Word of the Month: SPLOST III Referendum

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As I dropped my daughter off at school this morning, I couldn’t help but notice the marquee out front.  Check it out to the right.

“WORD OF THE MONTH: SPLOST III REFERENDUM”

Now, I can understand why the school is pushing SPLOST.  It’s a proposed 1% tax to help give more money to the local schools.  But is that really their “word of the month”?

In case they had mistakenly forgotten to remove the top line from the marquee or something, I checked the other side and it was exactly the same, so it seems to be intentional.  I had expected the word of the month to be something like “respect” or “freedom”, but I guess I’ll be helping my five-year-old with “SPLOST III REFERENDUM”.

That’s pretty dumb.

Pitiful email from East Cobb Pediatrics

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This was pretty sad.  I got an e-mail today from “[email protected]”, with the subject line simply “Flu Vaccines”.  Here is the complete body of the e-mail:

Flu season is coming and we wanted to let you know that we have flu shots and FluMist available now.  FluMist is indicated for healthy individuals 2-49 years of age. We will offer parents of our patients FluMist this year.  Please let us know when you schedule your childs appointment if you are interested.  It is not recommended for people with asthma.  Flu shots are indicated for individuals 6 months and older.  Please call or send us an appointment request through our website to schedule your appointment.  Thank you and we look forward to seeing you at your next visit.

Please log into your account, go to the My Patient Page, choose My Preferences, and select No Communication to opt out of future commnuications.

If you do not wish to receive this kind of communication from East Cobb Pediatrics, you can choose to opt out of it by logging in here (was linked) to change your preferences.

I thought it was missing some very key pieces.  To start, I had no idea who it was from until I saw the opt-out info at the bottom.  I’ve certainly never heard of “medfusion.net” before.  Also, it mentions that we should “call us or send us an appointment request through our website…”, but doesn’t provide the phone number or website URL.  Granted, I can look those up if I need them, but that’s just silly not to include them.

I thought it might be helpful to suggest some changes for future e-mails.  I hit “reply” and sent them a short message with some thoughts.  It bounced right back.  Apparently “[email protected]” is just a dead address.

We’re big fans on ECP.  They take great care of our kids and they do a nice job.  They just might want to work on their e-mail skills.

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Very cool 3D navigation product released

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A cool looking 3D navigation program called Navi2Go from 3DVU has just been released.  It uses real world imagery and terrain and puts it in the palm of your hand as a GPS navigation device.  It’s got the look and feel of Google Earth, with the usefulness of a TomTom.

Of course, the usefulness of a device like this is how well it routes, re-routes, and simply gets you from point A to point B.  I haven’t seen a real review of the device yet, so that remains to be seen.

As of now, it’s available on a wide variety of Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry devices, with iPhone support “coming soon”.

More information can be found at GISuser or on 3DVU.com.

Firefox 3 alpha 2 released

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It’s a great time to be a web user — the new browser wars are meaning more great features for all of us!  Firefox has been hard at work on version 3.1 for a while now, and they’ve just released the second alpha

version of 3.1.  So what does it bring to the table?

 

  • The “video element” of HTML 5, which allows for some cool use of video on a site (manipulate with JavaScript, translucent draggable videos, etc) without using Flash.
  • Web worker threads, that allow complex JavaScript to run in the background and not disrupt the speed of the page you’re on.
  • The highly-touted new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine isn’t yet ready, so it’s not enabled in this release.
  • Dragging tabs between windows no longer results in a page refresh.
The next few months will be interesting for Firefox and Chrome.  Most of these new features (other than the video element) are things that need to catch up to Chrome.  On the flip side, Chomes next big release will likely have a lot of features to try to catch up to Firefox (plug-ins, for one).  By the time they both catch up with each other, we should be looking at two amazing browsers!

Chrome now listed as a browser type in Google Analytics

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As of today, Google Analytics is now showing “Chrome” as a browser type in Google Analytics.  Visits from Chrome users over the last few days will be retroactively updated to show their use of Chrome over the next few days.

