The Power of a Link

We're going to be working with an agency to design the new site we're working on and while putting together some information for them, I was running our Gardening in a Minute site's numbers (shout-out to Google Analytics!).

There was a HUGE spike in visits on June 7 - more than twice our daily average. That's great, but something that weird, you've gotta dig a little deeper. Looking at the sites through which people found us (did they Google us, click a link on the university site, etc.) I see an equal number of visits coming through www.baynews9.com, a Tampa Bay television station's Web site.

Visiting baynews9.com, I find an article published on, yep, you guessed it - June 7, titled "Gardening: a growing trend as fuel prices rise." And what should they list in their "more information" links but little 'ol Gardening in a Minute.

So a significant number of people who've probably never heard of us before are now aware of our Web site, all because of a simple link. Luckily, the radio show will soon air down in Tampa, so they'll be able to hear us, too.

Very Different University Web Site

Check this out: Biola University

It's a reeeaally small Christian college in California, but I was blown away by the Web site. Is it effective? I don't know. But it looks pretty damn cool.

I'm Coming Clean

This is supposed to be my professional blog. But then I realized - I don't want to write about my job - at least, not the technical aspects of it. Because I'm not a techie.

There, I said it.

I fell into this web thing by accident, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I like it. I like the technician aspect; I like making things, having something to show in the end. I'd be a terrible manager. I just don't find "technology" being that exciting to write about. Use, yes, but write about? I'll leave that to "Wired."

Maybe I'll write about the other parts of my job, like how I'm learning so much about plants and stuff, due to that being the point of the organization that I work for.

The web site that takes up most of my time is http://gardeninginaminute.com, for the one-minute radio show produced by my department.

But I also have Florida Master Gardener Program, Florida School Gardens Competition, and the Center for Landscape Conservation and Ecology.

As you can see, they all use the same template, and that's the template created by Solutions For Your Life, the public face of the University of Florida Extension Service.

My department works closely with the UF environmental horticulture department. What's "environmental horticulture," you ask? Good question. Stupid phrase. It means all plant stuff, except the stuff you eat. Flowers, landscape plants, turf (that's what the industry calls grass - they don't like the word grass).

But since we our show covers all sorts of gardening, we do the food stuff, too - fruits and veggies.

Like I said, I'm learning quite a bit. My coworkers are experienced in agriculture, botany, sustainability - and they're all writers. With masters degrees. Yeah, I feel a little stupid every now and then. But I try to take in every they're teaching me.

Maybe I'll write about that.

The Big Picture(s)

The main web site I manage focuses on gardening - which of course includes flowers. So it only makes sense that our template-mandated 125x125 photos be available in a larger size. After all, there's only so much to admire about a beautiful bloom or luscious greenery if you have to squint to see it.

So I went about the task of figuring out the best way to do this. I decided to go with a specifically-sized pop-up window. We'll put a small link under the regular photo:

And that will bring up a larger image in another window. It will be sized to the photo and won't have a tool bar or address window, just to emphasize its purpose. (Link to larger image.)

This is all accomplished with a small bit of Javascript. I'd like to explain how the script works, but since I don't actually know Javascript, that would be difficult. Like many webmasters before me, I merely copy-and-pasted code that was shared on the always-helpful Webmastersworld. It sounds like cheating, I know, but frankly, I have no interest in learning Javascript. It's kinda like driving a car: you're glad someone put the engine together for you, but you don't have to know how internal combustion works to drive.

Anyone with web experience is probably rolling their eyes right now. The post I found the code on was from two or three years ago - this is old news. But it's new to me, and I can't tell you how proud I was to show off my new "trick" to my coworkers.

"Find and Replace" Stupidity

Sometimes my dumb mistakes are so dumb as to make me laugh.

I've always used target="_blank" in my HTML to make a link open in a new window. I like my links to external sites to open in a new window keeping my site open for the user. I think with our assumed audience that's a good idea.

But the Gardening Solutions site uses XHTML Strict, and target=_blank is apparently a no-no in XMTML Strict. Your code will not validate if you're using it. Say what you will about the purity of validation versus "the page works, why fix it?", I'm trying to play by the rules of the huge institution for which I work. I noticed the web guy who built many of these pages that I inherited used rel="external" and that seemed to work, so I did a handy-dandy search and replace and did the good-doobie thing - I replace any mention of target="_blank" with rel="external" -- not really knowing how it worked.

Guess what - now it wasn't working at all! Opening my site in IE7, I found that none of my links were opening in new windows, not even ones that had previously worked before my little s'n'r - ack!

So after a little research, I realized that rel=external only works with a little Javascript workaround (I know nothing of Javascript). I open up the file called external.js and compare the code to one I found on webmasterworld.com. (Which rocks, by the way.)

It was looking correct until one line. The correct code had:

anchor.rel="external";

My code had:

anchor.target="_blank";

My search and replace had replaced it everywhere - including the one place I needed the "wrong" code.

What makes this even more stupid is I had done the exact same thing with another piece of code a few day ago!

Ah, the adventures of an inexperienced webmaster.