Hard drive recall

Western Digital recently announced a "hardware issue" involving some of its hard drives. Certain models of the WD Caviar 5400 RPM EIDE hard drives could fail to power-up after 6 to 12 months of use. The affected drives were manufactured between August 27, 1999, and September 24, 1999; the problem doesn't seem to affect the company's WD Expert line of hard drives. If you suspect you may have an affected WD Caviar 6.8GB per platter hard drive (drive capacities range from 6.4GB to 20.5GB), first visit Western Digital's website. The site contains a downloadable utility to quickly and accurately identify any affected product. If you discover you have an affected drive, Western Digital will ship an advance replacement along with software to transfer all data over to it. You may also want to contact Western Digital's tech support staff at 1-800-357-1374 for more assistance.

Top 20 things not to do on a web page

This list originally came off a Stanford University website nearly 3 years ago. We think it applies just as much now as it did then...

1. Don't crowd images.
2. Don't have a stylistically different icon for every bullet.
3. Don't have too much information on a single page.
4. Don't forget a timestamp.
5. Don't let links drop - check your hrefs.
6. Don't violate whitespace balance.
7. Don't make something look like a button and not work like a button.
8. Don't steal someone else's graphics.
9. Don't repeat the same link with different names.
10. Don't be sloppy with your html - know how the language works!
11. No deadend links.
12. Don't leave the important stuff for the bottom - someone may not make it down that far.
13. Don't forget other platforms and browsers.
14. Don't forget to tell people how big big files are before they download them.
15. Don't forget a webmaster reference.
16. Don't do dangling links - avoid the word "here" - put the link on the item itself.
17. Don't include references to "generic web information" - there are already enough sites that provide that.
18. Don't let links be too non-descript - if someone prints it out they won't have the link.
19. Don't forget to make the title very descriptive so that when it's saved to someone's hotlist they'll know what it is.
20. Don't forget - testing, testing, testing.