The same thing happened to me! 

My business web site is www.AlphaNetDevelopers.com which was first published to the Web in 2002.  Many web site and programming projects later (five years) the web site was really outdated both in terms of content and design. 

This last month I rolled up my sleeves and got to work to bring it up to date with a fresh new look, recent web site design portfolio and all of the services we actually offer. 

I decided to give the site a Web 2.0 look and feel with a fairly minimalistic design and added a matching company blog so I could quickly add new information, news and tips for web site design and programming. 

Got a minute?  Drop by and visit the new site:

www.AlphaNetDevelopers.com

He led me up the stairs at the front of a condo and dropped to his belly and froze, perfectly still except for a tiny twitching of his tail, intently watching something in the grassy area in front of him.  I wondered what he was doing and decided to follow his lead.  As we waited completely motionless, a black tail appeared behind a garden rock, waving back and forth. 

My night vision adjusting, I could finally see what Mr. Christy had seen immediately; a young skunk sniffing around in the garden, his tail waving in the air, nose to the ground.  As we watched, the skunk investigated the entire garden area, finally shuffling off into another yard and out of site.

We continued down the street, with Mr. Christy leading us into a large parking lot behind a local hall.  Again, he suddenly dropped to his belly and froze, watching the far corner of the lot.  I crouched beside him and strained to see what he had spotted.  This time it was a possum ambling along the far wall.  We watched as the possum moved out of sight into some bushes in the next lot.

We were on the move again, Mr. Christy hyper alert with twitching ears and sudden stops as he saw through his night eyes.  With a sudden leap he jumped up a telephone pole beside us, cat climbing up the side and just as suddenly dropping to the ground, ready to pounce, tail fluffed out and hackles up.  He had knocked down an enormous black widow spider from the telephone pole and was all set to attack it.  I picked him up and soothed him as we walked away.  I don’t think my little cat would have survived a bite from a black widow!

What’s amazing about all this is that if I had been alone I would never have seen these creatures of the night.  Only being out with my little kitten with his incredible night vision and hearing made it possible for me to see them!

He was sitting on the floor looking up at me with an obviously affectionate gaze, quietly meowing to have me pick him up.   I brought him up on my lap and petted him behind his ears, one of his favorite spots. 

He responded by standing on his hind legs and putting his forepaws on either side of my neck, pressing the entire length of his belly against my chest and nuzzling his cheek against the side of my face.  Purring loudly enough to be heard in another room, he begain to lick my face, eyes slitted and obviously in some form of feline ecstacy.  As he gave me his kitten kisses, he began gently kneading my skin with his paws. 

I stroked his fur and told him he was a beautiful little cat.  After several minutes of this extraordinary display of affection he dropped back down into my lap, curled up and went to sleep.  I swear he was smiling!

He wanted my permission to use the lyrics of my poem, “Creation,” which I had posted on my website, Sharlee.com, in his choral work, Creation Canticles, which was to be performed by the Worcester Choral Society.  I granted him permission to use the lyrics.

Several months later Adrian sent me the completed score in a PDF.  I stored it away, thinking it was wonderful that the Internet had made it possible for me to publish my work, and for him to find and put it to use in such a beautiful way.

You can read the lyrics of the poem on my website.  Be sure to watch the flash version of it too, created for me by Lorri Lee Arnason.  The link is on the poem’s page.

http://sharlee.com/poemcreation.htm 

The Creation Canticles was performed in 2004,  and received wonderful reviews.

Here are a couple of them:

West Midlands Network - Making Music
Regional Bulletin May 2004
www.makingmusic.org.uk/westmidlands

Adrian Lucas took over the WORCESTER FESTIVAL CHORAL SOCIETY in 1996 and last year, following in the footsteps of both David Willcocks and Christopher Robinson, he became conductor of the CITY OF BIRMINGHAM CHOIR also.

He has been increasingly drawn to composition in recent years and, although his Creation Canticles is his largest work to date, he has written a number of smaller scale pieces, including a 25 minute carol sequence, Noel, for upper voices, harp and organ. He will be writing a Te Deum for the opening service next year’s Three Choirs Festival.

