SOPA Blackout Day Of Protest

Along with thousands of other websites, not the least of which are WordPress, all icanhazcheezburger network sites (FailBlog, theDailyWhat,Know Your Meme, etc), Wikipedia, reddit, Tucows, Internet Archive, Wikipeadia, and Mozilla, our website will be joining the one day SOPA Blackout on January 18, 2012.

Our main website will be "dark", though Live Chat will still be available, as will the client management and support section of the site.

For any of our clients or other website owners who would like to become a part of this protest, there are numerous "Blackout" HTML templates, Wordpress plugins, Blogger templates and Javascript scripts in order to make it easier for you to blackout your website.

As always, please be careful when downloading and/or using scripts from unknown sources. Know what you're adding to your site!

Two Important Caveats Before Your Site Goes Dark

1. Set your index page to return a 503 status code.
   
   A 503 HTTP code means "service temporarily not available." It tells Google and all other search engines that your site is temporarily down (Like for maintenance), and also doesn't get the text of your blackout page indexed as new content. More on the details of why you'd want to do this are in Pierre Fars' Google+ post Website outages and blackouts the right way.
   
   How to set a 503 code header?
   The easiest way is by using PHP. Your page can be plain HTML, all you need to do is change the page extension from .html to .php for this to work. Simple add the following code to the very top of your page, before the DOCTYPE or anything else, like this:
   

   
   OPENING PHP TAG GOES HERE
   header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
   header('Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
   header('Retry-After: 84600'); // in seconds 84600 seconds in one day
   CLOSING PHP TAG GOES HERE
   DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" (Proper DOCTYPE goes here)
   

   
   

   An important note: Don't forget the PHP tags! You'll need an opening PHP tag and closing PHP tag where indicated (the limitations of the blogging software used doesn't allow for displaying scripting tags).

   
   
   Check your page to make sure it's returns a 503 header.
   Upload your blackout page and test the headers using an online server headers checker such as this one. Here's what you should see (with the URL of your website):
   
   
#1 Server Response: http://helloworldweb.com
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:06:29 GMT
Server: Apache
Retry-After: 84600
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

   


2. Turn OFF or pause any server/website uptime monitoring services, such as Pingdom, so you don't spend the 24 hours being alerted that your website is down.

~ Mara Alexander
Hello World Web Design and Hosting

New California Online Fraud Law

Pretending to be someone else could now land you in jail as of January 1, 2011, when the new California Online Fraud Law went into effect, making online impersonation a crime.

Under SB1411, by Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, it is now a misdemeanor to impersonate someone online with the intent to harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud. The bill, which passed the Legislature unanimously, essentially expands impersonation laws to include online behavior.

Those convicted could face a maximum fine of $1,000 and one year in jail.

And now if they could only toughen spamming and phishing laws...

Announcing: Concrete Art

Announcing the newest member of the Hello World Web family, Concrete Art.

About Concrete Art:

Concrete Art is owned and operated by Richard LeTendre and based in Sacramento, CA. Rich has been bringing creative and custom cement resurfacing solutions in a wide variety of applications for clients in Northern California for over 10 years. Concrete Art utilizes green and environmentally conscience methods to bring beauty and durability to every room of your home, office or business.

Concrete Art makes your world a better place!

About Concrete Art's Website:

Rich requested a simple one page website, one that would mirror the classic and elegant style of his business, utilizing the colors from his existing stationary and business cards. Though this was to be a one page website, we also needed to display an unlimited number of photos to showcase and exemplify the wide variety of work done by Concrete Art. We also needed a contact form, which is typically on it's own page with a site, as well as information about the process and materials used by Concrete Art, since many consumers might not be familiar with these methods.

A bit of a tall order to include all that information into one page and still have a sleek and uncluttered look...but we were up for the task.

Photo Slideshow:

A Compactly-sized JQuery Slideshow was chosen to showcase the photos of Concrete Art's work, with a color-scheme for the sites' background chosen specifically so the photos would be a focal point. Rather than a traditional photo gallery, which would need it's own page or section of the website, the slideshow uses a small amount of space and could be incorporated into the design of the index page, while displaying an infinite amount of photos and allowing for the addition of unlimited photos in the future.

Contact Form:

The contact form was written into the index page, using a slightly smaller version of what would be used on a contact page. The script that processes the contact form filters and blocks most types of automated spam.

Business Information:

Information about the process and materials used by Concrete Art were incorporated into an FAQ, driven by a JQuery accordion. Each time an FAQ/accordion is opened, the others are closed and the open one "slides up." Using an accordion allows plenty of room for adding additional FAQs later, and is a good way to have a lot of information in a smaller space.

Web Standards, Validation and Browser Support:

One would think with such a simple design and only one page, making the site cross-browser compatible would have been cake...but someone forgot to tell that to IE7. All the other browsers: Firefox 3.6, Google's Chrome (which uses the same rendering engine as Safari), Opera 10, even IE8 displayed the site as intended. But not IE7. Or at least not without a fair amount of coaxing and a rewrite/repositioning of the site.

Finally the site displayed properly in all major browsers, and validates to W3C standards for HTML, CSS, WAI and section 508 (accessibility).

Graphics Created:

This project didn't require many graphics to be created. The logo was recreated from the logo used on Concrete Art's business cards, a favicon to match, and the "Alternative Flooring" background graphic, displayed using CSS. A few of the photos had to be touched up to remove/cover date stamps, which would have marred the elegant look in the slideshow.

Other Small Touches:

As with all our sites, the copyright year is written using a PHP script that will automatically update each year, so the site always looks fresh. Instructional documents were converted to PDFs and set up as downloadable files.

Rich and Julie were a delight to work with, and I look forward to enjoying them as clients - as well as friends - for many years to come.

If YOU need an awesome website for YOUR business, CONTACT US TODAY!

Contact Us Now!