God help you if you ever need an attorney, but just in case you do, the aforementioned link might be a good place to start.

Well maybe. For a site that touts itself as being a directory for the “Top Lawyers of America,” there’s not much info here to indicate why these particular lawyers might be worth your time. The directory is very sparsely populated to begin with, and while a forum is also available here, there’s been no activity on the message board since last May.

By all appearances though, this is simply an underexposed commercial directory where attorneys pay a fee to have themselves listed, though to the site’s credit, they do include a review and ratings systems for visitors who may have perused the services of these attorneys and would like to report their experiences with them. The sparse number of reviews found here seems not to be the fault of the site owners, but rather because of the directory’s lack of exposure. Regardless, the ratings systems allows visitors to voice opinions that can potentially inform us as to whether a particular lawyer is either worth our time (and hard earned money), or whether he should be avoided for being an evil spawn of hell that only the devil himself could love.

Given that a field such as law seems to have far more bad seeds than humanity could ever tolerate, websites that at least attempt to make an effort to sift the good from the bad deserve to have a chance to succeed. By all appearances, this directory still has a long way to go, but use a little web design consulting to polish its looks, and bring in an expert on SEO and marketing to help it gain more exposure, and we might just have a winner here.

After putting up Google ads on my blog, I noticed scrolling in Firefox seemed to get choppy when the text ads came into view, but when they weren’t scrolling was smooth as usual. Great, another bug I needed to hunt down. I can just forget about getting any sleep this week. Web design, @#$%!

Fortunately though, I got lucky and found out a line in my stylesheet ( background-attachment: fixed; ) turned out to be the culprit. I removed it and presto, the scrolling problem cleared up. My background stayed exactly the same afterwards, so apparently I didn’t even need it there. One of these days I’m gonna get a book on CSS so I can finally figure out what in God’s name I’m putting in my stylesheets. Even now I still can’t get a handle on floats and how they work. But I mean really, float this people. Sheesh.

But anyways, happy to see this irritating bug had quickly been squashed, I surfed back to my blog to double check… and saw an ad for cosmetics staring me right in the face.

What the…? Hellooooo, what happened to relevant ads, Google dudes???

Then it got worse. After refreshing the page a few times, an ad for John McCain’s presidential campaign showed up.

OMG get it off my blog, get it off get it off getitoff!!!! AHHHH!!!!!!!!

I furiously clicked as fast as I could to my Adsense account and read up on how I could filter out some of these ads. Let me tell ya, Google’s Competitive Ad Filter… sux… rocks. You can’t use keywords or even perform a search for ads you’d like to screen. Instead you basically have to check the link properties of a particular ad (since you can’t click on them), and then check out where it links to so you can add the originating site to the filter list. Unfortunately Google’s redirection script turns each link into a 300 mile long streak of cryptic nonsense, so you have to carefully scroll through it until you find the originating URL. This is what I have to go through to keep my blog from advertising lipstick. Good grief, I may as well start subscribing right now to Glamour and Vogue magazines.

Though now that I think about it, my fingernails could use a really good manicure… ohhhhh crap.

As I travel around the blogosphere, I’ve come across numerous tips and advice on how to successfully blog and develop a strong readership. Some of it involves developing a community of friends on social networks that could potentially bring an onslaught of massive traffic to your site. This can be done once you establish a mini-network of friends who can collectively Digg, Stumble or Reddit your blogging content, with you of course agreeing to do the same for them in return (sort of a you scratch my back, I’ll shave yours arrangement).

Some people can be really good at this for whatever reason. Me on the other hand… I can’t make friends in real life, I’m supposed to do it on here? My ass. I begged just ONE acquaintance of mine to stumble my blog so I could get a boost in traffic and of course I got blown off. Obviously this isn’t going to be a winning strategy for me right now. Ahhhhh, if only I were a hot babe, how easier this would all be…..

But anyway…

A few of the blogging experts I’ve encountered also recommended getting an outside web designer to develop the look of your blog for you (and also assist in optimizing it for search engines). Look, I don’t want no designer touching my private goomie gammies, capice? The thought of a third party having access to my code like that just doesn’t give me any warm and fuzzy thoughts, ya know?

But I can understand the rationale behind it. Blogging, or rather, professional blogging is HARD work. You’re basically doing the work of three people largely because it’s a three pronged process: promotion, maintenance and content building, all of which can be full time jobs unto themselves. And because I spent so much time on the former two for the past couple of weeks, I left myself little time for the latter.

