Why Wait Webs

Today, many people are simply reserved to the idea of receiving anywhere from 20 to 1000 spam email messages every day. Some deal with it by filtering their email to stop spam, but in my experience they will also lose at least some of their actual email as a result of this, even with the best filters. Others have simply given in, and spend a half hour or more every single day just hitting that delete button to get rid of their spam emails.

While it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get your email address off of these spam lists once you are on them, you can stop email spam for the most part by being careful with your email address from the beginning. If you have a new email address or an address that receives very little Spam, following these guidelines will help you keep it that way:

• Don’t make purchases from companies you do not trust. - Many companies build their lists by purchasing emails from other companies who have sold something to that individual.
• Stay far away from websites that offer free iPads or other up-scale electronics in exchange for your email address, recruitment, or signing up for offers. They are not always scams (although that often is the case), but they do make their money by selling your email address. This is the single fastest way to get signed up to literally hundreds of spam lists. If you absolutely must participate in one of these, I highly advise using a secondary or “throw-away” email address.
• Avoid signing up for free email newsletters, unless you are genuinely interested in the content. Some will tempt you with a free offer, and there is nothing wrong with that if you are interested, but sometimes they can be difficult to get back off.
• Do not list your email on any website. Ideally, use a web form, so that no one can find your email address from the site. But if you feel it is necessary to include an actual email address, you should use one separate from your normal work and use an image instead of text so that spam robots will not pick it up as quickly. I speak more on the details of this in How to Publish Your Email Address.

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Making video games is a lot of peoples’ dreams nowadays, and there is certainly something to be said for looking at an interactive, moving game and thinking, “I made that!” While I don’t enjoy the process of writing video games as much as I do website design and other graphic design, the final result is very rewarding. If you have ever thought about getting into video game creation, Flash is a great way to get started! The workflow is shorter than some other mediums, and you can post your work on the Internet for virtually anyone to see.

Practically everything I know about video game development, and many of my other skills, came from tutorials over at CartoonSmart. I can say from first-hand experience that these are absolutely fantastic tutorials that will have you cranking out great content in no time! So, if you want to get into video game creation, what better time than now? Click away to some of the best game-making tutorials out there.

If you have any comments about CartoonSmart, or want to share any other resources you have found to be helpful, feel free to post a comment!

Why Wait Webs indexed on first page of Google thanks to having search-engine friendly content.

We have all seen websites, books, and seminars dedicated to one of today’s hottest topics: search-engine optimization. There is a lot of information out there, a lot of it helpful, and a lot of it completely bogus or largely fluff. If you are new to the subject of SEO, the plethora of information available about writing content for search engines can be quite daunting.

Fortunately when it comes right down to it, one of the most consistent, tried and true methods of search engine optimization is simply writing search-engine friendly content, which is something anyone can do if they follow a couple very simple techniques. By the end of this short article, you should be able to write search-engine friendly content that will allow your website to get indexed by Google and the other search engines much more effectively.

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WebKit, the rendering engine that has brought CSS3's explicit animation to the web for the first time!

Today we as web designers and developers get a rare chance to look into the future. The latest nightly build of Webkit (the rendering engine for browsers Apple Safari and Google Chrome) includes some new support for CSS3. Specifically, explicit animations using CSS. Up until now, developers have either had to rely on Flash and all its drawbacks, or bite the bullet and write out a long piece of JavaScript just to get a box to slide in elegantly. JQuery alleviated the problem somewhat, but nothing compares to the visual approach of writing a CSS document.

CSS animation will enable developers to spend much less time on animation which, to the end user, may seem trivial. And it will do so with cleaner, simpler, more robust code that will load significantly faster and run smoother for the end user. Read on to see a preview of how it works, and when you can expect to be able to use this on an actual web page.

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I don’t like Internet Explorer. I don’t think I’ve made that any secret. One of the reasons for that is that there are many instances where fully valid code won’t render properly in IE6 — many more instances than is the case with other browsers.

IE6 Showing its True Malevolent Self

Today I found the strangest and most terrible bug I’ve ever encountered. In Internet Explorer 6, my main content was completely invisible. Images and text alike were simply gone! The container DIV was stretched out as it would be if the content were there, and the text was selectable! If I highlighted the text, in fact, I was able to see it, even after de-selecting it. On a page refresh however, my content would simply disappear again, only to reappear when highlighted.

I consider this the most terrible bug ever because in most cases, a bug will rearrange your website, or make it look ugly, but users will still be able to access the content. The content is the reason for the site’s existence, and with this disappearing content bug, users of Internet Explorer 6 will not see your content unless they think to highlight it (and in that particular demographic, I’m willing to bet the odds of that are pretty low). Thus your entire site is rendered unusable and pointless. So read on for the fix!

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