Web Design and Life

I’ve been using Crimson Editor for all my text editing needs for the past few years. I was overjoyed with joy with when I first found it after using plain Notepad for so long. This week I discovered Notepad++. They are very similar, but Notepad has a few new features I am digging in large quantities.

1. Multilanguage Syntax Highlighting - Notepad++ can load an html file, recognize that there is JavaScript and PHP mixed in there as well, and display it properly. Crimson Editor just looked at the file extension.
2. Code Folding - Little minus signs appear beside the lines numbers at the start of each block of code (functions, classes, loops, html tags, css rules). You can minimize blocks of code that you don’t want to see.
3. Brace Highlighting - Put your cursor beside a {, ), or ] and it highlights the correspondiong {, ), or ].

All these little features make it much easier to understand the structure of whatever I’m working on and track down errors caused by missing }.

One area it is tied for with CrimsonEditor is price, ’cause it’s free too. Go get it

The first week I was back, all my pages were in the SERPS. Now I’m down to just my index page. It is still getting hits from Google, but obviosuly my traffic is down since the inner pages aren’t getting found.

The Problem

I’ve heard all kinds of crazy reasons for Google doing this kind of thing. The two I’m looking at right now are:

• Not enough unique content per page
• No deep inbound links

The Solution

• I’ve taken all the Adsense off the site. The ads shared a lot of code. I thought Google skipped that stuff when it was parsing, but maybe it doesn’t.
• Later this summer I will create and distribute some free Zen Cart templates, each with a link to a different part of my website in the footer.

This blog was never indexed by Google or Yahoo, though MSN is getting every post. Must keep writing!

This little bugger wandered onto the deck last week. He took a nap, ignored humans shoving nuts in his face, and then wandered off between the slats of a fence.

Then he came back to our yard and went through another fence, never to be seen again. Go squirrel go!

The new interface is up! Now it is a map and directory combined. I’ve got addresses, websites, and rules for all the public skateparks around Toronto. I’ve taken down the private ones for now, I need to mail the owners and make sure I have it all right. I probably should give the pages some design work before I do that though.

Either that, or I’m putting up a photo gallery so users can post pictures of the parks, or them riding the parks. It would be pretty cool if I could get a community going.

I just found the Zen Cart template section on TemplateMonster. Check these out

HUGE deviation from the stock layout. Links like ‘New Products’ and ‘Specials’ are much more visible. Giant product images on the front will help suck customers into the catalog. The center boxes like ‘Related Products’ aren’t even recognizable. Most of them move the categories up the page. They’ve integrated almost all the features well - language and currency selectors are things I usually just leave in their side boxes, yet some of these integrate them into the header.

They’re all too busy for my liking though. However, they still go to show anything is possible with Zen Cart.