It’s sweeter than candy!  I just finished a new mod for LJScript exchanges which I call the ‘buffs mod’.  If you’ve ever played an MMORPG, then you’ll know what a buff is, but if you haven’t they are basically a spell, item, or similar object that will increase a particular stat in the game.

The buffs mod offers similar rewards while surfing.  These rewards affect the duration of the surf timer, the surf rates for credits, banner impressions, and text ad impressions, and a special buff that allows a user to ‘possibly’ receive random referrals for the rest of the day.

Buffs are fully configurable from within the admin area, where you can set how often they show up, just how much the buff effects, and how long it lasts for.

Users can recieve instant buffs which become immediately active, or collected buffs which they can save and use later for when they want to get their powersurf on.

Buffs disappear when a user logs out/logs back in, so if they leave they will lose any buffs they currently have.

The mod comes with 6 buffs ready to go, and others can be programmed in to work with any unique features your website may have.

It is my hope that this mod will increase the activity at your website as well as the quality of your traffic, but it can only do that if I can install it.  I’m offering this mod for $60 + $15 for any additional buffs you’d like programmed into it.  It can be made to work with any feature so long as you have an idea for how you’d like the buff to work.

You may see a demo of this mod in action by surfing at my LJScript sandbox.

Purchase the buff mod today!

A new generation of traffic exchanges was launched last week, called Thumbvu from a long term veteran John Guanzon, which allows you to surf sites you’d like to see based on a thumbnailed screenshot of the website.

Thumbvu also takes a leading position in merging social media with traffic exchanges, integrating Facebook, Twitter, and even Youtube into an exchange. This leaves Thumbvu with a lot of room to grow.

This is a new breed of exchange that this industry has been waiting for. So today, I finally got a chance to try it out and surf a few sites and I must say it is an excellent concept. But I see a lot of the members falling into the same old website promoting rut that they’ve used for the past ten years. I see rotators and splash pages galore.

It’s too early to tell whether splash pages will be effective in Thumbvu, but I’m inclined to think not. What people want, in this type of exchange, is content. There is a very old saying online, and I’m sorry for such a horrible cliche, but ‘content is king.’ In this case you are using a social media platform to promote your business, and nothing would work better in Thumbvu than a purely kickass website.

This site uses a fairly large thumbnail, but it is still only a small window into what you are promoting and you must use it as effectively as possible. Since the thumbnail is a screenshot of the website you are promoting, you must have a decent offering and a splash of style.

Splash pages aside, the main problem I’m seeing here is rotators. Rotators will not work for this site, period. End of story. Your results will be significantly less for a rotator than with a static website.

I see so many thumbnails with the tag at the bottom saying rotator, and that’s an immediate turnoff. Do I want to take a girl on a blind date? Why hell, I don’t even know her name. Who’s gonna answer that door when I go clicking.

In older exchanges, it didn’t really matter. Every click was a blind date, but now we have options, and there are two other girls to choose from. I even know their names, they’re written at the bottom.

Rotators fail on Thumbvu because the website you are clicking to see is probably not the site you will find.

There are three things I would recommend right off the bat for promoting in any traffic exchange, Thumbvu included.

• A good concept website

  This could be as simple as your blog. In fact, put your blog in there. Do that. If you don’t have a blog, then what are you doing? It’s 2010 now. At the very least a decent offering would be social media profiles like your twitter page, your facebook profile, and anything that promotes you, your business, or your website long term.

• A hook

  You want to provide something users will be interested in, so if your site is a photography site with lots of pictures, you’d want to promote your most interesting pictures. In this way, other surfers would be inclined to view more of your gallery. In the case of a blog, promote your most interesting posts and thoughts. You need a hook to grab them with.

• A good design on said website

  This will be key when surfers are provided the thumbnail options. You want that thumbnail to stand out as much as possible to get more hits. So it’s important, absolutely important, that your thumbnail provide the bait for your hook.

Thumbvu is the new gen and long waited for, and I congratulate John on what I expect to be a successful website, but I hope he can overcome many of the old habits of traffic exchanges to bring Thumbvu to it’s fullest potential. My advice, John, would be to ban rotators immediately. When it comes to Thumbvu, they will only hurt you and the people who are using them.

