News - Papa Mike Creations Network

Spammers + Medications = Horse shit

no_email@example.com (papamike)

Have you ever wondered why most spammers advertise medications and send you to sites that look legit? The reason is because they are selling illegal, dangerous, and copycat products. The worst part of the scam is that they also get your credit card number, home address, email address, and possibly your phone number too. Identity theft is a big player in this counterfeit drug scam. The crooks usually get away with three things:

1. Spamming your email or website or both

2. Profiting from your purchase of potentially life threatening medications

3. Stealing your identity

And I'm not just talking about China, it happens in all countries including the USA.

Social Networking and More

no_email@example.com (papamike)

I think a lot about the direction the Internet is taking. Since "Social Networking" has caught on and seems to have spread across the entire world, more and more of the worlds youth are finding out just what democracy means. Social, media has recently sparked regime (via the use of Tweeter and Facebook) change all across the middle east. Twitter, I think, is the preeminent voice of the world. Facebook, I believe, will one day go the way of the dinosaurs, into extinction. I, myself, have an account that I rarely visit. I'm actually tired of using it, and really think that the founders should give more back to the people who use it. It's true, there are very few things that you have to pay for, but the 10% of advertising that is displayed on each page alone is hauling in the bucks.

In my view, a one time donation of one billion dollars will go along way in renovating a lot of distressed schools. Help with infrastructure projects that our forward leaning "Socialist" society should not be doing. But that is not the way that our do now and pay for later government is geared to work. I do applaud the recent donation by Mark Zuckerberg of $100 million to Newark Public Schools, the public school system of Newark, New Jersey. Zuckerberg along with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett signed a promise they called the "Giving Pledge", in which they promised to donate to charity at least half of their wealth over the course of time, and invited others among the wealthy to donate 50% or more of their wealth to charity.

And the beat goes on.....

Google Chrome surpasses Firefox, takes #2 spot in the UK

no_email@example.com (papamike)

When Firefox became the alternative of choice to Internet Explorer, I'm sure its developers never imagined they were opening the door for a third party to take over in a fraction of the time it took them to transform the browser market, it was a harsh first few years after all. When you consider other companies like Opera tried for years but never captured the mass following they probably deserved, it's an overwhelmingly impressive feat for Google and its Chrome browser.

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DOCTYPES

no_email@example.com (papamike)

Every now and then I get something thrown at me that makes no sense at all. The most recent one is that you can change the DOCTYPE of a theme. That is the biggest lump of bull shit I've ever heard. A theme is dependent on the DOCTYPE that is established in the CMS. If you validate a theme that is the default theme of RavenNuke(tm) and since the doctype of RN is set for XHTML 1.0 Transitional then the theme had best comply to that standard or else the validator will attempt to fall back to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and you will get a lot of errors. If you code your theme for HTML 4.0 Transitional, it isn't going to validate against that. It is going to look for a DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.0 Transitional and it will find errors.

So in essence, you cannot place a doctype inside of a theme and I don't give a rotten damn if you're a expert or not.

Stuck On Theme Compliance

no_email@example.com (papamike)

Seems I'm stuck on theme compliance. But, it's such a critical issue when you think in regards to browser compatibility. To be able to ensure that your web site can be seen on all browsers (and there's a lot of them out there) you need to ensure that first and foremost your theme is compliant with W3C standards. Another standard I discovered recently is a online web check tool that is located at http://www.onlinewebcheck.com/check.php . If you have a W3C compliant theme and you run it through the tool I just wrote about, you will possibly discover a bunch of errors and warnings that W3C doesn't consider in it's compliance checks.

Now that I have run through that, I'll write about something else that is theme related. Did you know that if you have more than one theme on your website and you want to see if all of them are compliant, you will have to assign each of them as the default theme before W3C can check it for compliance. It only checks the default theme which is set in admin under preferences.

Google Webmaster Tools

no_email@example.com (papamike)

I am always trying to make my web sites better. I keep them compliant and make an attempt at meeting W3C standards and Google standards. If you haven't noticed, Google is the preeminent giant of the Internet, and pleasing that monster of a search engine is complicated to say the least. But where do you start? A good place, well maybe the best place is http://www.google.com/webmasters/ . While there, you can run all of the tools to your hearts content. Check 'em out and see if you can please the monster.

In The Scheme Of Things

no_email@example.com (papamike)

My greatest problem these days is attempting to get my theme designer compliant to W3C standards. It's being a pain but I'll get it done. I have a real problem with the so called (self appointed) experts who claim to know everything, spend their time telling others that there is a problem with their website, in that it is not compliant. They are the self assigned internet compliance folks who police the Internet. And in reality they aren't needed, the Internet is a free to use conglomeration of anything you could ever need. If a website is not compliant, has 900 errors, then who cares. I sure don't.
The biggest claim to fame self proclaimed "Expert" do not take into consideration is that the person they are cutting down may be an expert themselves. Experts tend to litter their made up world of self proclaimed deeds that they have accomplished but offer little or no proof of what they claim to have done. Now I don't speak of all self proclaimed experts, for there are some true ones out there.
Just be aware of who you are talking to and make a attempt to ask other truly recognized experts (through their forums) if what you're getting feed is correct.

Compliance

no_email@example.com (papamike)

I know you've done all of this work to make your theme compliant. But are there errors that W3C doesn't show you? Your website probably has errors that affect code within your theme that you may need to fix. I know because I had a bunch of errors and warnings. But I have gotten it down to 3 warnings and 3 errors. Not bad but I want to get it down to zero. I expect these figures to go up as I am coding in new stuff to the site.

For a website that is XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0 compliant with no errors or warnings, go to my design website which is not built on top of a CMS but is one that I hard coded http://papamikedesigns.com

If you think that your website or theme is compliant? Run it through Online Web Check and see what happens.

PHP 5.3.6 Released !

no_email@example.com (papamike)

[7 March 2011]
The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.6. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, some of which are security related. ... Read More ...