News at BobsHowTo
11/24/2007
I've been revising the structure of many of the site's pages. In doing so I seem to have corrupted quite a few pages, sorry! I believe I have corrected most of the errors, but if you see something unusual, please email me at bob at bobshowto.com with the @ sign in place of the word at. The junk mail is becoming overwhelming, but I can't afford to miss any legitimate email from my visitors. And thanks for visiting.
I hope as a result of these changes to speed up the website a little more. I may be altering the appearance of the background of all the pages to some extent. I do hope to keep the format very similar. Bob
11/09/2006
No news is good news! Actually I hope I have improved the page load time of the site. The text content is given precedence over other content. Please forgive the ads, but it does cost money to run and maintain the site! As always I avoid popups and also I try to avoid any kind of flashing ad, but at times this is impossible. If it's subtle I may show it, sorry. I apologize again about the deck ceiling plans (guidelines may be a better term). I do have what I feel is a very good design now and will be documenting it in the near future. I also have the advantage of actually having tested the design through one winter season and it performed as expected.
03/09/2005
I've been using the Firefox browser to some extent and hopefully I've been correcting relatively minor problems related to rendering using Firefox and all the common browsers.
12/29/2004
Removed ads by Magazine City.com. They no longer have an acceptable Better Business Bureau report. Magazine City BBB Report.
12/22/2004
Finally by hook or by crook, I've managed to enable GZIP compression of this websites content. My web host made this difficult to do, and it should be trivial. For the 56K modem user this can mean a 3 to 4 times faster page load of the www.bobshowto.com web pages. Remarkably only 10%-20% of the web sites out there support GZIP compression. This is probably mainly due to stingy web hosts, the businesses that host the web sites that you find on the Internet. Unfortunately if you have Norton Internet Security on your computer this GZIP compression is disabled! At least for the 2003 version of NIS. Turn off the security feature and you start receiving compressed web pages from my site and even Google™ too!
12/14/2004
Revised site to use Iframes for certain content, again for speed of presentation of content.
12/2/2004
In an effort improve site performance I have downgraded the appearance of the site once again. Hopefully this will improve page load times for those with slower connections (like me at 45.2 in the Endless Mountains). I hope in the near future to take advantage of some tricks on my server using sub domains to tune up performance. I believe the changes made today will reduce page load time by 3 to 4 seconds.
8/19/2004 NBAF Magazine subscriptions has bad BBB report.
NBAF magazine subscriptions (www.nbaf.com) did have a good Better Business Bureau report, this is no longer the case and the BBB says NBAF is no longer a member. Today I have ceased all NBAF advertising I had on my site. I'm also wondering whether I will receive the two magazines I renewed through NBAF!
08/15/2004 Company sneaks in Pop-Up and even file download
A company that had a banner ad at the bottom of my web pages appears to have "snuck in" some delayed "Pop-Ups" and perhaps even spawned a file download. If this happened to you while visiting www.bobshowto.com I apologize. The file download can of course be rejected. I inspect these ads before I insert them in the site, but it is possible for the advertiser to retroactively change the content. Also by placing a "Cookie" on my PC they may well trick me into not realizing there are "Pop-ups" from a given advertiser. I'm actually not totally sure www.bobshowto.com was the source of these "Pop-ups", but I have deleted one advertiser I suspect of sneaking them in anyway.
07/28/2004 Bad BBB Report
A company I advertised no longer has an acceptable Better Business Bureau report. When I began advertising this company, they did have a good Better Business Bureau report. As soon as I discovered this deficiency I pulled the ads.
The company is : LS Marketing, LLC
The product is Snoring Stopper : http://www.snoringstopper.com
The BBB report: www.labbb.org A revised Hyperlink as of 3/29/2005
6/22/2004 Bit the bullet and moved site to IPowerWeb
Well I had to do it; Epix.net and Microsofts IIS 5.1 are just too unreliable. Google is tough when web pages are not present just once, and even more so if not present twice. If Google misses a page once the page remains in the index in limbo.
The page URL is known but there is no description or summary provided. If Google misses the page twice, you're out of the index for a month, unless your site is scanned daily by Google which some are. So www.bobshowto.com is now hosted by
IPowerWeb:Powerful Hosting - $7.95 - Free Setup. Our home website, which I'm guilty of not maintaining much is still running on my PC using dialup, usually connecting at 46.6 to Epix, although we may choose another ISP soon. Take a look at www.windyhill.info our home website.
6/21/2004 Google Search Page added
I've added a Google search page. Google now allows customizing the search results to match your site. They also allow you to add a clickable banner at the top. So I made up this nice Spectrum Banner that will return you to my search page. I sort of like the blue background with the Google results.
6/4/2004 Bob at BobsHowTo.com email address stolen by virus
My primary email address is now being used, probably by a virus, to send mail and sometimes even send viruses to email addresses I have never heard of. Apparently this is a very common occurrence. This has probably been going on for about 6 months. Anybodies PC that is infected
with certain viruses will send out emails, emails perhaps containing a virus. These emails will appear to be sent by people you may have added to your address or contacts list. I know my email address has fallen victim to this because I receive emails from mail servers saying mail I
personally have never sent has been rejected by the server because it has a virus attached, or the person no longer exists, etc. To date no one has actually complained directly to me about these problems, and I don't look forward to that day. I really hate to cause any of my visitors
inconvenience! What I could do is send emails to visitors that have written to me, but this may be viewed as spam, so it is a tough decision. Please let me know at Bob at BobsHowTo.com of your opinion about this if you have emailed me in the past. You'll note that I continue to
avoid using the @ sign in an effort to defeat automated email address searches, thereby hopefully avoiding spam and reducing my exposure to email address theft. I hope no one is inconvenienced by these occurrences. Here are some links regarding the topic:
http://www.businessknowhow.com/tips/email-stolen.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/services/email/virus.html
5/23/2004 Significant change to BobsHowTo.com site navigation
I've made a significant change in the site layout. The navigation remains the same, but the navigation bars have moved. This new layout should improve page download time. Also I hope it will be easier to navigate the site; with the navigation bars near the scroll bar, hopefully, I won't be putting as much wear and tear on your mouse or you hand for that matter. Any obvious problems please let me know Bob at BobsHowTo.com. Replace the "at" with "@". I have noted with this change that on some pages the text may jump or "rewrap" once, sorry, hope to fix it! Thanks, Bob