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Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. – Apple Inc.

Guest Blogger: Sarah Lenssen from #Ask5for5
Family photos by Mike Fiechtner Photography

Thank you Richter Web Design and nearly 150 other bloggers from around the world for allowing me to share a story with you today, during Social Media Week.

A hungry child in East Africa can’t wait. Her hunger consumes her while we decide if we’ll respond and save her life. In Somalia, children are stumbling along for days, even weeks, on dangerous roads and with empty stomachs in search of food and water. Their crops failed for the third year in a row. All their animals died. They lost everything. Thousands are dying along the road before they find help in refugee camps. 

At my house, when my three children are hungry, they wait minutes for food, maybe an hour if dinner is approaching. Children affected by the food crisis in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia aren’t so lucky. Did you know that the worst drought in 60 years is ravaging whole countries right now, as you read this? Famine, a term not used lightly, has been declared in Somalia. This is the world’s first famine in 20 years.12.4 million people are in need of emergency assistance and over 29,000 children have died in the last three months alone. A child is dying every 5 minutes. It it estimated that 750,000 people could die before this famine is over. Take a moment and let that settle in.

The media plays a major role in disasters. They have the power to draw the attention of society to respond–or not. Unfortunately, this horrific disaster has become merely a footnote in most national media outlets. News of the U.S. national debt squabble and the latest celebrity’s baby bump dominate headlines. That is why I am thrilled that nearly 150 bloggers from all over the world are joining together today to use the power of social media to make their own headlines; to share the urgent need of the almost forgotten with their blog readers. Humans have the capacity to care deeply for those who are suffering, but in a situation like this when the numbers are too huge to grasp and the people so far away, we often feel like the little we can do will be a drop in the ocean, and don’t do anything at all.

When news of the famine first hit the news in late July, I selfishly avoided it. I didn’t want to read about it or hear about it because I knew I would feel overwhelmed and uncomfortable. I wanted to protect myself. I knew I would need to do something if I knew what was really happening. You see, this food crisis is personal. I have a 4-year-old son and a 1 yr-old daughter who were adopted from Ethiopia and born in regions now affected by the drought. If my children still lived in their home villages, they would be two of the 12.4 million. My children: extremely hungry and malnourished? Gulp. I think any one of us would do anything we could for our hungry child. But would you do something for another mother’s hungry child?

My friend and World Vision staffer, Jon Warren, was recently in Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya–the largest refugee camp in the world with over 400,000 people. He told me the story of Isnino Siyat, 22, a mother who walked for 10 days and nights with her husband, 1 yr-old-baby, Suleiman, and 4 yr.-old son Adan Hussein, fleeing the drought in Somalia. When she arrived at Dadaab, she built the family a shelter with borrowed materials while carrying her baby on her back. Even her dress is borrowed. As she sat in the shelter on her second night in camp she told Jon, “I left because of hunger. It is a very horrible drought which finished both our livestock and our farm.” The family lost their 5 cows and 10 goats one by one over 3 months, as grazing lands dried up. “We don’t have enough food now…our food is finished. I am really worried about the future of my children and myself if the situation continues.”

Will you help a child like Baby Suleiman? Ask5for5 is a dream built upon the belief that you will.

That something I knew I would need to do became a campaign called #Ask5for5 to raise awareness and funds for famine and drought victims. The concept is simple, give $5 and ask five of your friends to give $5, and then they each ask five of their friends to give $5 and so on–in nine generations of 5x5x5…we could raise $2.4 Million! In one month, over 750 people have donated over $25,000! I set up a fundraiser at See Your Impact and 100% of the funds will go to World Vision, an organization that has been fighting hunger in the Horn of Africa for decades and will continue long after this famine has ended. Donations can multiply up to 5 times in impact by government grants to
help provide emergency food, clean water, agricultural support,
healthcare, and other vital assistance to children and families suffering in the Horn.

I need you to help me save lives. It’s so so simple; here’s what you need to do:

1. Donate $5 or more on this page (http://seeyourimpact.org/members/ask5for5)
2. Send an email to your friends and ask them to join us.
3. Share #Ask5for5 on Facebook and Twitter!

I’m looking for another 100 bloggers to share this post on their blogs throughout Social Media Week. Email me at ask5for5@gmail.com if you’re interested in participating this week.

A hungry child doesn’t wait. She doesn’t wait for us to finish the other things on our to-do list, or get to it next month when we might have a little more money to give. She doesn’t wait for us to decide if she’s important enough to deserve a response. She will only wait as long as her weakened little body will hold on…please respond now and help save her life. Ask 5 for 5.

Thank you on behalf of all of those who will be helped–you are saving lives and changing history.

p.s. Please don’t move on to the next website before you donate and email your friends right now. It only takes 5 minutes and just $5, and if you’re life is busy like mine, you probably won’t get back to it later. Let’s not be a generation that ignores hundreds of thousands of starving people, instead let’s leave a legacy of compassion. You have the opportunity to save a life today!
 

There are number of ways to go about this.  Some of the more common (and sometimes complex) ways of doing this is to:

1. Sniff out the user agent string and then based on the results, redirect the user to alternate pages.  The downside to this is that of course new devices and browsers are coming out almost daily.  So unless you plan on keeping that user agent string detection piece up to date, this can quickly become obsolete.
2. CSS Media Queries to specify and detect screen size and type and then provide the same page with CSS rules applied only towards the elements on the page that you want to display for that device.  This is a great approach and it allows you to use the html markup you have already created, but as of today lacks full support from some mobile browsers.
3. Detect screen size.  And this is the method I went with.  It does rely on JavaScript being enabled on the mobile browser, but that is going to yield a fairly high % of compliance.  In short, this method detects the browser size, and if less than a value you specify in the JavaScript, redirects the user to http://williamson.ws/mobile.  The downside here is that you are creating additional pages for mobile devices (more time & effort) but the method is minimal, long lasting, standards compliant, and simple to implement.

