A couple of us had a few minutes left in our lunch break so we decided to take a stab at early voting. We parked, walked to the voting precinct, voted and walked back to our car in only 12 minutes!

You too can exercise your civic privilege from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays at the Board of Elections office in Civic Hall at 155 E. Washington St. in downtown Athens.

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This website can help you locate gas availability.

Go to Wright Express

1. Enter your location or zip on the link below
2. Enter your fuel type.
3. Click Submit
4. Click on the transaction time twice to sort descending...it looks like the transactions
   are updated every 5 minutes.

So, the stores with the most recent transactions should have gas. Hope this helps.

If you've ever worked with CSS, you know what a pain it can be to get things looking right in all of the major browsers (Firefox, Safari and IE). IE is, of course, the major offender, causing extreme frustration at times. With the release of IE 7, the Microsoft dudes made a giant stride in standards compliance, but IE 6 is still hanging around in the fringe (I think the percentage of users on this site is only around 9%). So, that means haxoring the codes to make the site look acceptable in Internet Explorer 6.

When we first launched the new version of the site, we included a notice heading telling users with IE 6 that we suggest they upgrade to a modern browser (IE 6 was released in August of 2001!!). Well, we got a little bit of flack for taking the easy way out. So, I put on my big-boy pants (once again) and went to work on IE 6 compatibility. Here are some of the tools that I used to accomplish this:

Parallels Desktop - A wonderful invention. Let's me run Windows from within OS X. I can test on Firefox (Mac and Win), Safari(Mac and Win), and IE all at the same time!

IE Conditional Comments - I actually have to hand it to the Internet Explorer development team for including these. They knew their browsers would require a little extra attention and some off-the-wall tricks to get things looking right. Just put this in the HEAD of the page to apply CSS styles only to versions of Internet Explorer less than 7:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
  <style type="text/css">
    #custom_style { just:for_ie; }
  </style>
<![endif]-->

IE7 Script - Equally as important as the conditional comments. This script will update IE 6's CSS rendering to be compatible with IE 7. After including this script in the site, it fixed about 50% of the IE 6-specific problems. It even has support for transparent pngs as background images! Invaluable.

While the site still doesn't look perfect in IE 6, it's definitely pretty close. If you see something odd in any browser that you're using (except Netscape, I don't acknowledge its existence), please send an email to support@plexusweb.com and let us know.

At Apple's press event last week, Steve Jobs announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have downloaded over 100 million apps since Apple's App Store came online. That's a lot of downloads, approximately twice the rate of song downloads from iTunes, according to Apple.

But how many of those apps add value to our iPhones, and how many are simply diversions which illustrate the kinds of neat tricks one can pull with a built-in accelerometer? A large number, like the "Beer" app, which shows a glass of beer on your touch screen which empties if you tilt the phone, are utterly useless except as novelties for idiots. Others, like the interface apps for Facebook, mySpace, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc, make it easier to interact with those sites, which is great if you use those sites. A large number of the apps are games, some of which are more fun than others (Labyrinth LE being one of the best examples), but none of which are really useful in any way other than as time-killers. Still others, like the impressive "Shazam", do really neat things that don't really have any practical value.

The best apps, as far as I'm concerned, are the ones that expand your iPhone's potential as a convergence device, taking advantage of things like the built in GPS or WiFi connection to add new (and perhaps more importantly, useful) things you can do with your phone that it didn't do straight out of the box. Here are two that I think meet that description:

1. Apple Remote: One of the few applications developed by Apple so far for the App Store, Remote allows you to control your iTunes via WiFi, turning your phone into a remote control for your music system. What makes this potentially awesome is iTunes' available AirTunes feature, which lets iTunes broadcast wirelessly to stereo speakers via an AirPort Express. That means you can have your home theater, your music library, and your iPhone, all in separate places, all communicating wirelessly, all working together to deliver a 21st century home music experience.

