Debra D's Blog

Grading Your Website

It’s the end of the school year — the perfect time to grade your website. Today I tried the free analysis tool, Website Grader, to see how well Contextures would do.

It’s easy to do — just fill in the website address and your email, then click the Generate Report button. There’s also an option to enter the website address for competitor sites, so you can compare your results with theirs. I picked a couple of other Excel sites, so I could see where Contextures stood in comparison.

A couple of minutes later, the results were shown, and Contextures scored 96.8 — pretty good, with room for improvement.

Website Content

Website Grader was impressed that I had a blog, and posted there recently. It told me how many Google index pages are on my site (156), and said, "Generally, the more pages your site has within the Google cache, the better." So, I’d better add a few more!

The readability score surprised me — College Undergraduate. I try to avoid five-dollar words, and describe things as simply as possible, but if you read my website, you’re obviously pretty smart.

There’s a link to a Blog Grader too, if you want to try that.

Website Optimization

The report warned me that my Page Title was too long — by 1 character, so I’ve fixed that. It also recommended that I get the font tags out of the page. I’m starting an online CSS course next week, so I’ll improve things after that.

Website Promotion

The report even gives you a Twitter Grade, if there’s an account tied to the website. I was surprised to get 91.36, since I only have a few followers, and don’t tweet very often.

Monthly Reports

I signed up for the free monthly report, so I’ll see if the minor changes that I made had any effect. They’re also promoting a paid service, but it starts at $250/month, so I’ll pass on that.

What’s Your Grade?

Have you graded your website? Did you agree with the outcome? Please share your results in the comments.

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You Have to Sleep Eventually

When you’re self-employed, you can set your own hours, and sometimes those hours can run into the wee hours of the morning. After staring at the computer screen all day and most of the night, your eyes might be tired, but the rest of you is strangely wide awake.

If you want to make it easier to fall asleep at night, adjusting the brightness of your computer monitor might help. I downloaded a free program, f.lux, that changes the colour of your monitor, based on the time of day, and the type of lighting that you have.

Adjust the Settings

You can set your location by zip code or longitude and latitude, and it helps you find those settings, if you don’t have them memorized.

You can also adjust the daytime and night settings, to control the monitor colour changes.

flux02

Turn It Off

There’s an option to disable the colour change for an hour, if you want to work on something colour-sensitive, or if you have to stay awake to finish the project that’s due tomorrow morning.

Be careful though — when I temporarily turned f.lux off, I was almost blinded by the monitor light.

Does f.lux Help?

Will the late night colour softening help me get to sleep? Maybe. At least it makes it easier to look at the screen in the evening, so that’s a good thing. And I am starting to feel a bit drowsy….

A Fresh New WordPress 3.0 Look

Emboldened by yesterday’s success in installing the WordPress 3.0 upgrade, I decided to install their new default theme — Twenty Ten. It’s optimized for all the new WordPress 3.0 features, so it will give me a chance to try some of them.

There’s a header picture option with the Twenty Ten theme, so this blog has a bit of colour now. Exciting, I know!

I’ve added a Recent Comments list in the right sidebar, and a list of categories, to make it easier to find things.

If you’re reading this in your RSS feed, you can wander over to the blog, and see what you think.

I like the clean look of the theme, and nice big font, and it’s easy to change the column settings and layout.

So far, so good.

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Testing the WordPress 3.0 Upgrade

An advantage to having multiple blogs is that you can test things on a smaller blog, before installing them on your main blog.

For example, WordPress 3.0 was released today, so I decided to test it on this blog first.

Backup First

Before installing the upgrade, I did an export of the blog’s data, from the WordPress dashboard. It would be smart to do a full database backup too, but I felt like living on the edge.

Find the Upgrade Button

For previous upgrades, I’ve seen a notice near the top of the dashboard, advising me that a new version of WordPress is available. There wasn’t anything visible when I logged in to WordPress, and I found the Upgrade option under the Tools menu in the dashboard’s sidebar.

Automatic Upgrade

You can download all the files and manually install the upgrade, but I opted to click the Upgrade Automatically button.

Everything went smoothly, and only took a few seconds.

New Features in WordPress 3.0

You can read about the new WordPress 3.0 features on the WordPress site.

The new feature that I noticed immediately is the Updates option under the Dashboard menu in the sidebar.

It was highlighted with a 1 symbol, and showed that my Theme had an update available. It’s handy to have everything in one screen, instead of individual lists.

So, I updated the theme, and even remembered to re-install the Google Analytics tracking code in the footer!

