Tyler Nichols Weblog

My wife and I took our son to see Sesame Street Live last weekend at Boston University. Trevor loved it and I would reccommend anyone with kids who like sesame street to go.

Tonight I noticed that several of my sites with flash were getting the error message “Click to activate and use this control” while being viewed in Internet Explorer (all is fine with firefox, opera etc).

The problem stems from a recent Microsoft Update http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/912945/en-us This update has to do with the EOLA patent lawsuit that Microsoft recently lost.

As a work around I used the Unobtrusive Flash Object (UFO) from Bobby van der Sluis, replacing the standard macromedia object code.

This is going to start affecting A LOT of websites. As internet explorer users perform windows updates, sites that use flash will have this problem. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

KinderStart.com is suing Google because their search engine ranking has fallen. Now their revenues are down 70% as well. Hello KinderStart, SERP’s are dynamic. What makes you think you are “entitled” to being ranked well. Actually the site is just a directory that looks like it’s sole purpose is to pimp adsense and other advertising. I also see a ton of what looks like recipricol linking back to KinderStart.com, perhaps that’s it.

Boo Hoo….. stop whining.

Jesus?! Obviously, it’s a bogus item trying to get people to view the auction. He is probably hoping people will check out this item and then view his other auctions. If they do, they’ll find this crap. Very clever (or sleazy, depending on how you look at it) way to sell crappy, useless ebooks on ebay.

Finished my wife’s new personalized Easter Bunny Letter site tonight. Hopefully I will have enough time before the Easter holiday to properly SEO it. I have coded it out as a valid tableless layout. Actually, the site is sitting pretty good at # 3 #2 for the phrase “easter bunny letter” on Google. I am no where to be found on Yahoo! and MSN #1 on MSN.
This should be a nice addition to Sandi’s other site Letter From Santa.

Well after 3 years of hosting my websites at Dreamhost, I have decided to move on to another hosting company. I was actually torn as to whether I should actually make the jump. Unfortunately, their service has gone so far down hill, I had no choice. For the last 6 months or so, Dreamhost has sucked, to put it mildly. It seemed like everytime I checked on my websites they were down. Their custom “control panel” is now so slow, it’s unusable or down completely. Creating a new MySql DB is supposed to take 5 to 10 minutes through the panel. I created one last weekend and it took over 5 hours.
Support continues to suck, but I really never used them for anything other than to tell them my site is down and ask them check the server.

Anyway, I’ve moved on to Gatorhost and so far I am pretty happy with them. I signed up for a reseller account so I could host sites on their own and not as addons to a primary domain. A cool feature which I have never used before is Cpanel. I was used to the steaming dung of a control panel offered by DH.

So I am hoping that the new hosting works out, because it was a pain in the ass to move all of my sites.

McSucked.

This is a documentary of a man and woman in England who were sued by McDonalds for libel for distibuting flyers criticizing the fast food giant. I hate McDonalds so I can appreciate anyone who takes a swipe at them, but this was boring.

My Rating:

Dell has decided to sue a man from Spain from using his last name “Dell” in his url….

You can also read Paul Dell’s Blog

This is interesting

Two employees at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop on Cape Cod were arrested after allegedly spitting in customers’ coffee.

Does this coffee taste funny to you?

UPDATE: You can now add urine to the secret ingredients served by dunkin donuts. Both men that were arrested are suspected of being ILLEGAL ALIENS from Brazil.

I stopped going to Dunk’s because:

1. Nobody speaks english there anymore. Makes it kinda hard to order.

2. They always got my order wrong! (see #1)

3. I have seen workers do some nasty shit while waiting in line.

Hopefully this latest incident will put a dent in DD’s business and they’ll make changes. Either way, they’ve lost my business for good.