Tim Linden of StartXchange wrote today about Traffic Exchange owners who aren’t complying with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Article: The Big Bad List

This law, in a nutshell, was signed by President Bush in 2003, sets forth requirements for businesses sending commercial email, and did absolutely nothing to reduce the amount of SPAM sent over the internet. It states that “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose)” must have the following.

1. An unsubscribe link, that works, in all emails sent
2. Requests to unsubscribe from a list are honored within 10 days
3. Opt-out lists are only used for complying with the law (and not sold to someone else so they can add them to their list)

Tim listed 20 traffic exchanges that sent him emails without an unusbscribe mechanism in place to comply with the CAN-SPAM act, most of which are LJScript exchanges. In order to opt out of an LJScript you would typically need to delete your account. The script itself does not supply an easily usable link to simply unsubscribe/delete the account.

Until now.

I’ve recieved two inquiries in the past couple weeks about a mod that would do this, and after reading Tim’s post I decided to push it out quickly. The Easy Unsubscribe mod is ready for use by LJScript exchanges. It will cost $25 and could be installed in a matter of minutes.

The mod allows users to click a link, which will be in each email sent out by the Admin, and unsubscribe. At the page, they will be asked for their password for security purposes. After they provide the password they click unsubscribe and their account is deleted.

Update Tim informs me that asking for a password isn’t CAN-SPAM compliant either, and while not as secure, the mod is updated so it will request their email address instead.

Nearly 8 Million Downloads on the counter. Those are the unofficial results so far from Mozilla as people around the world downloaded the newest release of their browser – Firefox 3.

There were a few blunders. As I pointed out yesterday and CNN later reported, the traffic to Mozilla’s download sites was so intense that it took down their servers for approximately 2 hours at the beginning of the release as 9,000 copies a minute were downloaded. After 5 hours they had delivered as many copies of Firefox 3 as Firefox 2 got in the entire first day of it’s launch – 1.6 million.

Article: Firefox fans celebrate release of new browser

When the sites did become available it was difficult to tell where to download the new release as the pages still prominently displayed Firefox 2, with a link to Firefox 3’s release candidates. So I, as well as many others, downloaded the latest release candidate – RC3.

But aside from the technical fumbles the day went brilliantly. A good show of marketing might on Mozilla’s part. Now Mozilla’s webpages are updated, proudly showcasing their newest work – Firefox 3.

For those who mistakenly downloaded RC3 before the page was updated do not fear, as apparently RC3 was re-released as Firefox 3, and hopefully Mozilla will include downloads of that as part of their numbers in the final attempt at the world record.

Article: Firefox 3 Identical to RC3

8 Million Downloads! Good job, Mozilla.

It is officially Download Day for Mozilla Firefox 3, your chance to help set a world record for most software downloads in a single day by downloading Mozilla’s Firefox 3 official release.

Or it would be your chance, if it didn’t appear as though Mozilla’s websites are down. I’m attempting to upgrade my browser, but have yet to get either GetFirefox.com or SpreadFirefox.com to load. Meanwhile, Mozilla.com/ appears to be working but it is slow and does not seem to be updated as of yet.

Today is Firefox Download Day, but Mozilla’s servers appear to be taking the beating of a lifetime so be forewarned it could take you a bit to get through to a download site.

Good luck, Mozilla, apparently the internet is with you!

I wrote about Download Day a little over a week ago and now the folks at Mozilla have recieved 1 Million pledges to support their attempt at a record number of downloads that will correspond with the general release of Firefox 3.

This is 1 fifth of their goal to get 5 million downloads on Download Day. Considering that some of the pledges own more than one computer, and figuring in for future pledges as well as downloads not pledged, it may be entirely plausible that Mozilla will reach their goal.

If you have not yet pledged to download Firefox 3 on Download Day then please consider doing so.

Edit: Firefox Download Day is scheduled for Tuesday, June 17th.

If you have looked on any site about design in the past couple years you will hear the cries from the purists who shout ‘Tables are Evil. Do not use tables for design! Everything must be in positioned divs.‘

This, however, is not entirely true. Ok, it’s not true at all. Tables are great. They have uses. The only proof I need for this is that tables as of HTML 5.0 are not deprecated. Well, not entirely deprecated.