Obviously, that will have to change as I try to find a way to balance these three aspects to blogging. But now I’m sorely tempted to just say “You know what? Screw it, it’s time I started BLOGGING, PERIOD.” It doesn’t matter that I still don’t really know who I am as a person, much less what the hell my niche should be. I think I need to just get up and go, and let the words flo’. Maybe this way I’ll somehow be able to create something coherent and interesting enough to attract a readership larger than the 5 people who regularly visit the NPR website.

I’m serious, the government needs to declare all of Microsoft a terrorist group, because quite frankly they are more of a threat to mankind than Al Qaeda is right now.

I was polishing up up my blog when I happened to noticed the colors I changed for a particular table wouldn’t take for some reason in Microsoft’s newest bundle of pure joy, IE7. No matter, since it didn’t affect the layout or anything… but then I glanced down and also happened to notice this HUGE horizontal bar on the bottom scrolling out for maybe half a mile before it ended. Oh no. No no no no…..

It wasn’t showing up in Firefox or IE6, so I knew this was an issue relating to IE7. Just beautiful. Worse yet, as I surfed around my blog using IE7, I noticed a few other things were breaking as well. Why, oh why, did I harbor the hope that maybe, just ONCE, IE7 would somehow prove not to be yet another disastrous release that would cause web designers everywhere to curse and spit at any and all things relating to Microsoft? I had thought IE7 would be just enough of an improvement over IE6 (which itself gave me endless hours of grief) that I wouldn’t have to pay it any mind when coding my blog.

Nope nope nope. IE7 promptly decided to treat my blog like a public restroom, hosing everything down in its path, but in just clever enough a manner that I wouldn’t notice it right away. And now because of those nice folks in Seattle who curiously enough also liked to worship Satan in their spare time, I had to deal with this mile long horizontal bar that was apparently stretched out to cover some 4th dimensional object residing on my blog, seemingly invisible to the naked eye.

So, with the clock striking midnight, I resolved to work this through until I figured out what was causing the problem. What would follow would be a series of deleting/adding code, uploading the modified file, refreshing my page, checking the results, then rinse, wash and repeat. I continued on this neverending cycle until 4AM, when I finally tossed in the towel and crashed on my bed, muttering curses at Microsoft, then sleeping and dreaming that I was muttering curses at Microsoft. I finally woke up around 11AM, somewhat refreshed and ready to pick up where I left off.

After another hour or so of googling for answers, uploading code and swearing yet another blue streak at Microsoft, I finally found an answer. The reason my horizontal bar spanned on to infinity was because the numbers I used to list comments in numerical order were in…. italics.

That’s it. No other reason. Because my comment numbers were in italics, IE7 in its unending wisdom decided it needed to create a horizontal bar that could be wrapped around the earth three times because somehow, that just makes it all better.

I hate those Microsoft coders. I hate them. I hate their mothers, I hate their wives, I hate their children, I hate their pets, I HATE THEM. There are not enough fleas in this universe to infest the armpits of those hacking terrorists to my liking. I long await the day when the earth will open up and swallow the entire Microsoft campus whole, while angels in heaven sing and rejoice over the destruction of the greatest evil the world has ever known, at least ever since the invention of disco.

But in the meantime, I must continue to fight off these demons from infesting my blog, and lend my hand in some small way to assist those who have also been afflicted by this plague of mankind. So here it is: I noticed this problem also occured in those running Wordpress blogs using the Tiga theme. If this describes you, check an individual page where at least one comment has been made (in IE7 of course) to see if you get the horizontal bar as well. To fix, simply change the font style in the class “comment-num” to something other than italic, OR add the line “overflow: hidden” to the class comment header in your Tiga stylesheet. That should resolve the problem.

Fortunately, the other IE7 related issues were easily solvable, and I managed to clean them up just in time to see the sun set in the sky, yet another day stolen from me because of those evil snotbags in Seattle. *Sigh*

I think it’s obvious web design is definitely not for me. I had to do all this with only a rudimentary understanding of CSS, PHP and XHTML, and things have gotten a wee bit more complicated since I built my first webpage back in ‘97. Ahhhh the good old days, where you could throw some text up, wrap them in a font tag and low and behold, you had a webpage comparable to Yahoo. Now it can suck up all my time just to figure out what relative and absolute positioning means, and why it’s making my blog look like a pile of moose droppings. I can either spend all my time building and maintaining a blog, or I can spend it blogging for real, but I surely can’t do both. I think the time will eventually come when the technology will be so far over my head that I’ll have no choice but to use a service like Typepad just to avoid the chores and anguish of building and maintaining my own blog. It’s kind of sad, but what can I do. I don’t intend to go down without a fight though, so while I can still dance, I say, bring on the NOISE.