“But Mom, I need one.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
Around age 3 1/2, iit becomes, “Because I said so.”
That’s when we begin to learn the power of the word because. That one word becomes ingrained in our mind. That one word because — becomes a reason for anything. Our parents teach us that. [Read more…]
Yesterday, Joe of Working at Home on the Internet reminded me of my days going to press runs, when he was talking about his experience as a printer.
Immediately my mind flashed to this story.
I was in the car with my friend KB on the way to a press run. We’d worked 12 weeks straight living in the Marriott New York East Side. Now we’d flown into Chicago and were driving into one of the suburbs. She was driving. I was looking out the window. I was taking in all of the signs of the restaurants and stores as we passed by them.
Then, suddenly out of the blue I heard, “Will you . . . .SHUT UP!”
It seems I had been reading every sign out loud.
“I don’t really need you to read me every sign we pass,” she said. “What was that?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Fodder.”
Last night at Open Comment Night, we had another great and rambling conversation. Mike Dunn of Nomadic Audio stopped by to see what was going on. He live blogged the Open Comments Night. Click the title to see what he said.
Many thoughts were shared between blogger friends. New blogger friendships formed. Art was defined. Plans were made. Marketing ideas were discussed. Stories were told. A good time was had.
Here are some highlights. [Read more…]
Pete Townshend started a blog last September. He is writing a novella. As far as I know, his only promotion was to mention it on his website. Granted his website is more promotion than most of us could wish for, but the entire content of the blog–even more–is at at the website.
Go ahead. Check them out. I’ll wait here.
From his days with The Who, it was clear Pete marched to a different drummer. When it comes to blog marketing and promotion, it seems the same way. As far as I can tell, Pete didn’t follow any of the recommended wisdom.
Well, he does have a picture, under the picture it says
What is well known is that I’m a rock star. You are not worthy etc. In fact you are worthy. And so am I. We deserve each other.
That’s how Pete writes.
I read four of his comments. One is a request to offer up prayers. One is a statement that visitors are reading the chapter wrong. One was a joke, I think. It was hard to understand. The last is an apology that the next chapter isn’t there.
Pete Townshend’s first post–Sept. 24,2005–has 347 comments. Pete’s current post has 1,107 comments. His commenters are the same 30 or so people who talk to each other about all kinds of things. His site meter is locked, so I can’t tell you how many visitors he has had.
Technorati says he has 1,995 links from 529 sites.
His Wholinkstome profile looks like this:
Pete Townshend doesn’t need to do promotion for his blog.
Pete Townshend is a rock star. He doesn’t need promotion. He is a brand. He’s a big idea of his own. He can start something new, and his customers find him. He can ignore all of the rules and ride the interest on the quality music and the top-notch promotion that’s already been done. It’s been compounding year after year in his “virtual marketing account.”
But he’s Pete Townshend–definitely an exception to how things work.
Me? I have to do all of kinds of promotion like everyone else does. I figure I always will. So I do some every day. My virtual marketing account is barely open. Still I’m counting on the lasting value of every little investment I make.
What have you done lately to add to your virtual marketing account?
Sorry, Pete. I wasn’t talking to you.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
An embedded hyperlink is when the image is the hyperlink. An example of this is the feed button found in the ‘Subscribe’ section of Successful Blog’s sidebar.
These types of links can be problematic if you can’t view the images for whatever reason and you haven’t included ALT and TITLE attributes. To all intents and purposes, these links simply cease to exist. (Both screenshots that follow were trimmed at the top and side for fit).
View this screenshot of Successful Blog’s front page with images turned off,
and compare it to this one with images back on.
The first thing you notice is that in the top image there is no banner, and then that there is no way to subscribe.
Ooops.
An embedded hyperlink consists of a hyperlink tag and an image tag:
<a href=”http://www.foo.com/”> <img src=”image.jpg” /> <a href=”http://www.foo.com” title=”description of link destination”> <img src=”image.jpg” alt=”description text” />
Note how the TITLE is attached to the hyperlink, whilst the ALT is attached to the image.
Use a full ALT description when the image forms the entirety of the hyperlink, i.e., the image is the only anchor text.
Once again, think carefully about using the null ALT description (<alt=””>) when the hyperlink has a text component. For example:
<a href=”contactus.html” title=”contact page”> <img src=”contact.gif” alt=”contact us” /> Contact us </a></code> will render without images as <contact us contact us>
(The first from the alt attribute, the second from the anchor text).
In this case the image was purely decorative, and would have been better coded as <a href=”contactus.html” title=”contact page”> <img src=”contact.gif” alt=”” /> Contact us </a>.
And that is it. If you are already manually coding your hyperlinks, then making them accessible will just take a few seconds longer. If you aren’t yet manually coding your hypertext links, now is a good time to start. Those extra few moments pay huge dividends in terms of usability, SEO, and the general happiness of your readers. Whilst most of them won’t consciously notice a difference, the few that do will thank you for it, and we as bloggers are nothing without our readers.
If you are interested in learning more about this subject, the W3C has Web Accessibility Guidelines, and Webcredible have some very good white papers describing all aspects of accessibility and usability in more depth.
Sources for this article: The W3C, Webcredible, general common sense, and diverse other sources.
Thanks to Cas for the obvious work this took, and apologies in advance for any errors I might have introduced. We leave you now the links to the series. –ME “Liz” Strauss
The Complete Series
How to Code Accessible Links
This one: How to Code Accessible Linksââ¬âPart 1
How to Code Accessible Linksââ¬âPart 2
This one: How to Code Accessible Linksââ¬âPart 3
Just to remind you what the basic image code looks like:
<img src=”http://www.foo.com/image.jpg” />
The ALT description works in much the same way that the TITLE attribute works for a link. It is inserted after the URL but before the tag is closed and contains descriptive text. Instead of previewing the image when you mouse over though, the ALT attribute is what is read out when someone is using a screen reader. It should describe the content of the image. It is also the ALT text that is displayed by your browser when, for whatever reason, an image fails to load.
<img src=”http://foo.com/image.jpg” alt=”descriptive text” />
Use descriptive text in the ALT attribute when the image imparts information to the viewer, for example if it contains text like many header images and buttons do.
There are certain instances when the image being used imparts no information to the reader – for example a spacer.gif (though the practice of using spacer images is now frowned upon). In these instances, consider using the null attribute to make the screen readers ignore the image. To use the null value, simple use alt="" without a space between the quotation marks. Putting a space, or just ignoring the ALT description will result in non-visual readers being told that there is an image, but not being given a description. Highly frustrating!
Meanwhile Cas and I are off to plot a plan of our own, until tomorrow.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
The Complete Series
How to Code Accessible Links
This one: How to Code Accessible Linksââ¬âPart 1
This one: How to Code Accessible Linksââ¬âPart 2
How to Code Accessible Linksââ¬âPart 3