The texts for Creation Canticles are taken from the contemporary American poet, Sharlee Plett, John Dryden, A.E. Russell, Edmond Holmes and the final number is from St Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun.

In the programme note Adrian Lucas comments that the work aims to be a set of reflections on the wonders of creation, rather than a chronological portrayal of events, and its direct choral writing, colourful orchestration and sense of mystery left a big impression with the listener. Surely here is a work that should be taken up by other choral societies.

From the Worcester Choral Society’s Website
http://www.worcesterfestivalchoralsociety.org.uk/

The Worcester Festival Choral Society is the leading promoter of major concerts in Worcester. As well as being one of the oldest, it is one of most highly-regarded choirs in the country and has a singing membership of about 200. It presents about three major prestigious concerts each year, highlights in the Worcestershire Music and Arts scene.

The Society commissioned a major choral work from Adrian Lucas, Creation Canticles, which was given it’s highly successful premiere in 2004.

It lives in a little popup window that stays open over other windows.  You can drag its little box all over your screen, minimize it, close it, or just leave it open while you work. 

It has a nifty eyedropper that you use to select any part of your screen and grab the color.  Once you’ve grabbed a color, it shows you the color in its sample window and its hex code below.

You can customize the color you’ve selected, adjusting its hue, saturation and luminosity.  Color Cop shows you the RGB value of your customized color and when you return to the front screen, shows the color in selection boxes along with the hex code.

You can copy the hex code from Color Cop to the clipboard and drop it into your graphics editing software.

Color cop remembers the last several colors you worked with and your last screen position, and will remember whatever was there when you last closed it.

It is versatile too, with color code support for HTML hex, Delphi hex, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic hex, and Visual C++ hex.

It is freeware, with no nags and no popups.  You can download it from:

http://www.download.com/Color-Cop/3000-2383_4-10047009.html

I’d love to let him go outside, but he is so little and the town I live in poses many dangers for such a tiny creature.  We get a fair amount of traffic, there are many loose dogs and there are coyotes, one of which probably killed his mother. 

So I read up on training cats to walk on leash.  I learned that if you start them early enough, and have the patience of Job, it can be done although cats never really learn to heel and mind like dogs do.  Good enough.

I went to the pet store and found the smallest possible harness.  They had a harness for a teacup poodle or chihuahua. 

When I got home I pulled Mr. Christy onto my lap and the fun began.  Kittens don’t really take all that well to having a harness put on them and Mr. Christy was no exception.  He was confused first thinking that I was playing with him so every movement of the harness was met with teeth and claws to catch and immobilize the harness.  Then he decided this wasn’t a fun game at all and writhed about frantically as I pulled it over his head and fastened it around his belly.

I let him go and he treated me to an energetic acrobatic contortionist act that was as comical as it was frenzied.  Up on his tiptoes with his backed arched, he flew across the room in jagged bounces frantically chewing at the straps.  Then rolling about on the floor in a mad panic, chasing the side of the harness with his teeth.  He finally came to rest underneath the table panting and looking at me with disgust.  I told him he had done very well and offered him a treat.  On hobbly kitten legs he trotted over to me to accept his treat and his praise. 

I left the harness on him for about an hour and he seemed to come to terms with it, no longer fighting or attacking it. 

Round one accomplished!

I was about to tell her that I had enough luggage when a little gray kitten paw poked through the side of the case.  “You’re going to love him,” she smiled, and zipped open the case.

Deep gray eyes caught and held mine from inside the case and two little paws reached over the edge towards me.  He never took his eyes off me and his tiny mews caught my heartstrings. 

It was a tiny little tabby gray kitten, with tiger stripes on his back and leopard spots on his belly.  We put him on the couch, where he tottered about unsteadily, anxiously mewing. 

“He’s about 4 weeks old, the kids found him caught in a tree at the park and brought him home,” she told me, reaching over and scratching him behind his ears, “his mom was probably killed by a coyote.   He was up a tree, and his brother and sister cowering at the foot of it.”

“Will you take him?  He has nowhere to go and I can’t keep him with the dog in our household.”

And so Mr. Christy moved in with me today.

That’s what I decided to name him.  I had just finished watching Robin Williams as Christy in the movie “What Dreams May Come” and love the character he plays in the movie.

Meow! 

