The Importance of Keeping Your Story Straight

Posted on by rchapin

When developing any content related to your business keeping your story straight is an important principle to keep in mind that helps to develop and maintain good relationships with your clients and prospects.

The recent news story about FaceBook’s change to their terms of service is good example of how not following this business communication principle can lead to a lot of ill-will with your customers and create a lot of bad PR
In early February of 2009 FaceBook updated → Continue reading “The Importance of Keeping Your Story Straight”

Marketing Activities with Leverage and a Force Multiplier

Posted on by rchapin

An efficient way to generate qualified leads without continual, heavy investment in capital is to focus on business development activities that provide leverage and a force multiplier.

Leverage means that the effort that you spend on a given activity continues to pay dividends long after you are finished working on it, and a Force Multiplier is something that allows you to get your message out to many people simultaneously without any additional incremental costs.
Three good examples are:

  • Developing
→ Continue reading “Marketing Activities with Leverage and a Force Multiplier”

How to Fix Getting a Black Screen When Attempting to Install Windows XP

Posted on by rchapin

I recently was re-installing WinXP on my folks computer and instead of blowing away their existing disk used an extra one that I had lying around.

When I went to run the WinXP set up disk I chose to boot from the CD and then got the "Setup is inspecting your computer’s configuration" message.  And then just a black screen.  The CD drive spun down and then nothing.

Turns out that since I was trying to use a disk that → Continue reading “How to Fix Getting a Black Screen When Attempting to Install Windows XP”

Removing Extra Space In a Submit Button Under IE 6 and IE 7

Posted on by rchapin

When you create an input button that has a long string set as it’s value attribute IE 6 and IE 7 render additional, spurious whitespace or padding to the left and the right of the text in the button.  This is solved by adding the following conditional CSS style for the input button in question (assuming we have an input button with the class "submit_button"):

input.submit_button
        {
        padding: 0;
        margin: 0;
        width: auto;
        max-width: auto;→ Continue reading “Removing Extra Space In a Submit Button Under IE 6 and IE 7”

AJAX and Accessibility

Posted on by rchapin

I’m working on a project that requires the use of some javascript for a simple survey.  The rub is that the pages all need to be accessible.  I’ve not yet done any work with any AJAX and accessibility but found a few links to articles to get me started.

AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work?
Accessibility of AJAX Applications
AJAX and Accessibility→ Continue reading “AJAX and Accessibility”

Accessing A Subversion Repository Via an SSH Tunnel from Windows XP with Interactive Password Login

Posted on by rchapin

First off, I didn’t want to simply forward port 22 on my firewall to my local machine as I didn’t want to completely expose it to the net.  I have a number of hardened Internet servers that are completely exposed (for ssh connections, that is) and sufficiently locked down that I felt comfortable configuring my network to only allow ssh connections from a specific server.  What I did there was specify firewall rules to only allow connections on port 22 → Continue reading “Accessing A Subversion Repository Via an SSH Tunnel from Windows XP with Interactive Password Login”

Goal Oriented Design and Its Impact on Your Site’s Effectiveness

Posted on by rchapin

Take a 5 second look at your website, and then close your eyes.

What were the top three things that you noticed? If those top three things are not related to the top three things directly related to helping your business turn visitors into customers, your site isn’t implementing Goal Oriented Design principals.

Goal Oriented Design is a layout philosophy that prominently features the information and/or activities on your site that are most relevant to bringing in new business. → Continue reading “Goal Oriented Design and Its Impact on Your Site’s Effectiveness”

Chaging the Default Browser under Windows XP for IE and Firefox

Posted on by rchapin

There are times when you might want to change your default browser; especially if you are a developer and want to make sure that something works as it should with both IE and Firefox.

To change your default browser:

  • Go to: Start/Control Panels/Add or Remove Programs
  • Click on "Set Program Access and Defaults", the last button in the left-hand nav
  • Click on the "Custom" set of options
  • You will see an expanded list of items, Web Browser, E-mail Program, etc.
→ Continue reading “Chaging the Default Browser under Windows XP for IE and Firefox”
© 2005 Ryan Chapin