence the MIME type). So what? Well, serving XML-based web documents (XHTML v1.1 as application/xhtml+xml) comes at a huge price and we're tired of paying it (and our readers are too - *cough* most notably ¥åßßå).

Originally, we viewed XHTML v1.0 as predecessor of HTML, since it was standard-based and eliminated the problems of proprietary tags and sloppy coding. We blindly migrated to XHTML v1.1, thinking we were further future-proofing our pages. HA!

The future direction of the web (XHTML and HTML) is muddled. Consider: HTML isn't being phased out; developers of browsers such as FireFox, Opera and Safari are lobbying for (and developing) HTML 5; the W3C has renewed the HTML working group; and the Chief Technical Officer of Opera says, "I don't think XHTML is a realistic option for the masses. HTML 5 is it." [sources]

To find out what price our readers will no longer have to pay, and more about XHTML v2.0 and HTML 5 ... read on

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We've been running Google AdSense Adverts (shown only to search engine visitors) for nearly a year and a half. Revenue has increased, over time. We figured we'd take another stab at increasing our stake, so we revamped our adverts, their placement, how they show and focused Google ad bots onto more relevant text. Learn more about our Google AdSense Advertising Empire! (lol)

Randsco Revamps Google Advertising

Google AdSense: Ah, the joys of monetizing the blog with Google Ads! A "watched pot" comes to mind.

Back in February, we talked a bit about the history of Randsco and how it's become a calling card for web development work. We also talked about monetizing the blog and on our philosophy about Google Ads. The revenue from these context-related advertisements has been modest, but it has grown, as Randsco readership has increased.

Google Ads were added in June 2007 as "a test". We've been pleased with the results from these - relatively unobtrusive - ads and as a consequence, thought it time to revisit our Google Ad strategy. We're hoping to catch more paid clicks.

New Google Ad Strategy in a Nutshell

We've increased the number of Google Ad blocks to four three & a video Google Adsense Rules LOL ... four turned out to be a violation of the AdSense "Terms of Service" agreement (you can have, at most, 3 ad blocks on a single HTML page). So ... we've replaced the 4th ad block (bottom of the page, 728x90 banner), with a YouTube video block. (Might be entertaining ... or not.) Click the link (or in this box if it comes up over the link) to see the Google AdSense Rules , instead of one ad block. As before, we're only showing them to visitors who land on Randsco from a search engine (Google, AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) We don't want to shove advertising at "loyal" readers - anyone landing here by typing "randsco.com" into a browser address bar, bookmarking us as a "favorite", or linking in from a non-search-engine link. Originally, we only showed Google Ads to search engine visitors on their landing page, but we've now expanded that to every page they click through to see. We've also pointed the Google Ad bot to only look at the body text of each article (and comment text), which - in theory - will yield more relevant ads.

To learn about Ad revenue growth, Google Ad tactics and the specifics of the Randsco Google Ad policy changes ... read on ...

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