The Red Frog Blog

I am reposting a great article done by Nick La over at Web Designer Wall about some simple SEO methods to pay attention to. As someone who is aware of Search Engine Optimization will know, there are a lot of ideas (some good, some bad) floating around about how to improve your page listing in Google. If you are able to implement most of these methods consistently, your websites and any website you design will have much better search results standings.

Here was something written in his article that impressed me:

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj“.

There is lots more to learn over in the post Web Designer Wall: SEO Guide for Designers, so check it out!

In case you haven’t gotten it already, here, at Ancient Wisdom, we tend to like music, a lot actually, and at least one of us is especially talented.

Part of our musical inclination leads us to discover the wide variety of music new and old out there. I like to call it our musical education. And I have learned about way more music in the past few months than at any other time in my life. Keeping our musical selection lively in our office keeps our office going, for sure.

The best is when you discover a new song that you just can’t stop listening to. This doesn’t happen every day. Tyler acquired this great song on iTunes for free no less, “Time to Pretend” by MGMT, found on Oracular Spectacular. (more…)

Yea, we like beer. We like local. Local design? That’s us! We have been known to consume a growler or two, mostly thanks to our friends at the Ithaca Coffee Company. Oh, and you don’t want to know how many Growler Cards we have already filled up as part of the new Growler Club. Don’t forget to check out what is on tap.

So keeping in mind all of these things that we like, I was happy to read from our friends over at the Ithaca Beer Company on their Beer Blog about their success, so far, in the Great Lakes Brewing News National IPA Competition. It’s like March Madness, but with a different type of madness…

Anyway Ithaca Beer’s own Flower Power has made it into the Final Four! They go up tomorrow (March 8 ) against Bell’s Brewing Company Two Hearted Ale. Flowers vs. hearts? We better win!

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I recently ran across this positioning problem. I was setting up a site where I needed a div layer (nav element) to go inside a layer with 100% width. I needed to position the div absolute, top and also align it in the middle of the page (url to follow when we finish the site!). CSS doesn’t always behave like you expect it would. But in the event you were wondering how to align your div top and center, here is the solution.

Set your container element’s position as absolute with top as 0px, if necessary. Next give it a position of left: 50%. Give the div an appropriate width for its contents. Then set it up with a margin-left as the negative value of half of the width. See my example:

#headerInside {
       position:     absolute;
       top:          0px;
       left:         50%;/*some magic to align the element in the center;
       width:        1000px;
       margin-left:  -500px;/* half of the width */
}

You can also use the same principle if you want to align the element in the middle of the page vertically, by using top: 50%.

A little music trivia on this Leap Day?

A friend recently posed an intriguing bit of Beatles trivia to a group of us. We were gathered to watch Julie Taymor’s, Across the Universe, an excellent collection of Beatles classics tied into a compelling (if a little contrived) story of love, war, drama, and of course, music! Here is the trivia question:

What of the plethora of Beatles’ songs start out with the exact words in their title, and in addition, start exclusively with vocals?

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