The deal is this. In web design the common practice is to put your design in a table. It’s easy, simple, and gets the job done. A common two column site would look like this.

<table width=”770″ height=”100%” cellpadding=5 cellspacing=0 bgcolor=”#FFF”>
<tr>
<td colspan=2><h1>My site’s name</h1></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width=”140″>
<br><a href=”LINK”>Link Text</a><!– the rest of this is the side column
</td>
<td width=”*”>
<p>This is my content. I talk here and put my ad copy and stuff here.
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Now, there are a few things wrong with that code right off the bat without it even being a table.

1. There is, and never has been, a height attribute for a table. If I’m wrong and once upon a time there was a height attribute for tables it has been long gone ages ago. Internet explorer will parse it as if there were, but any HTML compliant browser will say ‘uh, what are you doing?‘. You simply can’t put height in a table.
2. While on the subject of the height attribute, it has been deprecated for all tags that did at one time support it. So no matter what, anywhere, in any design it is now considered bad form to put a height attribute in the tag. You are supposed to put it in the CSS.
3. The same applies to the width. Tables did at one time support width but this is deprecated now. It works fine, as any designer will tell you. Deprecation simply means you are no longer supposed to do it. That goes for the width attribute in the TD tag as well as in the TABLE.
4. If this is an XHTML document the 2 in the colspan must be in quotation marks (“). It won’t be compliant without them.
5. Cellspacing, Cellpadding, and Bgcolor all all deprecated. The idea behind all this deprecation is that you are now supposed to use CSS to do the bulk of your designing. They all work fine, as browsers are meant to be backwards compatible, but if you are looking to maintain standards then don’t use them.

Those all aside, this table, as a whole, is deprecated. Not the tags, the tags are fine. It’s using tables to layout your website that is deprecated. In the defining for HTML 5.0 there is a note.

HTML RFC

we need some editorial text on how layout tables are bad practice and non-conforming

W3, the organisation that developes and maintains the HTML standards, has adopted DIV tags as the standard for marking up a website. Why? Standards, accessibility, and above all else – Design. It’s what the div was created for.

The proper use for DIV is a block element designed for containing elements. According the the HTML 5.0 RFC.

The div element represents nothing at all. It can be used with the class, lang/xml:lang, and title attributes to mark up semantics common to a group of consecutive elements.

Basically, DIV does what a table cell used to do. By use of CSS it can be positioned where it is meant to be and because it is free of a table’s framing it can be easily repositioned and placed elsewhere, changed, or removed.

However the freedom of a DIV, unfortunately, also leaves the it open for massive abuse. Many designers have replaced masses of nested TABLES wit
h masses of nested DIVs. Bad design is not changed simply by using a different tag.

The overall skope of this though is that TABLE is not to be used for laying out content in a website. That isn’t the table’s purpose. There are other uses for tables and I want you to know that you don’t have to be afraid to use a TABLE. The only thing you need to know is when to use it.

Purists will cry ‘do not use tables,’ and so many fledgling designers will take this and run with it to the point that the meaning is lost. If you hear someone say that, they’re wrong. The correct saying that you will hear experienced designers say is more simple, accurate, and to the point.

Tables are used for tabular data.

It’s that simple. The hard part is figuring out what tabular data is. Do I use a table for this, or that? To determine this you have to ask youself what data you are printing and how that data is to be represented. For instance, a list of people would be best placed in a list.

• SuperMan
• SpiderMan
• BatMan

<ul>
<li>SuperMan</li>
<li>SpiderMan</li>
<li>BatMan</li>
</ul>

But what about a list with corresponding data? That, ultimately, would be best for a table.