To implement:

So, I had my sitemap.xml file recreated (I like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com) and I resubmitted today to Yahoo, Bing and Google and we will see if it makes any difference in the next month.  For now, my SEO rankings for the search term ‘Seattle Web Designer’ are as follows:

• Google = Page 6 (down from page 5 last month)
• Bing = Page 8 (up from page 9 last month)
• Yahoo = Page 8 (up from page 9 last month)

A couple of months ago, I launched a new website for jazz legend, Dick Berk.  Since then I have been meaning to write a quick overview of some of the more interesting features of the site, but these endless beautiful Seattle summer days have kept me from doing so.  Or perhaps, I just haven’t gotten to it,.. until now.

Some items of note;

• The entire site is “above the fold”.  Yes, numerous web designers will tell you this is bad in practice, but this site was so clean, and the background image so striking, that I wanted to keep everything on one page, and have the image scale with each window.  So with that, the site will render on 99% of screens out there.  This site looks amazing on an iPad as well as on a 27″ Apple Cinema Display.
• This site is valid HTML5.  Which really, doesn’t mean a whole lot.  Other than using specific tags and mark-up, the real fancy stuff comes on the next bullet.
• This site is not only valid HTML5, but the audio player portion will play in both Flash and HTML5.  The page will detect your browser’s capability and then give you the necessary playback mechanism, all silently.  And the experience is identical for Flash playback, vs. HTML5 playback.  This all happens with an amazing (and somewhat difficult to implement) jquery utility called jplayer.  Check it out at jplayer.org.
• This last item may seem odd to be included in the list, but I love it.  If you navigate to any page beyond the site root, and click any portion of the background image, you will be brought back to the main page.  Obviously this was easily accomplished by setting an <a> tag on the background image.  Simple, yet effective.

Other items on this site provided by RWD (me):

• PHP contact page
• Website hosting
• Domain name registration
• Custom Fonts
• Complete site design and development
• Organic Search Engine Optimization efforts

I have been busy wrapping up a site that has been in the works for nearly 6 months and it is getting ready for launch this month… can’t wait!  A great client and a great site, but more about that another day.

Here are my search engine rankings for the term ‘Seattle Web Designer’ for the month of June, 2011:

• Google – Page 5
• Bing – Page 9
• Yahoo – Page 9

So that’s a heavy hit on Bing and Yahoo considering I was once as high as page 4.  I need to write more, and get more quality traffic to my sites!

Gregg

I get excited about domain names and up until recently, could get a domain name search sparked from a random conversation, TV show, movie line, dream, thought, bumper sticker,.. the list goes on.  Now, I’m not a recovering addict, I love and embrace my addiction and if anything, have been neglecting it lately due to all of the cool stuff I’ve been working on at my day job.

Let’s be clear, there is a difference between being a URL addict vs. a cyber squatter.  I don’t buy domain names in the hopes that someday I can sell them at a greater price.  I also don’t buy them with the intent of putting a bunch of Google ads and making $5 a month off of random searches.  The reason I buy them is simple, I have an idea for a website that I’d like to make someday, and I want to get the domain name that fits while I still can.

Here’s a rundown of what I own right now:

• campaigntreasuryservices.com (production client site)
• flogbots.com (future project)
• fonttest.com (future project)
• globalthermonuclearwar.net (production project site)
• golfcheater.com (future project)
• golfzombie.com (future project)
• greggrichter.com (production)
• hexcolor.info (future project)
• mattcordier.com (production client site)
• moneygreenleathersofa.net (future project)
• nerdalerts.org (future project)
• nerdfight.org (future project)
• nerdytee.com (future project)
• originalpong.com (future project)
• richterwebdesign.com (production)
• richterwebdesign.net (production)
• richterwebdesign.org (production and also future project)
• seattlewebdesigner.biz (future project)
• thechicagodrummer.com (production client site)
• urladdict.com (future ironic project)
• websiterequirementstemplate.com (future project)
• yulelogs.net (future project)
• yulelogs.org (future project)
• Plus about 10 more that I am not ready to share (personal sites, sites in production, etc)

Feed the addiction

Gregg

Fame, I wanna live forever.  Unless there is an onset of Global Thermonuclear War.

Sometime in the month of February, the website, coolsiteoftheday.com found my WarGames site and featured it as the “cool site of the day”.  This gave me a relative 15 minutes of fame and from there, a nice chain reaction of a few other large sites listing it as well.  Everything from a radio station in Houston, to both a Dutch and Japanese version of coolsiteoftheday (unaffiliated but likely plagiaristic).

The impact on my WarGames site traffic was fairly dramatic.  Here are some stats:

• Unique visitors for 01/2011 = 314. This is pre-’cool site of the day’ traffic.  Not bad for visitors just coming mostly from search engines.
• Unique visitors for 02/2011 = 2,763. Holy crap.
• Unique visitors for 03/2011 = 1,766. Dramatic drop-off from February but still way up there.

All of this of course means better Search Engine Optimization for my site, http://richterwebdesign.com.  Which is one of the main reasons why I built the GTW site in the first place.

That site only took me about 15 hours to make and I find this recent excitement inspiring to make other completely useless websites for nerds like me.

By the way, that screenshot above is the final sequence from my website that only about 50% of site visitors stick around for (you have to play a few rounds of Tic-Tac-Toe while the WOPR completes the launch code).

Gregg