I’ve been working too hard again. But a web site I’ve been working on for several months is finally done and released. It’s a site to advertise two condo rentals that are owned by one of my clients.

One condo is a cute 2 bedroom in Playa del Carmen, it’s in the up-and-coming Little Italy section of town. I shot all the photos for this condo and have spent several hours there. It’s a nice place and I’m sure my client won’t have trouble renting it. It’s right around the corner from Quinta Avenida (the 5th Ave. strolling mall) and is close to Playa Mamitas, which is THE BEACH in Playa del Carmen.

The other condo is at Residencial Bay View Grand here in Cancun. And this condo is over the top. It was professionally decorated by Jerry Jacobs, whose work is exceptional. It’s got 3 bedrooms and can sleep 8 comfortably. It’s located on Playa Chac Mool which is one of the best beaches in Cancun. This property is a good deal more posh than the one in Playa del Carmen, but is just as comfortable.

Bay View Grand is a really nice property and this condo is on the 6th floor with views of both the Nichupte Lagoon and the Caribbean. I haven’t seen a sunrise from there but I’m sure it’s spectacular. I did spend an entire sunset there once and that was really special. I’m certain that renters will love this property, but I do think my client is a little crazy to rent something so nice! If it were mine I wouldn’t want to share.

Here are links to the vacation rental site and also to Jerry Jacobs’ site:

• Cancun Playa Luxury Rentals
• Jerry Jacobs Design

Since I moved here from the States I’ve lamented the lack of all kinds of things. Roads without potholes, peanut butter that doesn’t have lard in it, good coffee, Target, organic vegetables and yard sales.

And I mean real yard sales, rich people yard sales, yard sales with NICE things for sale, not the junky ones you get here once every blue moon where everything is overpriced crap.

Along the line of yard sales another thing that has been lacking here is some kind of decent classified advertising web site (you know I really MUST sell that Johnson Brothers tea set that I never use but keep dragging from house to house).

Well I was just reading the DroppedIn blog, way over there in Planet Merida, and it turns out that Malcolm and Jillian have just launched a sweet little free classified advertising site for the Yucatan peninsula, it’s called Yolisto.

There’s nothing much being advertised on Yolisto yet but it’s truly just a matter of time. It’s so pleasing to the eye and so user-friendly that I’m sure it will fill up with lots of tea sets I don’t need in no time at all.

It’s not the same as a real live American-style yard sale but it’s so close that I can almost smell the bargains…sniff, sniff.

• Yolisto: Yucatan Classified Advertising
• Malcolm & Jillian’s DroppedIn Blog

It’s party season in Cancun folks. And this is the time of year when I, yet again, realize that 95% of the people I know here are folks that I met because of the internet. In case you you live under a rock, and haven’t noticed, the internet is an integral part of the social climate here.

And it’s normal for me to meet someone and once I start to yapping to have them suddenly interrupt and say “Are you RiverGirl?”. Click, click, all the connections get made and the online world crashes headlong into the reality of a friendly person standing in front of you. It’s a trip and every-time it happens I try desperately to remember what the heck I actually SAY in my blog…but I usually can’t remember anything and so opt for an uneasy sense that maybe I should be embarrassed, maybe or probably!

Well enough on that, here’s an update on some of our recent parties:

Last weekend we got invited to a party at Mexico Way’s apartment, and when I got there I was lucky enough to meet Mexico Way’s hot shit mother and also her cool friend LurkerGirl (when are we having LUNCH?). And I saw my best buddy the AlmightyAdSenseGod. And also good old (old as in trusty not as in OLD) CancunCanuck was there. And probably some other folks from my online circle of friends, but you know, it was a party and so we were, like, drunk at some point.

All I really remember was some moron who claimed to know everything about everything web related and was such a complete idiot that I was forced to turn my back on him and talk to CancunCanuck about sex instead (she knows a lot). What a tough life.

And then yesterday we had 3 parties to attend, the first was the International Women’s Club’s Holiday Tea. I dragged hubby to it with the promise that he would not be the only man there. And he wasn’t, there were a whole 2 other men there! Poor guy was surrounded by 35 women for 3 whole hours.

After that we had a fiesta over at the casa del AlmightyAdSenseGod (Happy Birthday Dani!), where we encountered another motley crew of online buds from the CancunCare forum including Drewbert and notSteveCoker (who swears he’s not a Republican, though no one believes him). We also encountered lots of beer, Jannet’s yummy curry, birthday cake and the most lovely kitten in the whole world. Truly that little guy puts our 9 cats to shame. Shame, shame, shame on each one of them for not being that cute or cuddly, damn spoiled cats!

