Toluu

Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

"I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum." Bishop Desmond Tutu

Papa and son at Primo Coffee [Flickr]August 28

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

day care closed, so we're spending quality time together today at the cafe.

Warren Easton HS marching band, New Orleans LAAugust 28

Here's a video of the Warren Easton HS marching band in New Orleans, LA:

Link Bus Map revisited for 2008 [Flickr]August 26

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

The Link Bus is back in action.

I did a new map this year, showing the time points by number (number of minutes after the quarter hour) rather than by letter.

Make your web site fasterAugust 26

This blog loads very, very slowly.  (Sorry.)  It's big, it's full of weird crap that I like to post because it's interesting, and sometimes things break because the weird crap is no longer supported.

If you want it to go faster look at this:

Steve Souders book High Performance Web Sites describes the 14 best practices he developed while working as the Chief Performance Yahoo!. YSlow, the Firebug extension he created, codified those best practices. Now working at Google, Steve discusses the next set of best practices he's discovered, including the impact of iframes and where to place (and where not to place) inline script blocks.

and it you want to understand why web sites that are faster are better, more profitable, and more helpful for users see Andy King's Web Site Optimization

Fast display speed is the key to success with your website. It increases profits, decreases costs, and improves customer satisfaction (not to mention search engine rankings, accessibility, and maintainability).

Here's Steve Souders talk at Google.

Google AdSense in professional association wikisAugust 26

Google's AdSense program is designed to provide relevant targeted advertising content to web pages.  It works, sometimes intermittently, on weblogs - but there's often enough other non-relevant things on the design of those pages to work only indifferently.  What you do find however is that the appropriately targeted wiki design - especially one where the subject matter expertise of a professional association is involved, and where the words in use a specific to a field of specialty - yields extremely targeted results.

Caution is worthwhile, however, because for every well-targeted advertising stripe you get the occasional horrible, unprofessional blunder.   Some cases in point.

Quimica from the American Chemical Society is running this ad on page one, hosted on Wikispaces:

Now ask yourself, what is to blame here?  There are three ways that you can fix a problem like this of having inappropriate advertising running in your wiki.

1.  Don't run advertising at all.  Host your wiki yourself, or host it somewhere with an option to turn off advertising.  Remove the risk of the accidental inappropriate Adwords ad by not using Adwords as an ad network.

2.  Sell advertising in-house as sponsorships, or run house ads in the stripe of