Rackspace = Fantastic!

I though I'd write a few words about a company that makes me glad I'm in the web design business. Rackspace has been a truly extrordinary company to work with. The quality of their service has been outstanding. Every time I speak to someone there they are happy, up beat, knowledgable-- or have ready access to a person who knows the answers. While the quality of the ingredients (hardware, bandwith, etc.) is top of the line, what stands out is the quality and availability of the people.

That isn't to say that they have a team of all-knowing Internet gods on staff 24-7. I have been able to stump them a few times. (To be fair, these stumper questions were about email management software. Something that was not part of their offering and really doesn't pertain to hosting directly.)

I think the best part of their servce has been their complete willingness to either walk me through operations I was not familiar with or just take over the process and fix things to my specifications. Rackspace is the kind of company that stands for quality in the true meaning of the word and I'm very pleased to be doing business with them.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of image use on websites

Text Origins
For a long time the World Wide Web was composed primarily of text. HTML tags provided some basic formatting for paragraphs and relative font sizing. This first version of HTML was created by scientists and was not meant for exacting page layout.

The Rise
As the WWW started gaining popularity, more geeks (and I use the term endearingly) started to play with HTML. As a former scientist I can vouch for the fact that most of these guys don't have the greatest sense of esthetics. So as they started to get "creative" with design, the choices that were made could be called… questionable. This is how we ended up with cloud backgrounds, rainbow bars and animated GIFs of dancing cartoon animals.

The Fall
When the Internet started gaining popularity and widespread use in the mid 1990s, images were still rare and often of low quality. Digital cameras were just becoming available at low resolutions. File size was a real concern for web developers as 14.4 modems were the standard of the day. The first real web designers were faced with primitive tools and HTML was being pushed to its limits. Bandwidth restrictions made quality images a practical impossibility.

Of course this didn't stop people from using images. "Traditional" graphic designers created sites that relied heavily on images to get around the shortcomings of HTML. By using images, designers had complete control over typography and layout. The result was a slide show of still images. While these sites captured the designer's vision, they were very slow to load and were completely unusable to web surfers with accessibility needs (blind, etc.). There was also the gigantic repercussion these sites were almost completely invisible to search engines. Long load times and poor search engine performance has made this practice very rare.

The Rise
Once broadband Internet access began to permeate the market, giant images didn't seem like such a bad idea. Even video streams have become practical and expected over the Internet. While still largely invisible to search engines, image over use was no longer the bandwidth hog it had been. This has give rise to online photo services and photo sharing networks. This type of data exchange was unthinkable in 2000.

The Fall
Now, with the wide adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) there is finally a chance to format page layout without resorting to images. CSS doesn't provide the level of font control most designers want but we are closer than ever before. Pages can be formatted rather beautifully using only CSS techniques. By adding just a few well chosen images and CSS layout techniques, an entire site can be given an esthetically appealing design with code alone.
As a web developer, I've spent many years mocking up designs in Photoshop and then translating those concepts into web pages. Often many key images would be sliced-out of these PSD files and incorporated into the HTML layout. Now with CSS, many of the things which had to be created with images (navigation rollovers for example) can be created with a few well chosen lines of CSS. While CSS isn't perfect, it has re-prioritized the way I approach design. I find myself looking to build as much of a layout as possible using CSS. It's amazing to see how much more you can accomplish (from a design perspective) building a website with just code than you could a few years ago.

I know the arrival of CSS is old news, but it recently struck me that the adoption of CSS has fundamentally changed the way we approach web layout. CSS has become so practical and well documented (including the hacks) that web layout is in the hands of programmers just as much as it is in the hands of web designers.

Noise in the Generational Technocracy Gap

I'm becoming more and more aware that degree of familiarity people have with technology (and by extension the ease with which they adopt it) has less to do with age or generation. It seems that the young and "techno savvy" people who are all about the very latest handheld devices are at a total loss when it comes to functions on a computer (PC or Mac). Also, there seem to be a number of "older" folks who manage to get through the latest gadgets and computer issues with graceful ease, thus defying the adage of the retiree that can't program a VCR.

So what does techno-savvy-ness correlate to if not generational exposure to technology? It's a mixture of logic and experience. Of course you see many bright people struggling to comprehend the basic operations of a cell phone-- but that's hardly surprising. I suppose the situation just strikes me as odd. It seems that more often it's the retirees that are out-pacing the kids at understanding and manipulating technology. Sure the kids know how to make their phones do neat things an how to play video games... but it's the people who were in the technological trenches-- the dark days of the DOS Prompt-- that understand what's going on inside the box, and how to fix it.

Tools and Software

I've been thinking about this for a while and the blogging format seems like a decent way to communicate this type of information. There are a number of software tools out there that make Internet life easier. Here are a few of the indispensable tools and practices.

1- Get rid of Norton System Works and AntiVirus:
A decade ago, Norton was indispensable, now it is a complete burden on your system that creates more problems than it solves and generally mucks up and slows down the operations of your computer.

2- Turn on Windows Firewall:
By this time, if you're a Windows user, you should be running WinXP. Use the native firewall. It's quite good and keeps life easy. For your frequent Internet access points (home and work) you should have a hardware firewall installed. This is far more secure and frees up system resources.

3- Keep your Anti-Virus software up to date:
If affordability is king, try AVG's Free Edition. It's been rated quite well, is frequently updated, and has all the features you could want including email scanning. - It's free so you don't have an excuse anymore.

4- Get Cloudmark:
While this isn't a free solution the Cloudmark Desktop is the best defense against SPAM that I've discovered. The software uses a common set of spam profiles submitted by other Cloudmark users. The only way a piece of email can be labeled as spam is if it has already been flagged as spam by other users. So if you're in the situation like myself where you rely on email for new business, you don't have to worry about email leads being flagged as spam. Only mass-delivered email will ever be flagged. This software is worth every penny!