With the rush of new browser versions in the last couple of months, I had to refresh myself on two options that I commonly need.  I thought it would be nice to put the methods to do these tasks in the most recent browsers all in one location.  Enjoy!

Resetting Internet cache

Browser “cache” or “temporary Internet files” are your browser’s way of saving you time by not downloading web pages and graphics again that you have already seen. However, in my world of web development, being able to reset your Internet browser cache quickly is very important. When we make even the smallest change to a page or graphic, it almost always requires a complete page refresh by the client.

Google Chrome (Version 16)

1. Click the wrench icon on the browser toolbar.
2. Select Tools.
3. Select Clear browsing data.
4. In the dialog that appears, select the check-boxes for the types of information that you want to remove. Usually you only want “Empty the cache“!
5. Use the menu at the top to select the amount of data that you want to delete. Select beginning of time to delete everything.
6. Click Clear browsing data.

Internet Explorer (Version 9.0)

1. Click the Tools button, and then click Internet options.
2. Click the General tab, and then, under Browsing history, click Delete.
3. In the Delete Browsing History dialog box, select Temporary Internet files ONLY, click Delete, and then click OK.

Firefox (Version 9.0)

1. At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Firefox button (Tools menu in Windows XP) and then click Options
2. Select the Advanced panel.
3. Click on the Network tab.
4. In the Offline Storage section, click Clear Now.
5. Click OK to close the Options window

Show the menu bar

I guess I’m old fashioned, but I really like to have the “File, Edit, View, Favorites, Tools, Help” menu options at the top of each of my browsers, even if it does take up a little bit more vertical space of my monitor. The newest browsers make this setting pretty hard (and in Chrome’s case – impossible!) to find, so here’s the instructions:

Google Chrome (Version 16)

As far as I can tell, there is no menu bar in Chrome! Shocker! All user activities are located under the “wrench” icon in the top right cornder instead (supposedly).  Please comment below if you’ve found an add-in or work around!

Firefox (Version 9.0)

If you’re using Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you now have an orange Firefox button that takes the most common functions and puts them in one menu.

• To temporarily show the old style menus, just press the Alt key.
• To have them shown all the time, right-click on an empty section of the Tab Strip and check Menu Bar in the pop-up menu.

Internet Explorer (Version 9.0)

The menu bar can be turned on or off in Windows Internet Explorer. Here’s how to display it:

1. Open Internet Explorer by clicking the Start button . In the search box, typeInternet Explorer, and then, in the list of results, click Internet Explorer.
2. Press the Alt key.

As a software development project manager at Beacon, I’m also proud to say that I’m both an NPR and data geek, so I was elated to hear a story this week that united all of my passions:  Google Searches Are A Window Into Our Culture.  The tool “Google Correlate” is actually a fascinating window into how people are searching for not only one specific term, but an entire web of other related (or maybe not-so-related) terms.

The political example given in the story was somewhat predicable (Democrats– veggie-loving, fitness buffs; Republicans– meat-loving, weight-loss program participants), but my own searches turned up some interesting results on Google Correlate.  I am just starting work on a new website redesign for a well-known business school and was wondering what kind of associations I’d find if using terms related to that school (thinking I might be able to use this information with regard to site design and features).  Here’s the terms I tried:

• business school– while many of the U.S.’s top business schools are listed, I was surprised to see the appearance of “art schools” and “art colleges” as correlating terms.  Wonder if my client has considered cross-promotion with this demographic?  Could a more “artsy” site design have benefits in this area?
• management school– like the “art” association listed above, I was suprized to find “hospital association” as a correlation with “management school.”  Perhaps another marketing opportunity here?  Would a site feature that included possible hospital careers be helpful to these visitors?
• mba school– oddly, this was a much more common search term in Utah than any other state.  Not sure how we can leverage this, but I’m sure we’ll bat it around for a while!

Also, don’t miss the comic book on the Google Correlate site – fun!  The most important point that the comic book emphasizes and bears repeating here– “Remember:  Correlation is not causation.”  Google doesn’t attempt to explain the correlation between terms, just show it to us in a manner for us to interpret and leverage.  Happy correlating!

Beacon is a development partner for the eCommerce platform ASPDotNetStorefront and has been developing successful eCommerce websites with them since 2007.  Here are some features and functionality that we love about the software as well as a few “tips and tricks” that hopefully you will find helpful!  Please be sure to chime in with your own thoughts and suggestions…

Public Site Features

These are some features about AspDotNetstorefront that we really like and promote to our clients, along with a few links to where we have put some of these features to use.  Note that a few of these items require a purchased add-on for full functionality, but they are generally inexpensive, easy to install and don’t require source code.

Admin Site Features

This headline jumped out at me today as I was browsing the web for new blog ideas:  The End of an Era: Internet Explorer Drops Below 50 Percent of Web Usage.  For years I was a fanatical and defiant IE user– perhaps it was the old MSCE loyalty in me– but eventually I went to the dark side and started using Firefox.

What was interesting to me about this article was actually not necessarily that IE continued to slide in popularity (duh), but that Chrome overtook Firefox (at least in that site’s stats).  The article’s claim that Chrome is now “the technologist’s browser of choice” is certainly food for thought.  Though I reviewed Google Chrome several years ago, soon after its release, I didn’t see a significant advantage versus the browsers I was already using and few of my clients were using it.

