Sunshine Lewis

Sunshine Lewis is a web professional. She would like to keep this bio short to reduce the risk of saying something embarrassing. She really likes databases and making the web more awesome through appropriate use of language, data and web standards. Also, video games.

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As an infographic: http://t.co/jiGqRpx1KS

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Is .121 the same as .12 or .100?

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For practicing.

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the "applying transformations to {filename}failed" could occur because of unrelated errors. The temporary work around is to go through the wizard steps of doing a full deploy (Build->Publish Web Site).

This saved me an afternoon of rage. thanks Blake Pell.

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Some really nice features.

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12 things about DNS

Did you know....

There are multiple types of DNS record but the two you probably care about are A and CNAME.

"A" records point to IP addresses and are required for the domain root to work.

"CNAME" records point to urls and are required for subdomains to work.

this.com is a domain. Well technically .com is the domain and this.com is a subdomain of the top level domain (TLD) .com.

www is a subdomain of the second level domain this.com. But for casual conversation you won't care. And that is probably fine. But it's all pretty fascinating. Main thing is, if you're speaking with network minded people about getting things done, the same words can be used to mean pretty different concepts.

DNS records are stored in zone files

Zone files are stored on name servers

To make a domain resolve to a web server, you need an empty A record pointing to the IP of that server.

The empty DNS A record is sometime symbolized by an @ sign.

You can also have wildcard DNS records, symbolized by the asterisk (*)

A wildcard DNS entry will only catch traffic for subdomains that are not defined later in the DNS zone file. Not for "everything" (the way wildcards typically behave)

It also helps if you point your domain to the correct name servers.

All that to say, I finally got my domain sorted out so you can get here even if you don't type in www. I'm only sorry that it took me so long.

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How I chased and exorcised an Umbraco ghost.

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The YouTube Creators are doing free video production workshops Wednesdays at noon. The workshops will cover pre-production, production, and post-production.

View the full schedule

You drop in on any that you like or go back and view recordings of the ones you've missed on the YouTube Creators Google+ page.

In addition to the opportunity to learn more about video production, this is a chance to see how G+ works as a method for sharing information and connecting with your audience(s).

Very nifty.

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Excellent manuals for making PDF files accessible. Includes exercise files!

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Wrong type parameter supplied to a PDS procedure

Problem

You've meticulously tagged a PDF form using Acrobat X but when you run the Accessibility Full Check, you get this message.

Wrong type parameter supplied to a PDS procedure.

Possible Solution

Check for form fields (usually tagged "FieldName - OBJR" by default) that have duplicate tags. One of them is the cause of the error. Delete one (or both) of them and retag the form field (annotation).

Background

Googling this shows that this could happen for a few different reasons but they all have something to do with form fields.

Using that clue as a starting point I made a copy of my completed PDF and started the classic troubleshooting divide and conquer. Once I figured out that I only got the error message on page 2, I started deleting sections of tags on that page until I could get the check to run again. 

Apparently it's not enough to just delete one of the duplicates, you have to delete the correct one. That's why it may be faster/easier to just delete both and retag that annotation.

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We as an industry have to stop thinking that our job is making wrappers. Our job is not making templates. Our job is not making buckets that people can put stuff in. Our job is making an experience and that experience includes figuring out what the content is.

Karen McGrane - We are all content strategists now

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About the website:

FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better - mainly through data visualization.

Immediately compelling. Also beautiful and interesting.

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Very pretty infographic explaining the basics of search engine optimization.