We’re showing Chrome usage at over 10% on this blog for the last three days, but webmaster/SEO blogs would certainly be skewed a bit high for something like that.  It’ll be very interesting to see what the numbers look like in a few weeks.

What percent of visitors on your

 blog are using Chrome?

Add your church site search to your Chrome home page

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One of the most talked about features of Google Chrome is the rather innovative home page.  It shows your nine most often viewed sites, along with some goodies along the sidebar.  The sidebar can include quick-search boxes for sites you often search.  As often as I’m searching our church site, I thought it’d be great to have it listed there but I couldn’t make it show up.  After a bit of tweaking, I got it to work.  Here’s what I did.

First, it’ll help if you have a true on-site search of some kind. From what I can tell, there’s no way to add search boxes if you use the Google custom search on your site.  If you find a way around that, let us know.

As for our site, it only took a couple of very small changes:

  • The search needs to produce a GET request, not a POST request.  The difference is that a GET request will put your search term in the URL, which is critical to make this work.
  • You may need to change your search string variable. I noticed that most sites use “s=whatever” when you search, so I changed ours to that to help Chrome easily figure out what we were doing.
  • That’s it!
As for getting it onto the sidebar, here is the two-step process that tends to work.  Try it with our church site if you want.
  1. Perform a search on the site, just like you normally would.
  2. After that Google should recognize that it’s a search and give you a new shortcut.  Start typing the URL of the site in the address bar at the top (“M-T-B-E-T…”).
  3. After a few letters, a small bit of text should appear on the side that says “Press [tab] to search mtbethel.org”.  Go ahead and press [tab] and search for something.
  4. Done!
You should now have a quick-search box for our site on your Chrome start page.  There’s no way to manually remove it, but it will go away by itself after a while.  There seems to be a limit of three search boxes on your page, so if you have three already you may need to repeat step #3 (the [tab] search) a few times to encourage Chrome to replace one of the other ones.
That’s it!  Chome even uses your favicon to dress it up, and they look very nice.  If you have any questions or problems, please let us know in the comments below.

Banzai Wild Waves Water Park is apparently a huge rip-off

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The picture to the right says it all.  The consumerist has a post today showing the actual size of the product vs. the image shown on the box.  I know that all of those things are exaggerated a little bit, but this is crazy!

We buy these kinds of things from time to time, but this is one that we’ll certainly avoid.

Google finally adds some data for Georgia

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Google got hammered a few weeks ago when people realized that their data for Georgia was essentially blank, making it difficult for people to see the areas affected by their conflict with Russia.  As promised, Google has started adding some nice data to the region.

In addition to city labels, they have a whole bunch of photos for the region, which really help to give you a good feel for what the area is like.  They promise to continue adding more data as it’s available.

Chrome is now available!

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Google’s new web browser, Chrome, is now available to download.  You can read our previous information about the browser, which explain some of the new features.

I’ve only been using it for a few minutes, but I can sum it up in one word: fast.  This thing flies!  I’m sure some glitches and/or shortcomings will emerge, but so far, so good.  Go get it!

How will “Chrome” affect your church site?

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As you may have heard, Google is releasing a new browser tomorrow called Chrome.  Based on what’s been revealed so far, it should be excellent

, though we won’t know for sure until we get our hands on it.  If nothing else, it’s expected to be very fast and very stable, which are the two main jobs of any decent browser.

But what about us webmasters?  Will we have to start worrying about another browser when building our sites?  Not really.  The great news about Chrome is that it’s built on top of Webkit, which also powers Opera (and a few others).  This means that the basic rendering engine is one that you’ve probably already checked your site against, so it’s nothing new.

Keep an eye on my SEO site

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tomorrow to see when Chrome is available for download.  If you have a Windows machine, it’ll certainly be worth trying, even if it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Update: It’s available!  You can download Chrome here.