However, Beacon’s web developer’s often share their preferences for Google Chrome for its speed and performance and I’ve finally made the jump to Chrome as well.  I find that it is consistently faster and less buggy that other browsers, but what ultimately put me over the edge was an issue with AspDotNetStorefront’s HTML editor and newer browsers.  I administer many AspDotNetStorefront sites and simply couldn’t wait for an upgrade to 8.1 or 9.2ML to use the WYSIWYG editor in admin.  Since the editor continued to work in Chrome, I guess I’ve officially made the switch! Who’s with me??

Here’s a very nice article about website navigation from our partners over at Hannon Hill, the developers of our preferred content management system Cascade Server:  Designing Your Navigation – Hannon Hill Corp.

I’ll also add a content matrix template that I use to record a site’s current and redesigned structure during the analysis phase of the project, before development begins.  There are two tabs in the spreadsheet– one for “current site” and one for “redesigned site.”  The redesigned site is pretty self-explanatory, but the current site information is often neglected in anticipation of starting the new project.  While it may seem superfluous to annotate a site that will be redesigned, documenting the current site ensures that no sections are “lost” during the transition (note that unless the current site map is maintained dynamically, these are rarely kept up to date).

I have seen time and time again that the success of a redesign can often be determined in the first few weeks of a project by how carefully the site is cataloged in advance.  As Kat notes so well in her article:

I cannot stress enough how crucial it is to map out the structure of your website prior to designing the navigation, especially if you are implementing one of the most powerful capabilities of a content management system, namely content reuse in the form of dynamic navigation.

Happy mapping!

Found a super article on “How to Google Like Google Googles” at PCWorld today.  Here are a couple of my favorites tips:

1. It is a constant battle with my middle and high school students to get them to use “authoritative sources” for school work (“but Mooooom, EVERYONE uses Wikipedia and my teachers don’t care!”).  Having seen for myself the misinformation purposely posted on Wikipedia, I still insist on .edu, .gov, etc. sites for research and this tip makes that a bit easier (though the battle rages on…)

   Search certain types of sites or just certain sites. You can search a wide variety of sites by inserting a close angle bracket (>) symbol before the type of site you want to search. For example, [penguins site:>.edu] searches for penguins across all .edu sites; and [crater image site:>nasa.gov] searches for crater images across NASA.gov.

2. Would have been soooo helpful on my three day, agonizing move across the country last year with the dog, two distraught teenagers and a dying minivan:

   Find hotel prices directly on Google Maps. No more copying and pasting the address from one site into a map to see its location–for several major cities in the United States, you can easily see nightly rates when you search for hotels in Google Maps. Try it now: Search for a “hotel in Los Angeles” on Google Maps

3. Not a particularly helpful tip, but makes you really want to be a “Google Master” doesn’t it?  Or is that just me???

   Gmail is a very deep program, with too many tips and tricks to list in this article. In fact, Google categorizes its Gmail user tips into four stages–white belt, green belt, black belt, and master. The tips for each belt can be found at Google’s “Become a Gmail ninja” site. There’s even a printible guide; after all, even ninjas forget their moves once in a while.

I recently provided a client with a list of non-flash animation options (a.k.a. JavaScript plug-ins) for their new home page banner image area. My good friend Wendy Honeycutt came up with a great list that I thought I’d share:

• http://tympanus.net/codrops/category/tutorials/
• http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/HoverSlideEffect/
• http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/CompactNewsPreviewer/
• http://www.serie3.info/s3slider/demonstration.html
• http://galleria.aino.se/
• http://www.gcmingati.net/wordpress/wp-content/lab/jquery/svwt/index.html
• http://css-tricks.com/examples/StartStopSlider/
• http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/examples/image-rotator/
• http://jqueryglobe.com/labs/slide_thumbs/

*Note: most JavaScript plug-in apps are customizable. Thus, the speed of image rotation, background colors, font styles, and transparencies can be adjusted.  Some really cool stuff out here!!

What are your favorite sites for JavaScript plug-ins?

We spend a lot of time at Beacon, and I mean A LOT, cross-browser testing – to the point that sometimes I feel like I do nothing else! Perhaps that’s why I got such a chuckle out of this great image from “The Shoze Blog“.  Enjoy!

Browser Wars

I found this article very interesting (and annoying??) and wanted to share: FYI: Your site’s email newsletter affects your Google rankings.  What’s next???  Maybe they will start checking Google maps to make sure we have sufficient numbers of cars parking in our lot each day??  Groan!

Full disclosure– Google rankings isn’t my area of expertise, but my colleagues in our Web Marketing department are experts in this area, so be sure to contact us if you have questions!

P.S.  Apparently there’s been some controversy over this article since it was original posted on May 31  and some alternate and contradictory views have been posted on the same site, including some input from Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, so be sure to get all the sides on this issue!

After looking at nearly 70,000 images for hours upon end, trying to figure how in the world I was going to figure out (this century) which files I was missing from a recent product upload, I hopefully typed the title of this entry into Google very late on  Saturday night.  Sure enough, I was thrilled to find the article “How to save a list of files in a folder” at the scarily named “Bloody Computer” blog site.

And the answer to my quandary?  From a command prompt, change to the directory that has the files you need to locate, and type:

dir /a-d /b > filelist.txt

In virtually no time, a text file is created with each file in the directory listed, which I could then easily copy/paste into Excel and find my missing files with a vlookup command.  This even works from a mapped network drive, which is exactly what I needed.  Thank you Jsanderz – whoever you are – you saved my weekend!