These are my links for April 25th through April 29th:
Archive for April, 2009
[Preface: I seem to have a constant need to engage in a conversation with my favorite blogging Realtor Keith Byrd. Keith, I hope you know I love your blog that's why I read it. The fact that I disagree with you consistently and need to provide a counter point has nothing to do with your skill as a Realtor or a blogger.]
With Keith’s latest post on Cal Poly’s instruction to have students drag a Realtor through a buying process as a “learn by doing” experience, I’ve found myself wondering about his conclusion: Is this learn by deceiving? I think it is. However, I also think it’s fair turn around. We are now experiencing one of the worst economic down turns due to the fact that multiple professionals did not throw up a red flag during the housing boom. Instead of doing their due diligence as Realtors and advising their clients that while a home is definitely a great investment, it might not be the best investment for them if they have to take a sub prime mortgage. Isn’t that also a deception? Is it fair turn around for students to now use Realtors to learn about a buying process? I’ve never been a fan of the “eye for an eye” as it usually leaves everyone blind, but I have a hard time staying quiet when the Realtor could attone for their misdeeds by helping out a college student.
We’re destined to make the same mistakes over and over unless we learn from them. Be the bigger man (or woman) and help the college students out. Just know they are probably not in the market to buy a home but help them anyway. This is your chance to stand up and be the bigger person.
To the students of whichever class this is for: Be honest. Tell the Realtor what you’re trying to do and hope they are an upstanding human being as well and will help you through the process. Win win for everyone.
These are my links for April 21st through April 24th:
A rant posted on what a few of us have been thinking in our heads for a long time now. Piracy seems like the only answer for what seems like a horrendous problem: How do we pay money for quality content?
Keith Byrd brought up an interesting point around the party that’s been going around Facebook. If a Cal Poly student initiated it and a radio station is doing the music who’s responsible for the cleanup and moderation of the party? The Cal Poly Student? The Radio Station? I’d like to suggest that number one it’s the job of the police to serve the community and whether we throw a party or not it’s their job to help moderate it. We, the citizens, pay their salaries through taxes and it’s their job to protect and serve us.
On the ground of clean up, I would hope that the community would clean up the beach afterwords. And if not, I’ll go down and help out.
Who’s ultimately responsible? I’m not entirely sure… I’d contend that you (Keith Byrd) and myself (Jesse Bilsten) are now also to blame because we’ve help spread the word on the party. What I’m really curious about is why do we have to blame someone for this event before it has even happened? I believe it’s this line of thinking that has brought an end to both Poly Royal and Mardi Gras. Can’t we just have fun and be responsible? And if something does get out of hand, would it be too much to ask for the police to do their job and take care of it? We don’t have to cancel fun activities just because they’re difficult to manage and clean up after. I’m willing to get my hands dirty and clean up after everyone if it means we get to have more fun events in this community and help drive tourists to the economy.
Imagine how great it would be for the Shell Beach economy to have all the hotels full and tourists purchasing food. I think it’s worth it from an economic stand point and I think our local police officers can more than handle the situation. We have an awesome police force, let’s let them do their job and keep the peace. Instead of looking for blame and trying to shut down these great events that help drive our small economy.
That’s my 2 cents.
These are my links for April 17th through April 21st:
After looking around the internet for a while I finally came across these 3 solutions. Since Blackberry doesn’t have jQuery (we currently use an older version of mootools) and I needed a quick fix I ended up going with the behavior option. However, users need to have their internet security settings on “medium-low” for IE 6 to render it properly. It’s not the perfect solution but then I suppose there really isn’t one for IE 6. I tried writing a solution within mootools for the problem but in the 5 minutes I spent on it, I noticed it would have overlapped other form elements and I wasn’t going to spend extra time messing with z-index.
- jQuery Select Dropdown Cut Off Solution
- Behavior based Select Dropdown Cut Off Solution
- Doug Boude inline javascript solution
Here’s my quick mock up code for mootools if anyone is curious:
for(var i=0;i< $$('select').length;i++) {
$$('select')[i].addEvent('mouseenter', function () {
this.setProperty('rel',this.getStyle('width'));
this.setStyle('width','auto');
});
$$('select')[i].addEvent('mouseleave', function () {
this.setStyle('width',this.getProperty('rel'));
});
}And here was the behavior solution:
<!--[if IE]>
<mce :style type="text/css">< !
select {
behavior:expression(window.dropdown_menu_hack!=null?window.dropdown_menu_hack(this):0);
}
-->
<script src="dropdown_menu_hack.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>
< ![endif]-->
</mce>Brilliant article on fluid image layout by Ethan. The technique allows for images to resize as the window resizes. Similar fluid techniques have been around for content layout but nothing for images. Most solutions required maintenance by the author to resize posted images to fit the column/row width/height restrictions of their website. This was restrictive for both readers and authors where as a fluid image layout would help large images look good at high as well as low resolution.
The first step is taken by using the css property max-width. Setting it to 100% allows the image to resize with the browser in standards compliant browsers (i.e. not IE). See Ethan’s test case for fluid images here.
I’ve been meaning to clean up and do a fluid style design for my blog for a while now. This in combination with Ethan’s other fluid grid design article over at a list apart might be enough to get me started.
These are my links for April 14th through April 16th:
Business Insider reported that internet advertising is still rising. Not just rising but rising faster than any other medium in history no less. What does this mean for me? It means I need to get to work on revamping my blog and adding a custom template with all the goodies. Then add ads. I want my cut of the pie gosh darn it. I will admit that I’m normally not one to ask for any kind of interaction from users. Let alone asking them to click on ads. But in this economy and as a business man I can’t help but get involved. Should you as well? Drop me an email or post in the comments. It will depend on your business and obviously your website. At the very least you should be leveraging online advertising to drive traffic to your website. Whether you can actually make money from the other side (serving ads) is entirely dependant on your business model.
Internet Advertising Dollars