Fax-to-email service

I just signed up for a free trial of a fax-to-email service. I found some useful info on David Berger's Free Internet Faxing Guide which led me to CallWave. When you sign up, you get a local fax number which lets you receive faxes as PDFs by email. The first 30 days are a free trial; after that, unless you cancel, it's $7.95 a month.

I'm thinking about ditching my BellSouth phone service for either Vonage or Time Warner's digital phone service, but before I can do that, I need a solution for receiving faxes. I don't need to receive faxes very often, but when I do, it's important, and so it needs to work! But I don't need to pay BellSouth something like $20/month for that extra "ringmaster" service. I don't even know what I'm paying BellSouth for it, actually, because it comes with a package deal. I'm just thinking that with $8/month for receiving faxes and maybe $30 or $40 a month for digital phone service, that's $38-$48 a month, and I'm currently paying $88/month.

We'll see how the fax service is, and I have to start talking to Vonage and Time Warner. I wouldn't mind saving $50 every month.

Project Seven's "42nd Street "

I bought Project Seven's "42nd Street" e-book, and started working through it today - I knew it would be a good CSS lesson, that it would stretch me at least a little bit (if not a lot). So far so good; it's the usual high-quality Project Seven stuff. I've just gotten through creating the graphics and am about to embark on the positioning stuff with CSS. I could use to get a little better at that. I'll try and report back when I've gotten a little farther along.

New site using Lightbox JS 2.0

I launched the artist's web site today.

The script used for those portfolio photos is almost so good I want to keep it a secret, but I really hope its inventor, Lokesh Dhakar, gets lots of contributions and good vibes and everything else he deserves for creating something so cool, so I'll tell it. Here's the Lightbox JS 2.0 site.

Hard to believe how easy it is to use, and how great it looks.

Using CSS to Style a Code Listing

Interesting - I had just made the post above, in which I couldn't figure out how to put HTML code on an HTML page. It wasn't working, which may just be Blogger and its odd ideas about code. I didn't have the time to mess with it, so I left the code out. Five minutes later Thierry posted the following tutorial on the Dreamweaver forum: "Using CSS to Style a Code Listing". He does a lot more than I was planning to do, but looks like he does it right.

Fifty million contact forms

Having made about fifty million contact forms for fifty million clients, I've come up with a little system.

The contact form is processed with a ColdFusion script - really just a snippet of code, which I'll provide upon request, but at the moment I don't remember how to escape the HTML to put it on an HTML page. The contact form has a readable "name" attribute - such as "first_name" - that code will output a neat list of the form field name/value pairs and email it.

My host company requires that the email address in be a valid user in the domain, so I create a user called something like "contactform", have its mail forwarded to the client's real email address, and put contactform@clientsdomain.com in the "to" field.

To test the form, I create a user "webadmin", and have it forwarded to my email address. When the form is working fine, I edit the code to have the "contactform" email address in the "To" field. Sometimes I put mine in a BCC field so that both the client and me receive the form info.

That's it. Works great for me. I'm about to go finish this one for the artist's site.

Fireworks PNGs for my client's print designer

Two things I learned this morning:

1. A Fireworks PNG, when opened with any other program, doesn't have the layers or vector information available.

2. You can export a file from Fireworks as a PSD, and it still has the vector information.

Contextual healing

The architects emailed back yesterday to say that "the proposal is acceptable" and asked me to send them a contract and invoice for the deposit. Yay! That's just a small "yay", because there's no real celebrating until I have a check in hand, but since I fired them off the contract and invoice yesterday, I should have it soon.

Here's what I learned today. Okay, I sort of knew this, but obviously not well enough. If I'm using a CSS style in the of a page, expecting it to "beat" a CSS style which is in an external style sheet that applies to the same element, the one selector has to match the context of the other. In other words:

#home a

doesn't "beat"

#navul li a 

In order to take precedence over the second selector, the first selector has to include the same context as the second:

#navul li#home a

I was actually kind of jazzed that this worked. I was even more jazzed that I was able to hand-code a nested nav list and make all the links work perfectly. This is the kind of stuff that I don't do for fun, but when I have to do it for a client project, I'm still happy to have gained some knowledge and enjoy the process. I guess I don't hate web dev so much after all!

Another day, another proposal

I had to submit a proposal for the architects' site today. At our initial meeting, they had really emphasized that they wanted the site to be visually sophisticated, and at the time, I figured I'd be best off hiring a subcontractor for the page design. I didn't have much confidence in my ability to satisfy them with the graphic aspect of the site.

But our initial meeting was a few months ago, and in that time, I've actually gotten a lot more confidence in my design ability, and I decided this morning to do the graphics myself. I wrote plenty of time into the estimate, and I'm actually kind of excited about it now.

I just sent off the proposal. They've been talking as if they are ready to hire me and get started, and I hope that that's the case. I hope the price suits them - I hope I covered all of the bases in the proposal. I hope they say "yes"!

Making hay while the sun shines

Let's see what's on the list for this week.

1. The artist's site - make a real template out of the page design he just agreed (see thumbnail to the right) on and get site files re-organized. Let him know that I'm ready for text and photographs.

2. I need to write an estimate for the architect's site, but first I have to decide whether I'm going to do the graphics myself. I was planning to sub them out, but I think I can probably handle it, and I need the money.

3. And I have the first set of updates from the big site I finished about a month ago, the one where the content management system fell through... long story. The upshot is, I'm updating the site, but it's great to see that this client is as organized and gracious as ever. I'm grateful for clients like her!

4. And last but not least, that site that the client let drop for a year, and that we're now finishing. It's a real estate site, and not very complex, but this client seems to need a lot of steering, so it's a little stressful.

Tomorrow is a national holiday here in the U.S. (Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday), but I'm planning to work anyway. I've had a lot of time off in the past few months, and I need to make hay while the sun shines.

Welcome to my brand-new blog

Welcome to my brand-new blog*. I intend to write about the work of making web sites here, both to share my experiences with others doing similar work, and maybe just to vent!

I made my first HTML page in about 1994. The Web was new and exciting, and I had a friend who knew how to make web sites, so I prevailed upon him to help me learn. I actually didn't own a computer at the time, though I spent a lot of the day on one at work and was beginning to be somewhat computer literate, and my friend let me go to his office when it wasn't in use and practice making web pages. It was all about typing HTML tags one by one ("hand-coding", as my colleagues love to call it). I think we had some kind of a very rudimentary HTML editor, but the main thing it did was to write the whole tag for you at once so that you didn't have to type the characters. You still had to know which tags went where. There was some kind of preview feature too, but all the work was done in "code view", as we Dreamweaver users would say.

Way back then, I remember wanting to do web design for a job, and joking with my (then) husband that "HTML" was an acronym for "Hoping to Make a Living".

After a year or two of playing around and building sites for free, another friend offered me some freelance work working on his company's web sites.

A couple of years later - almost six years ago now - I started my web design business, here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. My "real job" for the past six years had been doing administrative work for some small companies, and though I was being paid pretty well, I was bored with the work and frustrated at not having more independence. That last job felt like a too-tight pair of shoes, and it was soon history.

Since then, I've been cranking out web sites - even getting slightly better at it over time, although I still have plenty to learn. I hope to share some day-t0-day experiences and my thoughts on 'em in this blog. Chenquieh!

* When I saw this phrase in print, I immediately thought, "Papa's got a brand-new blog", and was thinking of some witty way to work that in here, when it occurred to me that somebody probably thought of it first. A quick Google confirmed that (at least) this guy did. But, I digress.