Hey! Don't throw away that, You Never Know when your Technology might need it

We see them everywhere, they are packed in some Snacks, like Beef Jerky, in New Shoes and in Electronics, and what do we do with them when we get them? We Throw them away!

Then , that day comes, you know that Fateful day when you drop your Smart Phone in a puddle, Little Jimmy or Jenny attempts to discover if the Tablet will Float, or you spill coffee on it over breakfast.  Te first thought being "CRAP! that's going to cost me hundreds to replace!

If you're lucky, you have some dry white rice that you can toss the device into in order to suck all the liquid out of it, and hopefully, pull it back from the brink of the Electronic Afterlife, until you realize… you finished off the Rice the night before making that dish for dinner.

you're at that point of "!@#$ What do I do now, my brand new [insert brand and item here] is DEAD!" until you stop for a second…"wait a tick, I planned specifically for this!" you say to yourself, running to the Tech box, where you pull out that reusable plastic deli meat container filled with the contents of that substance we used to always toss out, thats right THE SILICA PACK! 

Tossing the device in the bin, you pace back and forth for a day as those little beads wick the water away from all the sensitive areas of your device, you pull it out, you turn it on, you hear the familiar notes of your notification alert! Success, as you hold it to the sky, doing the Doctor Frankenstein "It's Alive" performance.

All because that little package got directed to a reusable cause instead of just being tossed in the trash.

Hackathon, or Giving back to the community through Sharing Tech Knowledge

So, in the past week I actually signed up to be part of something new for my local community, a event called PG (Prince George) Hacks, a Hackathon!  But what is a Hackathon anyway? 

To the majority of the world many view the idea of Hacking as the practice of cracking security to access information for nefarious purposes. In reality though this hackathon, actually is a place for Programmers, Database Designers, Web Developers and IT Specialists to take a day, gather together and create applications and processes which will help make the "world work a little better"

PG Hacks takes place on Oct. 19th and, is something I'm looking forward to participating in. more information can be found but looking up , on Twitter, #PGHACKS or bring up the following website

http://www.startupprincegeorge.ca/events/pg-hacks/

Prepping a Mobile Office and how a reliable tablet can help you showcase your business in the field

In this modern, connected world, the art of the Business meeting is being taken out of the traditional office environment and into more informal locations like Starbucks.  It's getting more prevalent to see people discussing projects over a coffee at the corner wi-fi shop with their portfolio open, pen and note pad at hand to take notes.

But what if there is something  on your Business' Website that would help with the discussion, what is the best solution for this situation.  the answer may very well be a  7-8 inch Tablet.  

Be it any of the Android devices, Blackberry's Playbook (Don't laugh too much, it was a major part of my return to Post-Secondary Education a couple years ago and still is a go to tablet on a daily basis to this very day) Apple's iPad mini or a Windows based offering. Having a Wi-Fi connected tablet at the ready allows you to quickly bring up specifically the information needed to win over your client and potentially land the deal.

Why do I suggest a 7-8 Inch tablet, instead of something in the 10-inch screen range? The answer is simply portability.  This size tablet can fit into most pockets on a zippered portfolio and be deployed quickly with the addition of a inexpensive stand for finding a good viewing angle.  Add in a recording device , like Voice Notes on the iPhone, making sure you have something like the Square Adaptor to take payment in the field and, depending on the device a small USB Drive (say 8GB's) to the standard weapons of a Pen, Notepad and easily accessible Business Cards to round out your portable office workspace, and you should be set.

Do All Businesses need Twitter?

Twitter is a wonderful service for Business, With ease a Business can quickly communicate to their Consumers promotions, special or upcoming events, all summed up in the space of about a text message.

But what if you have a business that is not formatted to benefiting from Special Events, and rarely has a product or service to offer via a promotion?

Take Inertial Zen Designs for example.  My company's primary business IS Web Design, the service is what is for sale, there is no physical Tee Shirts, Mouse Pads etc to sell. The office is a Home Based Office, so promoting on site events makes no real sense and if a promotion is done, outside of the free initial conference with a client, it usually consists of donating the creation of a Web Site to a good cause.

A business model like this can be well served with a Web Site, and even Facebook and Google Plus pages, where articles can be shared with explanations as to why the link is important. Twitter still remains an option Oh, and Inertial Zen Designs does in fact have a Twitter account

@inertialzen

Website Restoration, or "This Old Site"

You have been in business for some time, you even have a Website, but what do you do when that website starts to look a little old?  The first thought would be to actually start from the ground up and build a whole new Site. 

Consider the alternative , Website Restoration. Your Website, over the year has built a large collection of information that you  may not want to seen lost to your Consumer's access, with Website Restoration, that basic, general content is kept and reworked into a newly designed format thus giving your content a fresh, new coat of paint.

Besides the Consumer's surface being renewed, the Website, actually gets an overhaul on the back end as well, the results allowing for things like Flash Content to be replaced with Animated GIF files for logos, CSS replacing JavaScript roll over animations, pictures can be resized with optimized resolutions and Search Engine Optimization can be added in, all bringing a Website up to standards that will allow it to reach a larger audience.

Now ask yourself, do you want new or shall you renew This Old Site ?

Reworking existing code, or Oh What Fun rewrites can be.

As I got moving my personal website to a new server this week, I ran into a rather interesting task. You see I had HTML documents that had been coded back in 2001, long before HTML 5 and CSS 3 became the standards they are today.  

This, of course, means way more additional work in bringing the code of these pages up to modern levels, while at the same time maintaining the details of the original documents, and got me to thinking

Are there times where it makes more sense to start from scratch, or is a Website Restoration really the way to go?

And the answer is, of course, there are times where both options are viable and credible options. How someone decided on their path is of course factor driven, the biggest factor being that it may very well cost more to do a Website Restoration due to the fact that your Designer has to dive through existing code, deleting code that is not up to standards and replacing it with HTML 5 Standards. Other parts of code may very well have to be moved over to the being done on the CSS side of the coding instead of the HTML 5 side.

What are your thoughts on Website Restoration, Please leave comments below

Perfect Code...Until it hits the Server that is

So lets say you have recieved your finalized Website from your Designer, complete with the W3C Validation report for your final product verifying no errors in the code.

You upload the documents to a hosting server and publically announce the site's launch to the public when...wait! what is THAT?!!! A second Validation shows errors, and multiple ones at that!  Did your Designer miss something?

Turns out, the probable answer is a resounding NO! You see, there are many commercial servers that code things in their own way, they want their own annaliticis as to how their server is being accessed, so they plug in their own tracking code into a Design's HTML documents.

So how do you make sure your Designer is actually not the problem, and that there has indeed been additional code added to a Site's design?

try following these simple steps
1. Run the pages through the W3C Validator yourself prior to upload

2. Ask your Designer to key in a sign off that can be looked at in the document to show just where their work stops and add-on auto-generated code starts. this can be as simple as this example, coded just prior to the </html> line of a document

<!--codeded by David Peters, Inertial Zen Designs dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm-->

by coding in a digital signature in like this, which will not be visible on the displayed site's front end, your Designer is showing their pride in the work presented to your Company.