Here's how things are set up at my house: I have an old Windows box that Travis gave me, and that box lives in the attic. It is running iTunes and loaded up with a healthy library of music on its hard drive. It can stay in the attic because I have a remote way of accessing and controlling it: Whenever I want to listen to music, I simply pull my iPhone out of my pocket, access the iTunes library with Remote, find the artist and track I want to hear, and press Play. The Windows box in the attic then broadcasts a signal to my AirPort Express (available from Apple for about $99), which is connected to my home theater system. With no lag time, the music comes out of the high-quality speaker/subwoofer system sounding delicious and rich (that's why I paid for nice speakers, after all). The combination of AirTunes and Remote means I can hide the computer out of sight and seemingly pull music from thin air, just by calling it up on the iPhone. It's just one step closer to my dream of ultra-convergence, the day when every electronic device in my house will be connected to and communicating via the WiFi network -- the lights, the HVAC, the sprinkler system, the TV, everything. And instead of a million remotes lying around everywhere, there will be one remote in my pocket, the one that makes phone calls, plays music, checks your email, surfs the web, and controls every appliance in the house. I'm not there yet, but Apple Remote has brought me just a little closer.

2. Air Sharing: A new release from Avatron Software is Air Sharing, an app which uses WiFi to turn your iPhone into a wireless thumb drive. Need to take some files home from work with you? Air Sharing lets you mount your iPhone as a hard drive, allowing you to drag and drop files onto it wirelessly. The range of acceptable file formats pretty much runs the spectrum from Word docs, PDF's, image files such as JPEG's, PowerPoint files, etc. to video and audio (MPEG-4, MP3, WAV, whatever you need). Then when you get home, just access the files (again, wirelessly) and copy them onto your home computer. Everything is as simple as dragging and dropping between finder windows in OSX, and though I haven't tried it in Windows yet, it should be pretty straightforward. At the time of this writing (Sept. 15, 08), Avatron is offering Air Sharing for free at the App Store for the first two weeks of its release, after which the price will be $6.99.

So, there are two apps that make you iPhone something it wasn't already -- a remote control and a thumb drive. I hope that as the App Store grows, developers will continue to look for ways to make my iPhone into a tool rather than a novelty.

5 steps to gaining site traffic through search engines

The secret to coming up first in Google's search engine results pages is not as elusive as one may think. Not quite as simple as flipping "The Google Switch," but if you work hard, have dedication, and use creativity your site can climb the rankings. Because of what it takes to be perfectly positioned, the process is very much like a competition. Beating the competition (being no. 1 in search results) is an ego booster. It feels good to see your company riding high above your competitors, but when done correctly, your SEO efforts will drive potential customers to your site who are looking for what you have to offer.

Step 1:
Know your Google goals
The process of search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with examining your goals for the project. Map out in a document your benchmarks for success. You should have short term goals and long term goals. These goals determine how to proceed with your keyword research.

• Sell more high-heels through your online store and increase your revenue by 30%.
• Add 200 subscribers to your blog.
• Increase the length of visit by 2 minutes from visits coming from a local keyword.

You must have site analytics to truly measure whether or not you've been successful.

Google Analytics will give you concrete numbers that measure your site's visits, keyword referrals, search engine traffic, and much more. You must look at the before and after data to determine the success of your site's SEO changes.

Step 2:
Successful keywords perform a balancing act
Once you have articulated your goals, you can then examine the best keywords for your campaign's success. We use software to determine a keyword phrase's competition (how many pages Google has indexed for that phrase), how often the phrase is searched, and how relevant it is to a company's goals. Balancing these factors is key.

You can use Google's Traffc Estimator for free, but it doesn't provide all the information to make keyword phrase decisions.

Step 3:
Know your competition
Competitive intelligence is not only stealthy, but a great indicator as to what you need to improve. Examine the other sites standing in your way to high rankings. Look into their site structure, links, keyword phrases, domain age, and more to help determine which factors need improvement on your site.

Step 4:
Examine site structure and content
When a search engine produces search results it has not only examined the content on the page, but it also examines the site's code. It's important to know how to look under a site's hood and determine if the proper tags have been utilized.

Step 5:
Report, examine, and repeat.
After the necessary changes have been made, be sure to report on what has improved or changed in the search engine results (relative to your goals). Examine data from your site (or have us help with site analytics) to determine what changes need to be made in order to complete a successful Internet marketing campaign.

***Plexus does not guarantee to make your site number one in Google. We are just outlining the steps to success. Significant progress with significant ROI can be made with persistence, patience, and proficiency. Anyone that guarantees you the top spot for a Google search probably isn’t an ethical consultant. Be sure to do your research and ask questions in order to find the best SEO partner for you.