<table style=”border: 1px #000 solid; padding: 1px;”>
<tr style=”text-align: center; font-weight: bold;”>
<td>Superhero</td>
<td>Powers</td>
<tr style=”text-align: center; font-weight: normal;”>
<td style=”border: 1px #AAA dashed; padding: 2px;”>Superman</td>
<td style=”border: 1px #AAA dashed; padding: 2px;”>X-Ray Vision, Flight, Super Strength</td>
</tr>
<tr style=”text-align: center; font-weight: normal;”>
<td style=”border: 1px #AAA dashed; padding: 2px;”>SpiderMan</td>
<td style=”border: 1px #AAA dashed; padding: 2px;”>Shoots Webs, Climbs Walls, Can sense danger.</td>
</tr>
<tr style=”text-align: center; font-weight: normal;”>
<td style=”border: 1px #AAA dashed; padding: 2px;”>BatMan</td>
<td style=”border: 1px #AAA dashed; padding: 2px;”>Awesome gadgets, super rich, has a butler</td>
</tr>
</table>

The same holds true for something like a calendar. The HTML code for the calendar here at Foponet is in a table. A calendar is clearly tabular data. Always.

Now for the reason I write this post. Antonio Lupetti of Woork wrote recently about how to layout a form using CSS rather than tables. In his post he stated he usually used tables for this but some readers of his blog wanted to know how to use CSS.

Article: Clean and pure CSS FORM design

Now, I have to hand it to Antonio, his code for the CSS Form is clean and beautiful. Its a real piece of art, and I recommend you check it out, but forms are also tabular data. You can use them there without fear, although I might take a note from Woork and try out a CSS version is some designs.

A table is basically a box with rows and columns. The general rule is this. If your data is a row then use a block element like a P (paragraph) or a BLOCKQUOTE (blockquote). If your data is a column then use a list like UL or OL. But if you’re trying to lay out data in a way that resembles a table – with rows and columns – then use a table. Just don’t use a table to layout your entire site. It’s bad form.

Google, like the link is even necessary, has apparently changed their favicon suddenly and shockingly, and it’s a rather interesting look into the power of branding.

A favicon is a 16×16 pixel image saved in a special icon format with the extension .ico. When uploaded to a site, typically the main directory, it will be shown in browser address bars and tabs and becomes a brandable mark for that site. Typically a company would use their logo, or part of it, to reinforce the logo brand such as what Google has done. For ages, Google’s favicon has been nearly as iconic as their logo. The trademark uppercase G from their logo with a colored border.

As Ionut Alex Chitu notes on the GoogleSystem Blog (not affiliated with Google):

Google’s new favicon is less cheerful and comforting, but it makes a lot of sense: the small g is a symbol for infinity (∞). A googol (10¹⁰⁰) is just a poor approximation for the huge amount of information that needs to be indexed, organized and made useful by Google.

Will this hurt Google? No, probably not.

In fact it will probably be some great publicity for a time as people sit up and take notice, writing blog posts such as this one to reinforce the Google brand. It goes to show that there is a power to branding beyond the subliminal reinforcement. When you’re as big as Google, you can mess with it, and by doing so you tug on that reinforcement of the brand and get into peoples heads – as well as getting some great, cheap advertising out of the deal.

Yes, when you are as big as Google you can nonchalantly mess with people’s heads. That is the power of a good brand.

Just don’t make the mistake Coca Cola did and change your formula. That, definately, is a recipe for disaster.

Update: Google has finally posted a public message about their new favicon on their official Blog. The includes a nice sampling of the designs they considered for the new favicon as well as an allusion to Dr. Suess.

Article:One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Technorati Tags: Google, Favicon, Marketing, Branding

The good folks at Mozilla have set their sights, as well as their sites, on Guiness and their book of world records to attempt to achieve the record for most downloads in 24 hours.

So far, just over 128,000 people have pledged to download Firefox 3 on Download Day, which is yet to be announced but will undoubtedly coincide with the release of the Firefox 3 stable version.

According to the FAQ, download day should be in June, but a definate date is not set. As soon as Firefox 3 is generally released download day will begin. There currently is no set record number, as this is the first attempt at a software download record, but Mozilla’s goal is 5 Million downloads, a whole 3.4 Million more than Firefox 2.

You can take part in Download Day by pledging to download Firefox 3 on the Spread Firefox website.

Edit: Firefox Download Day is scheduled for Tuesday, June 17th.

I have a new mod available that will clean up some of the tables in LJScript’s admin control panel for users, user sites, site reports, contact requests, banner rotator, and text rotator and allow you to sort these lists by their fields. This mod is only available for LJScript exchanges.

Before	After

This mod is available for sale for $50. Check out the mods page for details.