Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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WordPress is User-Friendly
My friend Richard Novossiltzeff is assembling his family history on a new WordPress site. He’s having great fun sorting through the documents that have been sitting in boxes for decades, scanning them and getting them online for posterity. He’s finding WordPress to be really user-friendly. But he had a bit of trouble installing it manually.…
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SPAM ALERT: “Domain Notification – This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing”
Watch out for this email spam that looks like a domain registration! It comes from “Domain Services” and the subject line is “Domain Notification – This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing” – and then your domain name in capital letters. Inside is this alarming-looking message: Note: It looks urgent. It looks official. However,…
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SEO Trends
Gone are the days when you can put your desired keywords in a meta keyword tag and expect them to work with the search engines. Google especially doesn’t look at meta keyword tags, preferring to analyze the text on the page itself to determine what the page is about. It goes back to the days…
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How much will it cost to build a website for my vacation rental home or cottage?
The quick answer? Maybe you don’t really need one. Why is a web designer telling you that? Shouldn’t I be trolling for your business? Not at the expense of selling you something you may not need. I love building vacation home websites. It’s almost as much fun as taking a vacation. However, the cost of…
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Spam and E-mail encoding
Any time you publish your e-mail address online, you risk getting spam as a result. You can’t prevent people from manually copying down your e-mail address. But that’s not how you usually end up on spammers’ lists. Spammers acquire huge lists of e-mail addresses that have been automatically “harvested” by bots, automatic programs that surf…
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Nova Scotia – Come to life
On September 16th, HolmPage Productions became a Charter Member of the Nova Scotia – Come to life Initiative, in a signing ceremony with Premier Darrell Dexter. Come to life is an effort to bring together Nova Scotian businesses and organizations to promote our beautiful province in a positive and unified way. Not that anyone is…
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Register your domain and host your website with two different companies.
Suppose you register your domain with one company and host your site with the same business. What happens if the company disappears? Even the big ones can fail. It actually happened with one of the larger registrars a few years ago, leaving many people and businesses severely inconvenienced. Their websites had disappeared, and they could…
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Flashy isn’t always best. Keep it simple.
(UPDATED IN 2017) In 2010, I redesigned two websites for companies selling office furniture and supplies. The previous versions of the websites made extensive use of Flash and JavaScript. Some of their biggest customers (e.g. government offices) operated behind a security wall that banned JavaScript, and workers could not use the site or see any…
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