Logical Tags:

The logical tags include the H1, H2, H3, H4, P, BLOCKQUOTE, EM, STRONG AND CITE tags.  There are more, but these are the main tags anyone would use.

The logical tags follow the formal rules of writing college papers or essays, setting the written material out in a logical structure. 

H1 is the title of the piece.  H2 subdivides the piece into broad ideas.  H3 divides the H2 ideas further, and H4 subdivides the H3 ideas.

Within the H tags are the P tags which set out the paragraphs.  The first sentence of the entire piece is supposed to outline the broad scope or premise of the piece.  The last paragraph summarizes the piece or states the conclusion.

Within each paragraph, the first sentence sets out the idea contained in the paragraph.  The last sentence concludes that paragraph.

EM stands for emphasis.  It shows the reader that the writer is emphasizing a point.  STRONG shows that this is a more important point.  BLOCKQUOTE is reserved for quoting from other writers.

The CITE tag is used at the end of the entire article to list the research and supporting documents for the piece.  On the Internet the citations usually include links to the citations. 

Using the logical tags properly makes it easier for text to speech readers to work on your site. It also makes it easier for people to read long articles because people think in terms of little sections and they scan (not read) to what they are interested in.

Plus, the search engines actually do recognize these tags and give a greater weight or importance to them.  The most important tag is the H1 tag.  It is supposed to match the website TITLE tag in the metatag section of your web page.  If it does, you get a better search response on any words in your H1 tag.

Formatting Tags

Formatting tags simply change the appearance of the text or color on a page.  These include the B (bold) tag, BR (Line break),  I (italics) tags.  There are more of these types of tags but most people don’t use them. 

These tags do not tell search engines or directories anything about the content.  They just change the appearance of the displayed information.

Most formatting is done these days with CSS, which has its own set of rules and tags to use.  The logical tags are customized to alter their appearance with CSS.  For example the default setting for the appearance of the H1 tag is a butt ugly HUGE font size with a massive amount of space between it and the text entry.  With CSS you can set the H1 tag to a reasonable size with a reasonable amount of space after it.

Structure Tags

These include DIV, TABLE, TR, TD tags to name a few.  The DIV tag can be used to position or style sections on the page.  The TABLE, TR, TD tags are used to created rows and columns of information.  Design purists take the position that these tags should only be used for tables of data.  In fact, most designs on the Internet use tables to organize the layout of the page. 

The alternative to using tables to layout the page is CSS, which uses the DIV tag to lay out the page.  Since most people have great difficulty using CSS, this isn’t a favored method.  Blogs use CSS layout so you will be sure to encounter this if you are using a blog and try to customize it’s appearance.

This probably explains why the search engines love blogs so much - they use CSS and they are heavily text oriented.  Behind the scenes, the headers on your blogs are actually H tags.  The blogs use the P tags by default - that’s why you always get a new paragraph, rather than a new line when you press enter.

Out on the road
I leave my troubles and my worries behind
My spirits lifting I just start to unwind
I get a feeling that I just can’t define
 
Don’t really know why must be the gypsy in me
It runs through my heart like a sweet melody
Don’t really know why must be the gypsy in me T
That longs for the road and longs to be free

Out on the road
I leave my troubles and my worries behind
My spirits lifting I just start to unwind
I get a feeling that I just can’t define

Don’t really know why must be the gypsy in me
And I really can’t tell you where this highway will lead
And I don’t really care must be the gypsy in me
That longs for the road and longs to be free

Don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow
But I know I’ll be travelling free

© Copyright 2000 by Sharlee Plett

My blog is powered by WordPress, which they offer to the Internet community free of charge.  That’s pretty cool.  I decided that I should contribute back to the WordPress community and so I’ve made a whole bunch of vintage graphics headers for the WordPress default Kubric template.

I’ve created a blog on WordPress on which to display the headers and post the images so people can use them on their blogs. 

The name of my WordPress community blog is “Victorian Times” - if you’d like vintage headers for your Kubrick template on your WordPress blog, head over and check them out.  I just started on this at the end of November, I’ll be posting new ones each week. 

Here’s the link: 

Victorian Times Blog: http://victoriantimes.wordpress.com

Enjoy!