Note that the Obama failure will end with the inauguration of the next president, which is scheduled to occur on January 20, 2013, at 12 Noon, Eastern Standard Time. In computer system time, this is 1,358,701,200 (seconds since Jan 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC).

The first option, if you would like a static clock, is to create it using PHP. This clock is calculated by the web server, and will only be updated whenever the web page is reloaded.

<?php
  $datearray=getdate();
  $sectot=1358701200-$datearray[0];
  $seconds=$sectot%60;
  $mintot=floor($sectot/60);
  $minutes=$mintot%60;
  $hourtot=floor($mintot/60);
  $hours=$hourtot%24;
  $days=floor($hourtot/24);
  echo($days);
  echo("d ");
  if ($hours<10) echo("0");
  echo($hours);
  echo("h ");
  if ($minutes<10) echo("0");
  echo($minutes);
  echo("m ");
  if ($seconds<10) echo("0");
  echo($seconds);
  echo("s");
?>

The second option, for a dynamic clock, is to create it using Javascript. This clock is calculated by the web browsing computing, and it will update the clock once per second.

First step, create a file called “obamacountdownclock.js”, containing the following function:

function obamaCountdownClock()
  {
  var now = new Date();
  var tnow = now.getTime();
  var msectot = 1358701200000-tnow;
  var sectot = Math.ceil(msectot/1000);
  var mintot = Math.floor(sectot/60);
  var seconds = sectot%60;
  var hourtot = Math.floor(mintot/60);
  var minutes = mintot%60;
  var days = Math.floor(hourtot/24);
  var hours = hourtot%24;
  if (hours<10) {hours="0"+hours};
  if (minutes<10) {minutes="0"+minutes};
  if (seconds<10) {seconds="0"+seconds};
  document.getElementById('obamaclock').innerHTML = days+"d "+hours+"h "+minutes+"m "+seconds+"s";
  t=setTimeout('obamaCountdownClock()',1000);
  }

Next, in the head section of your html code, add the following line to load the previous javascript file:

<script type="text/javascript" src="obamacountdownclock.js"></script>

Finally, add the following text inside your html code, where you would like the clock to appear:

<span id="obamaclock"></span>
<script type="text/javascript">obamaCountdownClock()</script>

Enjoy!

Note: If you are viewing this page through a different browser (i.e. AOL, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Safari, Opera), please close it out and reopen through Internet Explorer or all features of this application will not work.

Also, recently, I was required to complete an online orientation course for a college where I currently teach. (I will not mention the college name here, although you could probably figure it out if you view my resume.) I attempted to access the course with Mozilla Firefox, my usual browser. No good. Next, I tried Opera. No good either. By now, I was irritated. I tried both Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome out of spite. As expected, their website failed again. Finally, I turned to Internet Explorer and was able to access the course. Later, I found the system requirements page for their website, and Internet Explorer is listed as a requirement.

Now the scary part: This college offers an associate degree program in Web Development!

This aggravates me. Not everybody uses Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Depending on who you ask, anywhere from 50% to 80% of people browse the web with Internet Explorer. Or, alternately, 20% to 50% of people use a different browser; this is a significant number of people.

I’ve seen this before. Do you remember the old “Best viewed with Netscape” and “Best viewed with Internet Explorer” buttons that commonly appeared on most websites a decade ago? It was a nightmare. Half of the websites did not work properly with your preferred browser. I thought we were past these “browser wars”.

This is why we have web standards.

One of the major issues on the web is making sites available to all people, whatever their hardware and software. Presently, all modern web browsers possess decent support for web standards. Is it not reasonable to expect web sites and applications to conform to these standards?

There is no good excuse to not adopt web standards in your web development work. At the very least, you should check that your web sites and applications work properly in the five major browsers: IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.

But, now, how will people find it? Usually through one of the internet’s search engines.

You can wait for the search engines to find your site, but that may take a long while. Or, it might never happen, especially if no other sites listed in the search engine link to your site.

If you are impatient, you can easily present your web site for inclusion by manually submitting the site to the search engines.

There are four major search engines you should know:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Bing (a.k.a. Microsoft Search, Live Search, MSN Search)
4. Ask.com

Three of them (Google, Yahoo, & Bing) allow webmasters to create an account where they can control some information available on the search engines.

All four accept the submission of Sitemap files.  A sitemap is an XML file listing of all URLs for a site, along with some additional information about each page.  Visit http://www.sitemaps.org for more information.  Go to  http://mikedaub.com/sitemap.xml on my site to view an example.

If you would like to exclude files or directories of your web site from the search engines, they (probably) follow the robots exclusion standard. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org for more information.  Go to http://mikedaub.com/robots.txt on my site to view an example.

Google

Google Webmaster tools (and to submit sitemap)
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
You may need a Google/Gmail account to register

To submit website to Google, go to:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo

Yahoo Site Explorer (Webmaster Tools)
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
You may need a Yahoo account to register

To submit both websites and sitemaps, go to:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Bing

Bing Webmaster tools
http://www.bing.com/webmaster
You may need a Windows Live (Hotmail, MSN, .NET Passport) account to access the webmaster tools.

To submit your site to Bing, go to:
http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

To submit your sitemap to Bing, go to:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

(replacing www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml with the actual sitemap address, of course.)

Ask.com

No webmaster tools.

No means of submitting single web pages.

To submit sitemap, go to:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

(replacing the web address as above)

FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) is a system of machine-readable pages for describing people and their connections. It is written in RDF (Resource Description Framework), a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web.

FOAF is open. Anyone can use it to describe himself or herself. You can describe yourself, your activities, your interests, your projects, and your relationships to other people.

FOAF is decentralized. You may create large social networks without the need for any centralized database.  You are able to connect to the web sites and services you like, without being cut off from friends who do not sign up with a specific social network choice (like FaceBook or MySpace).

And all of the public FOAF data on the web is already being indexed by search engines, including Google’s Social Graph.

For more information, go to the FOAF Project web site or read the specification.

I have a FOAF file at http://mikedaub.com/foaf on my personal web site. I list my email addresses (encoded with SHA1), my internet messaging accounts, my web sites, my OpenID‘s, my projects, my online accounts, some of my interests, and a few of my connections.

Feel free to link to me from your own FOAF file. Also, let me know when you do link to me, and I will be happy to return the favor. If you link to me, the information I prefer to have listed is:

<foaf:Person>
  <foaf:name>Mike Daub</foaf:name>
  <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>36ab1fc065a361956a53d67285fcf5129017ceea</foaf:mbox_sha1sum>
  <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://mikedaub.com/" />
  <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://mikedaub.com/foaf" />
</foaf:Person>

Now, if you have not done so already, go FOAF yourself.

The Opera Web Standards Curriculum is a free online tutorial course takes students from complete beginner to having a solid grounding in standards-based web design, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript development.  This excellent course was created by Opera Software (makers of the eponymous web browser) to promote web standards, efficiency, ease of maintenance, accessibility, device compatibility, and search optimization.

W3Schools is a collection of free HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, WAP, ASP, SQL tutorials with lots of working examples and source code. Their web site is a useful reference on a wide range of topics.

The World Wide Web Consortium, also known as W3C, develops the standards, protocols, and guidelines that make the world wide web operational. They also offer the Markup Validator, a free service that helps check the validity of your web pages against the web language standards.