Then we finally topped off the day with a party for employees of Grupo Ritco (hubby’s Residencial La Playa real estate gig is with Grupo Ritco) at Carlos ‘n Charlie’s. Remind me never to go to Carlos ‘n Charlie’s again!

I know I’m a complete wuss but the floor was sticky and I had on NEW SHOES! And the waiters kept dropping metal trays just so they would clatter noisily to the floor and the service was impossibly slow. And it was so stupidly loud that the only person I could hear was my husband and, well, I’ve already heard everything HE has to say seeing as he talks all the time, even when he’s asleep.

But their biggest crime was that my fake-yarda-sized (2 not 3 foot tall) mango margarita had about one tablespoon of cheap tequila in it. And on top of that those people put too much sugar in everything, the marg had more sugar than booze, the appetizer had sugar in it, the entree had sugar in the sauce. And the cheesecake was so sweet I couldn’t eat it (it didn’t help that it was FROZEN solid also). I am completely sure that the chef at Carlos ‘n Charlie’s must be a major diabetic who is trying to spread the fun! Still, the Grupo Ritco people were all nice, location aside. Hopefully they will have another get together somewhere a little more conducive to, you know, enjoyment!

And looking at my calendar I see at least 5 more parties are scheduled on the immediate event horizon. Some how I’ll just have to muddle through, what a tough life.

Well, actually, I just envy his gignormous talent so much that it HURTS! He recently gave a face-lift to his Simple Bits web site and it’s just full of all those little touches that make the web designer in me drool. I’m just a droolin’ and a droolin’ all over the floor, what a mess.

His use of color is great as is his use of type styles. And his use of {brackets} as his persistent page indicator is just so subtle and effective that I will have to steal it the next chance I get (clients, be ye warned). And his code is so nice and neat and clean that it just makes me want to break out in hives of jealousy.

I saw Dan speak at the WebVisions 2006 conference and he impressed me with how easy he made everything look. And then I read one of his books and it made everything look so easy. Well, screw you Dan for making it look so easy. (And thanks for the inspiration!)

See the Simple Bits site.

I was running the loop in the Parque Kabah, here in Cancun, this morning and I came around a corner and suddenly the entire path in front of me was underwater. The recent heavy rains we’ve had here have left their mark, and that mark is lots of mosquito-larvae-infested pools of standing mucky brown water in my park (that and all those potholes I keep raving about).

My first reaction was to get upset because running is all about rhythm. And this water in my way was breaking my rhythm. Suddenly I had to pick my way slowly around the edge of this huge pool. That meant a significant off-trail trek involving balancing on tippy rocks, jumping farther than I can and trying my best not to use any of the nearby Che Chen trees to help me balance (Che Chens cause an awful skin irritation when you touch them). Needless to say all this fussing about destroyed my “running mode” which was no fun.

As I began running again I started thinking about work, normal for the girl who dreams in standards-compliant xhtml with some CSS on the side and a little Javascript to spice things up. And I finally figured out why I hate it when web designers and bloggers put hyperlinks in the middle of paragraph text!

The reason is because hyperlinks in the middle of a paragraph break the rhythm of the reader. They are like that stupid huge puddle in the middle of my path when I’m running. They are a diversion from what you were already doing. And they are an invitation to get side-tracked.

When I see a hyperlink in something I’m reading I have to decide whether to stop reading mid-paragraph and go see what this link is about, or to keep reading and visit it later (knowing I may well forget to). If I stop reading and visit the link then there’s a good chance I won’t finish reading the original paragraph (like most people, I’m easily distracted). If I decide to wait to visit that hyperlink until later then I always find myself wondering if I missed something that would add to the value of what I’m reading.

As a general rule it’s a bad idea for a web designer to give users anything to wonder about. Users shouldn’t have to think or wonder about how to get what they need, or get what the author intended, from a web page. It should be obvious. And so from now on my new method will be to put hyperlinks that are relevant to my pages together in a list, so the user can decide to visit them independently of deciding whether to read the content on that page.

• Info on Parque Kabah
• Info on Che Chen Trees

One of the things we web designer types do is pay attention to where the visitors to our web sites come from. I use a program for this that gives me a sense of where they come from, what they do on my sites and where they go when they leave.

Well, I was just perusing my stats and figured out that my husband’s site Mexico Beachfront Real Estate, which I only released on October 8th, is rising fast in both Google and MSN Search, and is even number one for a couple of phrases.

The funny thing is that his site quickly gaining on both the Grupo Ritco site for Residencial La Playa and also the site that belongs to his boss there (she’s also an independent real estate agent). And both those sites have been out for a long time and have a lot more incoming links. But lately I’ve been finding that my sites are doing well in the search engines, especially the real estate sites I’m working on, I think it’s because I carefully studied the other major real estate sites for this area and have identified their weaknesses…shhh, don’t tell.

