Daily Network Monitor

Thank you all for the comments on Fixed vs. Fluid Layouts and Browser size. I agree that for a business web site, where the content doesn’t change a thousand times a day, a site with fixed width is easier to manage. Yet, there is something very cool about using fluid positioning on certain elements. I have a friend that works for a museum, and their web site uses some cool and very easy to implement Fluid Positioning: www.pem.org/homepage.

Years ago I built a web site for a specific SEO project - more on this later - for Ziff Davis Media. I relied heavily on the following web site, www.bluerobot.com, which has a lot of great examples on how to implement CSS in many web site scenarios. What’s great is that this site provides the code for you! This was my go to site when I was learning CSS positioning!

OK, the SEO project mentioned above included creating absolute positioned div tags in a relative positioned div wrapper. The point of this project was to get the most important search engine friendly content at the top of the HTML code page, while the content that you see in the browser is positioned somewhere in the middle of the page. Essentially, we wanted to “trick” search engines.

We contemplated doing the same thing for www.whatsupgold.com, but I’ve talked to at least one SEO expert that suggested this type of practice yields little to no advantage to all the trouble that it’s worth.

Comments by web developers and SEO gurus would be greatly appreciated, and look for the new site on May 6th.

I am a web master for www.whatsupgold.com, a site where we let users try, buy, and learn more about the popular network management software. Our main audience are Network Administrators, their bosses, and other IT Folks.

I want to poll other web designers and web developers on how they prefer to layout their web sites. We are in the process of launching a new site in early May that will be wider than the current site (optimized for 1024 x 768, versus the current 800 x 600), but will still include a fixed width layout. I decided to go with the fixed width for a few reasons, with the primary reason being - HTML pages are easier to manage.

What have others found as the main advantages/disadvantages of creating a site with fixed as opposed to liquid width?

Are most web geeks-masters-gods moving to a 1024 x 768 or higher resolution? In our research, we found that 99+% of our audience uses 1024 x 768 or HIGHER screen resolution, hence the switch to the higher resolution.

Therefore, I am using a fixed width of 960 pixels. I chose 960 since it is easily divisible by 3, 4, etc., and it easily fits in a browser width of 1024 with room to spare.

Your comments are most certainly welcome.

Prologue:

Don’t understand what all the huff in the media is about regarding the big telecom companies receiving amnesty for aiding the FBI in warrant-less wiretapping? Here are the Cliff Notes on the erosion of civil liberties in the United States of America and what it could mean to your network.

Act 1: FISA and The Patriot Act

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, requires a warrant to intercept international communications involving American citizens. In 2002, not satisfied with the prompt speed of the secret court that has granted these warrants, President Bush, under the auspices of the Patriot Act, ignored the law and ordered the NSA to intercept telephone calls and emails between people outside of and inside of the United States as long as the target was not in this country.

In 2003, the big telecoms (AT&T, Verizon and MCI) entered into contracts with the Federal Bureau of Investigations, receiving compensation for turning over records. Between 2003 and 2005, the telecoms further aided the FBI in warrant-less wiretaps by complying with at least 739 terrorist-related National Security Letters, circumventing current privacy laws. These emergency letters are self-issued subpoenas. As required by law, for an agent to issue a NSL, the inquiry must be related to an open investigation and partnered with a request for a proper subpoena. However, regarding the 739 letters, few were legitimate.

In an interview with Wired News, FBI Assistant Director John Miller stated, “The contract essentially pays for the man hours or the personnel cost for the people who have to do the work. We want dedicated people who handle our requests or do nothing else.”

In 2006, Mark Klein, a telecommunications technician with AT&T’s San Francisco branch, detailed in a statement, on behalf of a class-action suit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, that the National Security Agency, had been granted access to two massive databases that contained records such as phone numbers dialed and internet addresses visited by AT&T’s subscribers. Klein further suggested that access was being granted to the NSA in other facilities in metropolises throughout the United States.

Nearly a year ago, President Bush and Congress pushed the FISA Amendment Act through, granting the intelligence community the ability to spy without court approval for one year, with the caveats listed above, and retroactively legitimizing five years of illegal activity by the Bush administration.

Act 2: Protect America Act & RESTORE Act

(To Be Continued)