Will You Upgrade?

I’ll wait a day or two before installing WordPress 3.0 on any other blog, just to be sure everything REALLY went smoothly.

How about you? Will you upgrade to WordPress 3.0, or stick with your current version for a while?

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Problems Deleting an Outlook Folder

I’ve had some strange problems with Outlook for the past couple of weeks

complains about things not being closed properly
usually crashes the first time I try to print a message
crashed when I tried to select a couple of messages (it’s challenging to delete a message when you can’t click on it!)
very slow opening and closing

Probably the Outlook file was getting pretty big, so I deleted a bunch of messages, and compacted the Personal Folder. The Outlook.pst file was reduced to about half its previous size, but some of the problems persist.

How To Delete an Outlook Subfolder

Today I wanted to delete a subfolder that I don’t need, and even though the folder is empty, an Outlook showed a message said the folder was full, and couldn’t be deleted. Or maybe I didn’t have the correct permissions, and should check with the Administrator. Well, I’m the Administrator, and have permission to do whatever I want!

Google showed me how to get rid of that folder though.

Press the Ctrl key while opening Outlook, and confirm that you want to open in Safe mode.
Then, while you’re in Safe mode, select the folder and delete it.

If you’ve run into a similar problem, I hope this works for you too.

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Taking an Online JavaScript Course

Learn JavaScript for $9.95! That sounded like a pretty good deal to me, since most online courses an much more expensive than that.

When I got the JavaScript Live Course email from SitePoint.com, I followed the link to see what the course was about. There was a video with the course leader describing the content and delivery, and a link to see the course outline.

In the 3-week course there are 4 online sessions per week, with a live Q&A session each Friday. There’s also a private online discussion forum where you can get help with the practical exercises.

So, I signed up. Maybe I’ll learn a few things about JavaScript that I can use in my business. What’s really of interest to me though, is seeing how someone runs an online technical course. How will everything work? Will they hit any snags? What will the customer experience be like? What materials and training methods work best?

The answers to those questions are certainly worth much more than $9.95, and might help me plan an online course of my own.

Are you signing up? If you are, let me know, and we can sit in the back row of the class, or work on homework assignments together.

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Printing a Web Page

You might find something online that you want to print, such as instructions for doing something in Excel, or a tasty looking recipe.

Usually that page has a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to print, like ads and header and footers.

A while ago I discovered Print What You Like, where you can enter a URL, then clean up that page for printing. However, I could never find that page when I needed it, so I rarely used it.

Printliminator Utility

Today I found The Printliminator, a similar utility, which runs from a bookmarklet.

Just drag the bookmarklet to your Bookmarks toolbar, then click it when you want to clean up a page.
Highlight a section, then click to remove it
OR, press Alt and click, to remove everything except the selected section.

There’s also a set of buttons, including one to remove all graphics, and a button to Undo the last step.

Printliminator tool for web page printing

Video: Printliminator Utility

This short video shows how the Printliminator utility works, in case you’d like to see the tool, before you start using it.

Print What You Like Bookmarklet

When I went back to find the Print What You Like page today, I saw that it has a bookmarklet too. Maybe it’s new, or I missed that the last time that I looked.

Anyway, I hope you find this useful, and I wish they’d invent a cleanup tool for email too. Then I could crop off those long paragraphs that warn me about saving the environment by not printing.

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The Spreadsheet Day Poll

When should we celebrate Spreadsheet Day? A few dates have been nominated, so it’s time to pick a day, and Jimmy Peña suggested a poll. The nominated dates are:

Jan 26 – Ed, based on Lotus 1-2-3 release date

Feb 29 – Mike Alexander, “I vote to have Spreadsheet Day on Leap Year. In part, because it pays homage to the old Lotus leap year bug. But mainly because it only comes once every 4 years, and I’m fairly lazy.”

Apr 1 – Jon Peltier, “I want to overrule Debra and vote for April 1. The most fitting day of the year.”

Aug 1 – Debra, because it represents A1, the first cell on a worksheet, and avoids the April Fools stigma

Sep 5 – Chandoo, “It spells XL on phones when you type 95”

Oct 17 – Ken Puls, “The first copy of VisiCalc for the Apple ][ (Version 1.37) went out the door on October 17, 1979.” (http://www.benlo.com/visicalc/visicalc4.html)

What Date Will You Vote For?

Please vote for the Spreadsheet Day that you think is best, or suggest another date.

[Update] The Spreadsheet Day Poll has closed. Thanks for voting!

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