The other crazy thing that I just noticed is that this blog is ranked 4th on MSN Search (at this moment) for the phrase “Cancun Murder 2006″. Now really people, tell me, AM I THAT MOROSE? Do I deserve this? Do I talk about murder that much? The blog entry that’s being found is, admittedly, pretty negative but don’t all those posts about my stupid cats balance that out? I mean really.

Oh, and you might notice the new header graphic. I just got sick of looking at those green leaves so I did a 10-minute makeover on the site (which took half an hour of course). One of the joys of using CSS (cascading style sheets) is that I can change the header graphic and then go into the CSS file and search & replace all the blue text, change it to brown and voilá I’ve got a whole new look, well, a sort of new look anyway. I should really change out that dull boring green background…next time.

Here is a great little podcast from Paul Boag which provides a great mini-history of the internet and of HTML, along with a convincing argument for the use of web standards. It’s called the Business Benefits of Web Standards. Paul has a long lead in time, but it’s worth the wait.

If you own a web site, any kind of web site, you’ll get something from this podcast. And you don’t have to be technical to get something valuable from it. Be sure to watch the slides.

More proof that all I do is work…I’ve just released the Spanish version of the Condo Marketing International web site. I think I encoded all those pesky little accents properly, so it should look right in all browsers. There’s still some behind-the-scenes stuff to do in Spanish and I really should be preloading all those pictures… but the text is there and that’s enough for a Friday night.

Ok so it’s shameless plug time! In a big way too! I just released a new web site for my husband, Arturo Rivero, who is a representative at Residencial La Playa Cancun, the new beachfront real estate project north of Puerto Cancun. The web site is here:
Mexico Beachfront Real Estate.

Until now there has been very little information in English available about this project, but we went through all the marketing documentation and translated everything. You will find up-to-date pricing and availability linked down at the bottom in the footer area (as a printable PDF, and subject to change without notice). And there are lots of pictures and a full description of the project and the amenities that will be available.

Residencial La Playa will be a pretty sweet project when it’s done, with all 180 condos having terraces facing the Caribbean. And while I first thought it looked expensive, after seeing Bay View Grand and hearing the pricing there I think that Residencial La Playa is very reasonably priced for brand new Cancun beachfront real estate. And it’s much more convenient than Bay View Grand if you will be working in the downtown Cancun area.

The site still needs a few things. Namely the gallery page needs a description of each image and each image needs to be a link to a larger image, I’m just waiting for an IT guy to get me those bigger images (I’m always waiting for an IT guy to do something…). And I think there are some spots with awkward wording so I’ll be editing those too. Oh and I need to take a nice pic of hubby and put that up.

So if you know of anyone who’s looking for a beachfront condo in this area be sure to have them check out this site. And if you have any constructive criticism about the site I’m all ears.

My first email address was with Compuserve, and I think I got it sometime back in 1993 or 1994. I’m pretty sure it was sometime before Jerry Garcia died (August 9, 2005) because I have a snapshot in my mind of what my life was like at that moment and I know I was using the web for communication by then.

Back then spam was pretty much unheard of. In fact, you were lucky if you got email because just not that many people had email addresses back then. I remember feeling fortunate that my close family members did have email in those days, since they did not live nearby.

Well things have changed. I now get close to 100 email messages a day.

And I now have more than 10 email addresses, most which I check every day. I have email addresses for work, for friends, for specific things I do and for specific companies I do business with.

For example, I have a PayPal account and I have an email address just so PayPal can send me email (I give it to no one else, ever). This way I can easily keep track of which emails that appear to be coming from PayPal have a chance of being real. PayPal client’s are the target of many scams designed to get them to divulge their login information (these are called Phishing scams, see below for more info), so I am wary of any emails I get from PayPal. I do something similar with my banks and credit card companies, I use email addresses that only they know, and I do not use those addresses for anything else.

One of the email addresses I have is for spam. I give it to almost every organization that I do business with. I give it to online vendors and environmental groups and to people I don’t know. I give it to anyone likely to sell my email address. And also to anyone who is vulnerable to having a disgruntled employee rip off their database and sell it. Basically if they HAVE a database of email addresses then I give them my spam email address.

And so far this scheme is working pretty well. I get virtually no spam to the email addresses that I use for my family, friends and my own work. And my spam account gets, I don’t know, some hundreds of spam messages a week, nearly all of which are caught and deleted automatically by a spam filter. And this way I am keeping close tabs on my banks as well.

More Reading on Phishing:
Wikipedia Definition of Phishing
Anti-Phishing Working Group