If you are interested in designing accessible web sites, you might find these bookmarklets helpful. They use Bobby to check your browser’s current page for accessibility issues.

Just click on the link(s) that you’re interested in and drag it to your bookmarks or links toolbar and it should be added automatically. I’ve tested these with NN4/Win, IE5/Win and Mozilla – they should work in all three. Please let me know if something doesn’t seem to work correctly or if you test them on a different OS/browser combination.

• Bobby WAI-A Test
• Bobby WAI-AA Test
• Bobby WAI-AAA Test
• Bobby Section 508 Test

This is a really useful bookmarklet that I just found. It’s called Highlight word. Just follow the directions on the page for how to add it to your browser.

What does it do? Highlight a word in a web page, and then click that bookmark, and dictionary.com automatically opens up to the definition of that word. Very handy.

A webzine known as Chasing Hats. According to its mission statement:

We seek to return to wonder at God’s creation like children, and to lead others through our writing.

A worthwhile goal, to say the least. I haven’t read any of its articles yet, but the premise sounds interesting and promising. It’s been bookmarked.

I like getting e-mail about my college tradition sites, be it fight songs, rivalries, or whatever. That being said, I got way too much spam in the old lyrics@1122productions.com e-mail address, and I also had some spam sent to my main e-mail account as well. Since I have the power to control e-mail addresses on our server, I figured enough was enough. Besides, all the tradition sites needed a common e-mail address to send stuff to, anyway. So I eliminated the lyrics@1122productions.com address (hopefully sending a bunch of spambots some boomerang “account does not exist” e-mails for a while) and replaced it with a different one. Score one for the good guys.

To the robots who are programmed to swipe my e-mail address from everywhere on the net:

I do not want software to spy on other people. I already have two legitamite degrees of my own that I earned, and am going to go for a third. I don’t care about your weight-loss system. I have all the inkjet cartridges I need. I don’t smoke as it is, so I don’t need to quit.

I have no need for a “no down payment” mortgage. My credit card payments are just fine, thank you. Your investment plans do not interest me. I don’t care about making $1200 a week in your little “no-risk moneymaker.” I’m sure everyone else is a winner too.

I don’t need anything enlarged. I don’t need medication of any kind, and definitely not the kind you’re peddling. Your “celebrity” pictures are doctored, and I don’t care anyway. I don’t want to see you on a webcam doing anything, much less what you claim you’ll be doing.

If you have more than three letters in a row on your e-mail address that don’t make up part of a name, you’re deleted. If you have more than 5 numbers in a row on your e-mail address, you’re deleted. If you sent anything to my Yahoo! account, you’re immediately deleted, because I don’t use it for anything but a throwaway e-mail address anyway. If you send me mail from a Hotmail account and aren’t in my address book, you’re deleted.

In short, go away.

For quite a while now, I’ve been thinking of redesigning my site. It’s had the same form now for at least a year, and it’s time for a new look.

The problem is, for inspiration I’m looking around at the sites that I tend to frequent, and all of them seem to have similar structure and layout. I’m wanting something different, but since I’m not actually a designer, I’m at a bit of an impasse.

So I’ll keep working at it. Who knows? Maybe I’ll figure something out eventually. Maybe then, I can truly call myself a web designer. 🙂

It seems that Joe Burns will be quitting his web site as of the end of this year. Well, big deal, one might say.

It’s just that Joe Burns is the founder of HTML Goodies, which is probably one of the most well-known HTML starter sites on the web. It also has tutorials on many other Web topics. His web site was my second stop in learning how to code HTML (the first was the NCSA HTML Primer at the University of Illinois, which was the guide back in 1996, when I first started). He’s been working on HTML Goodies for eight years, which is pretty much an eternity in Web time. (Actually, it almost spans web time.) Oh, during that time, Dr. Burns has been a professor of communication at two universities.

His site isn’t going anywhere; it will still be there for anyone who’s new to the web, or anyone who forgets what that tag is that sets off a long quote from the rest of the text.

This may be one of the coolest sites I’ve ever managed to learn about. And it doesn’t even give you any new content.

Nope, it gives you old content. The Internet Wayback Machine shows you what most any site looked like on days in the past, from 1996 to the present! For an example, here’s my page as it looked on March 15, 1997, pre-1122productions.com, pre-pressing on…, and when the fight song site was still unheard of. I kind of cringe when I look at it now…frames! Noooo!

It’s official. It’s time for a new computer.

I never thought that I would see the day that I would fill up an 8GB hard drive. When I got the computer I currently have (a little over three years ago) I wondered what it would take for me to fill up that much space.

Now that the system is dual-boot, with Linux taking half the space, it’s a tough fit. My C drive is full except for about 20MB. And that’s after cleanup. My other partition has a little more space, but it’s still a pretty tight squeeze.

I’ve decided that if I get a signing bonus wherever I go to work, I’m going to take some of it and get a nice system. Then I’m going to take the one I currently own and convert it to a full-time Linux machine.

But of course, I have to get the job first…why must so many things hinge on having a job? 🙂