After consulting with our lawyer we will be adding the following to our Terms of Service (TOS) effective immediately…

You hereby grant BlueFur an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the BlueFur Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the BlueFur Service or the promotion thereof.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback post them below or catch me on twitter.

This is simply a matter of demographics. As the baby boomer generation slowly but surely enters retirement age, the talent pool in the workplace will get smaller. The upcoming generation simply is not as large as the baby boomer generation, so many companies will quickly discover that it is getting harder than ever to find good talent.

As such, it is important that you, as a business owner, recognize that your most valuable resource are your employees. This is the resource that will be the most difficult to replace, because the supply side simply will not be able to keep up with the demand side. Whereas you can always go out and buy new equipment, invest in new infrastructure, and upgrade other important aspects of your company, finding the right workers will become an increasingly difficult challenge.

For this reason, when you are working out your annual budget, it is absolutely necessary for you to invest in human resources and the happiness of your employees. Just as you would invest in research and development, investing in human resources may not result in immediate positive results, but it can aid in the long term success of your business.

This not only entails consideration of monetary compensation and other related benefits, but also the other aspects that make for a happy employee. Take Google, for example. They provide their employees with free daycare, lunch, language lessons, and so on. None of these are directly related to their business, but it helps to keep the employees satisfied.

It should be noted that a growing demographic of talent are willing to sacrifice some pay if it means that they are working with a company that they can be proud of. Is your business doing its part to take care of the local community? How is it approaching environmental concerns and what is it doing to address other pressing issues in today’s society?

CDot Networks is a leading managed services provider and will be sharing their expertise for success with an exclusive list of attendees.

Throughout the morning, you will learn about unique information management solutions to maximize your investment and lower total cost of ownership. You will take away key principles of how to secure, evaluate and classify information based on its value to your organization.

CDot Networks expertise will give you a holistic view of solutions in their perfect state, you will leave with a complete vision of solutions available to ensure your environment puts your organization in a position to mitigate your risk and come out of this economic downturn on top.

When is the event happening?
Thursday, April 9, 2009 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Where is it happening?
Wedgewood Hotel – 854 Hornby St – Vancouver

Registration
To register for this event RSVP here.

Javascript is largely based around the Document Object Model (DOM) of a webpage. The Document Object Model is a way of representing HTML documents for querying and manipulating documents. Access to the DOM makes Javascript a unique language, as it allows you access to the webpage as it’s fully rendered in the browser, something no other language allows us.

So, using the Document Object Model, we are able to read information in our HTML and then modify and add information to our HTML – all dynamically. The Document Object Model is basically a nested model of HTML/CSS tags and attributes of the document. This is sometimes referred to as the DOM tree.

There are three top-level branches in the DOM, window, location and document. Most of what we want will be under document. From this top branch, we can branch our further to various places. One way we could go is to get an element in our HTML. But, for right now, let’s look at modifying the document directly.

The Document Object Model can get quite advanced, really quickly. We’re going to just start with adding some text to the body via Javascript.

[code='javascript']document.write('

This text has been written to the document using Javascript.

');[/code]

Using the DOM is it also possible to access styling attributes, normally done using CSS. For example, if we wanted to change the background colour the of the document, we could do this:

[code='javascript']document.bgColor = '#0099CC';[/code]

The syntax of Javascript can sometimes be inconsistent (as you can see with the two examples above), however it does have some consistency to it. Each of the above examples are statements, which have to end with a semi-colon. When referencing the DOM, branches are separated by periods. Like with HTML and CSS, you need to use US English in Javascript.

Next week we’re going to further our discussion of the Document Object Model by talking about elements.

As diligent as you may be with keeping your gadgets fully charged at all times, you may not always have access to wall outlet to charge your cell phone or some other portable electronic device. That’s why having one of these portable battery chargers can come in so handy, especially when you’re on the road and away from your home base.

The Griffin TuneJuice is a portable power pack that can be used to charge the Apple iPhone or iPod (any model with a standard dock connector), giving you that extra bump in battery life when you don’t have a chance to tether your Apple product to the wall. There are other similar power packs on the market that can be recharged through a USB port or wall outlet, but the TuneJuice for iPhone and iPod takes on a different approach.

The pack itself holds no electricity on its own. Instead, you insert four AAA batteries and the energy contained within those batteries can be transferred over to your iPhone or iPod. On the surface, this may not sound like the greenest solution, because you may feel inclined to go through disposable alkaline batteries. However, you could very easily use the TuneJuice in tandem with rechargeable NiMH batteries instead. The ability to use disposables just adds to its versatility.

Using the provided AAA batteries, you can expect one top-up to provide up to 24 hours of music, 6 hours of video, 2 hours of talk time, or 1.5 hours of web access.

The Griffin TuneJuice for iPhone retails for US$29.99 and is available wherever most iPhone accessories are sold.

So last week we cleaned up our error log and created a robot.txt to prevent the majority of error messages in the error log. This week our focus is going to be on creating a sitemap that we can then submit to Google, Yahoo or MSN.

There are several sitemap generators out but for the purpose of our project we will use xml-sitemaps.com’s generator to create a free sitemap.xml file. The free version does your top level links and they have a paid version which will include your whole site. Generating your sitemap is pretty easy…

1. Enter your domain in the appropriate box.
2. Set how often your pages are updated (there is no advantage to doing it more often if you don’t update frequently).
3. When you last modified your site content.
4. The priority of your pages in relation to each other (leave this as the default for now).
5. Click Start and wait for the output.

Once the output is provided scroll to the bottom where it says XML Sitemap content and copy that content to notepad (or your favorite text editor). At this point I would suggest you go through adjust the priority of pages like your index to be weighted higher (set it to 1.0). Once you have done that save your page as sitemap.xml and FTP it to your public_html folder.

Now that you have a basic sitemap you can go and submit it to various places. Stop number one is to submit it to Google through their webmaster tools. If you have not setup an account with them do so now. You can also submit your sitemap to Yahoo and MSN.

Lastly using the robots.txt file we setup last week we will add the following line…

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.ca/sitemap.xml

Replace your domain above as it is just an example. You should do the same for all your subdomains as well to ensure maximum exposure for your sites pages.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.