Emil Stenstr?m is a computer science student writing about web development. He has written a very good article explaining dynamic css.

Don’t know what dynamic css is?, Well read on

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Here?s something for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)

A new startup called Amie Street that may have found the right way to help people discover and market price music from new or little known bands.

Artists can upload their music to Amie Street for promotion and sale. Users form social networks with friends, listen to, and purchase music. All songs are DRM-free in MP3. Songs appear to be at 192kpbs quality level, although it may just be whatever the artist uploads.

All songs are free to start. Prices fluctuate over time based on demand for the song.

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Wired News has an article on new powerful infrared cameras to read license plates.

You knew it had to happen sooner or later. First the police in several cities started using these devices, some of which can read sixty license plates per second, for finding stolen cars and make windfall profits from ticket scofflaws.

You have to know it’s only a matter of (probably short) time before all of the companies that are already collecting too much information onyou pick up on this and have these readers installed everywhere and link them to their already massive databases of what used to be your personal information.

I really hate to see this happen, but I guess there’s no stopping it now and there’s no end in sight. Can’t we get any good privacy laws?

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This website contains a large collection of quick reference materials ranging from HTML and CSS to Python and Perl. All of the links are up to date and all of the cheatsheets are free to download.

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There is quite a good discussion going on at the Search Engine Watch forum about what exactly makes a competitive keyword.

It is something I was wondering myself and there are many good arguments on several different sides of this discussion. I think it goes to show that keyword bidding and optimization can be a very difficult challenge and I don’t think there is any one correct answer. If you are bidding on keywords what really matters is that you need to effectively track the activity to be sure that whatever you are spending is worth it and that you are getting a good return on your investment (ROI).

If you are optimizing your site for keywords I’m not sure it matters how many other sites or pages are out there, what matters is whether you are at or near the top.

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I have been advising my customers for quite a while now that for processing credit cards on the web PayPal is just as good of an option as any other real time credit card processing option.

A couple of years ago a site using PayPal for payment options was seen as amateurish, someone running an Ebay business from their basement. That is no longer true and PayPal is just as big a player as any bank. Now along comes Google and their Google Checkout service and the question to be asked is which one should you use?

Ebay is trying to protect their cash cow and will not allow Google Checkout to be used on their site. Elsa Wenzel has written a good comparison of the two on c/net reviews. They are really two different kinds of services and you should read this before deciding, but one thing I’m sure of is that the competition will be good for everyone.

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Here?s something for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)

What sounds worse to you: fingernails dragged across a chalkboard or the incessant honking of a broken car alarm? It is this kind of distinction that Professor Trevor Cox of Manchester’s Salford University is studying with his BadVibes site, which solicits votes from the public in “the hunt for the worst sound in the world.”

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My RSS feed has not been working for several days now. The RSS2 feed wasn’t affected. It seems that you can’t use an ampersand in your posts. I pasted one in a link to another site and my feed froze at that point. I just replaced it with the word “and” and just like magic it’s back.

What have I learned from this?

1) I found out that you can’t have an ampersand because of the ampersand commands (there is an ampersand command for an ampersand which will look to the reader like an ampersand)

2) And most importantly. Just because your write a blog it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to read it. Make sure that you subscribe to all of your blogs just to make sure that they work (test, test, test)

Computer World has an interesting story at the moment on what the hot skills are expected to be four years down the track. Predictably, technical skills are seen as being less important than business and soft-skills.

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Paul Knapp editor of brainbox.com.au says pretty much the opposite. “In almost every successful IT project I’ve ever been involved with it’s been a nuts-and-bolts techie that’s had the most important impact. More often than not, the “business skills” types were more hindrance than help. Many times their superiority and arrogance led to project failure.”

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I’m thinking both are pretty important.
If you don’t know the technical side of your business you will have to trust others who may or may not know what to to. Either way you won’t know what is right, maybe right until the bitter end.
On the other hand if you have the best ideas and all the skills necessary to get them functioning properly, no one will ever hear about it if you don’t market your ideas well. Again you’re looking at a slow painful death.

In the end both sides need to work well together. The ones that do will succeed and the others will just keep on arguing about who is more important.

A free 10-week “AJAX Programming” online course is about to start from August 4th, 2006. This course is for anyone who wants to learn AJAX for the first time or increase their knowledge on AJAX. In this 10-week course, students learn basic concept of AJAX as well as how to use various AJAX frameworks and toolkits and it’s really free.

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