Web Development and Technology Blog

I have run into this numerous times, so I am hopeful this will help someone, and also be a good place for me to look if I forget what to do.

At my office computer, I have taken advantage of the ease with which you can use Folder Redirection in Vista. In XP it was a bit harder, but with Vista it is easy to have the “Documents” (no more “MY” in Vista) stored on a network share, in my case one that is RAID enabled so I won’t lose my stuff.

Anyhow, since that redirection changes the Registry location for user files, it has messed up many of the programs I install that use InstallShield to install. InstallShield doesn’t apparently like UNC or Mapped drives as locations for personal/temp files, so I get this Error 1327 Invalid Folder.  I found this doc on their site and it was for XP, but the same fix applies.  Basically, I change the Registry entry that points to the invalid mapped drive, and run the install, and then add back in the registry key (or you can also just set-up the redirection again).

These vendors need to realize in more corporate environments, esp. with the advent of Vista, this redirection is more likely, but at least I found a workaround. It is annoying, but no at least I know and it is pretty easy to do.

A few weeks back, I attended a full-day seminar on Google’s AdWords. AdWords is such an amazing thing, as it so totally changes the paradigm of advertising.  I work for a direct mail and marketing provider (BlueGrass Mailing) and I have always loved direct mail, going back to when I worked in politics, because it is targetable; I can pick a specific market and send a specific message to them. What makes AdWords so amazing is you get the specific target, specific message and then you can track the ability of that message to move people, no other medium offers this.

Anyway, one of the things that really struck me about our discussion of optimizing your site for both organic and paid results, was that the “semantic web” can help you with your search results. The semantic web has always been a esoteric area for me. I understand in theory what Tim Berners-Lee means about separating presentation from data. The easiest example is that I use CSS to format my data, that I store in databases or in HTML as unformatted. But in that case, I know what the data is and what I am doing with it. He is talking more big picture, talking about all the data that we create in terabytes daily and bringing some kind of order to it. So I never really thought it would be relevant to something like Search Engine Optimization, or relevant to me in a smaller way.

What was said about SEO, though , is that if you start using tags like Header Tags (H1 – H6) and Paragraph tags, then the search engines pick up on that and assign a weight the data within those tags.

I had quit using header tags, because I thought it was bad practice. When I first started doing simple web pages, all the way back in 1996 (for Transylvania’s College Republicans) I used header tags, because they were a simple way to format text. Netscape had a default format for each, so you knew what it would look like.  Then as HTML 4.0 and CSS came along and there were better ways to specify your text format, I quit using them.  This semantic way means you use the CSS to format what the data inside the tags looks like, but then you are just using the header and paragraph tags to identify, “hey, this is my most important thing – literally, my page’s header” or “this is just a regular paragraph.”

I am still getting used to using it, as you can see from my own site, but it is definitely something interesting to keep in mind and a simple way to increase your site’s pages’ searchability.

Since I use Firefox for most of my browsing, I am constantly annoyed when I get to a site that has embedded Windows Media Player (WMP) content that I can’t get to play unless I go to IE. Well, thanks to the wonderful people in Redmond, that has finally been remedied. Due to the OPEN SOURCE efforts of Microsoft, yes, open source at MS is shocking (they even have 2 sites devoted to it, Port25 and CodePlex), but seemingly good and sincere, there is now a plug-in to enable this.

As you can tell I am excited about this development.

Get the plug-in here.

Wow, it is so much harder doing a site, either professional or personal in nature, for yourself. Like many things in life, it gets placed behind higher priorities. So it is that I am blogging at 2 AM while trying to finish the content on my site.

I wanted to answer the number one question I would have if I came to this site. PearsonSpace.com, huh? How derivative is that.

Well, not really, or not as much as it would seem. I never realized, having not had my own domain in years, how many Pearsons there are. Of course, I manage one of those site, Pearson’s Funeral Home, but I never realized I had such an extended web family. So after trying to get my 13-year-old daughter to come up with something cool and creative, and not Pearson-related, this is what we ended up with.

Seems to fit though, because we can have family stuff, hopefully, soon my wife and kids can blog and put pics up there, although they do a lot of that at MySpace; plus it can be a repository for my freelance web work, as well as my tech musings.

My blog- My intention is to keep this more focused on what I do for a living, namely web development, software and IT. More personal stuff I have stuck at MySpace, time permitting.

So take a look around and contact me with questions.