Christian Ziebarth

Archive for February 2009

jQuery Reveal and Hide

In Uncategorized on February 19, 2009 at 12:51 pm

Here’s a little jQuery trick I have implemented on my Orange County Mexican Restaurants blog. I have found that many visitors don’t know about the labels that are at the bottom of most of my blog entries, which, if clicked, will lead them to more information on the subject(s) they are reading about. Another problem is that often Google doesn’t send them to the best page on my site for the search terms they used.

For instance, often people will search on “Mexican restaurants at Disneyland” and they will be sent (for some odd reason; Google, fix your algorithm) to my entry on the chimichanga carts there. Now, I have way more information on Mexican food and restaurants at Disneyland than just that one entry and I even included linkage for it, but at this stage of the Internet game people don’t seem to recognize and utilize text links anymore.

What I have done then is to create the following graphic:

Complete Mexican Food at Disneyland Coverage

And include it in each individual Disneyland-related entry on my blog and link it to the Disneyland label (http://ocmexfood.blogspot.com/search/label/disneyland).

However, once they click through to that label they don’t need to see that linked graphic anymore so I turn it off using the following jQuery code (label URL abbreviated for presentation here): Read the rest of this entry »

Good Old-fashioned Books

In Uncategorized on February 11, 2009 at 7:22 pm

With the unfortunate brushfires that have occurred in Victoria, Australia, the big Aussie-based web development website SitePoint (see blogroll here for direct link) is raising funds for victims of the disaster by selling five of their books for $29.95 USD and donating ALL of the proceeds. If you’re any kind of web developer and you have any kind of heart and human compassion in you it’s hard to not help out with this effort. I have just placed my own order for five of these books.

The main reason I’m mentioning this here is in the hopes that other people that could use web dev books might also want to take advantage of this offer and increase the amount of help that is offered to those who were affected by these historically bad wildfires.

This made me think that even in this Internet age I actually do purchase AND read web development books. Of course I’m looking at a darn computer screen much of the day but I don’t like to read big blocks of text off of a computer monitor and sometimes I learn things from books that I wouldn’t learn from online tutorials

And here are many of the web development books I own myself:

DSCF6158 Read the rest of this entry »

Tables vs. Tables

In Uncategorized on February 3, 2009 at 6:34 pm

You’ve heard of Spy vs. Spy and Kramer vs. Kramer and Godzilla vs. Rodan. But have you ever heard of Tables vs. Tables?

I am surprised that in 2009 there are still people in the web development world who don’t understand the proper use of HTML tables.

With the economy the way it is I have a trickle of freelance web development work but still need to land a full time gig. I contact many companies about jobs they have posted but rarely get any sort of response. A few days ago I actually received a response from one company that may shed some light on what other, non-responding companies could be thinking. After this company checked my resume online they wrote back and said:

We cannot accept you as a developer because we found a TABLE tag in your markup on your page at: tccnotary.com

Read the rest of this entry »