A Griffith Listing

Real Estate Services by Jon Griffith

You are here: Home / Archives for address

About Registering a Domain Name

by

Thousands of professionals use e-mail every day under “free” e-mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, and Juno.  If you’re in business, you owe it to yourself to create an identity.  Not only is this a good plan for branding your business, but it’s also a good plan for establishing a permanent “world address.”

Many years ago I registered my name, jongriffith.com because I wanted exclusive ownership of that name.  I wanted complete and total control over all of the traffic that the internet sent to that domain name.

Think of a domain name as your surname.  No matter where you go, no matter where you live, your name will always be the same.  Your numeric address over time will change, but your NAME will always be the same.

In the internet world, we don’t refer to destinations like we do in the world of the U.S. Postal Service, although the system is similar.  There’s the Griffith family household at 1234 Main Street, and there’s jongriffith.com at some arbitrary, hidden number that would be too hard to remember.

I bet, in fact, that even though you know where some of your friends and family live, by landmarks alone, you don’t know their address.  You also wouldn’t know if they moved unless they told you, and if they did move, they would have to tell you.

On the interwebs, if you move, if your “house” is burned down, (your house being the computer where your website and e-mail reside,) you never have to tell anyone that you’ve changed your address.

This is NOT the case if you use Yahoo.com, or Juno.com as your e-mail provider.  Imagine one day that Yahoo announces that they’re either a) ending free e-mail as you know it, or b) went out of business, or c) changed their name.  Now you’re stuck having to announce to everyone, yet again, that your “digital address” has changed.  In the process you lose connection with some people because there was an interruption in continuity between you and that person.

Establishing your own domain to handle your website –and– your e-mail traffic will eliminate this from EVER being a possibility.  You probably apply this logic already to your cell-phone, which should, unless the entire system changes one day, always be the same number, for the rest of your life.  Why not make your e-mail address behave the same way?

Using Google Apps for Domains (let’s just make the safe assumption that Google isn’t going anywhere) you can establish a domain name and a permanent online web-presence that will never change.

[add_to_cart id=”55946″ sku=”GAEO”]

How to Adjust the Margins on Disqus Commenting

by

I run a myriad of WordPress blogs.  On most of them, I utilize a commenting system called Disqus.  It’s just cool.  There’s one thing that I was troubled by when I first implemented it.  When enabled, the comment section seemed to be aligned flush with the width of my content, leaving no aesthetic margin to delineate a separation in design.  Thankfully, using Firebug, I was able to inspect the Disqus comment area to find the class identifier so I could modify the design slightly to fit my site.

Notice the following image.  The dark gray background and the Disqus comment area butt up against each other.  Not cool.  The right side of the comment form (not shown) also squished against the right hand side-bar.  Not attractive at all.

Simple Fix

There’s a very easy CSS style that you can apply to your Disqus settings for a given website and you do it from the Disqus website:

  1. Simply login, choose the site profile that you need to address.
  2. Click the settings tab, then click Appearance on the left.
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and paste the following into the Custom CSS box:#disqus_thread { margin: 0px 20px 0px 20px; }

Save your settings, and re-load your blog.  The setting above essentially squeezes the entire Disqus comment section by 20 pixels on the left and the right sides.  You can modify this to suit your needs, but it should help you line up your comment box with the other content on your site.

Here’s how it looks now:

Hope that helps.

Following up Getting Around Phoenix

by

Steve Belt of Real Phoenix Living recently posted an article about getting around in Phoenix which promted this response:

The bulk of my youth youth (I say that because I’m relatively young to some) was spent on a bicycle and in a car.  On a bike because I delivered newspaper, and in a car because I delivered Pizza, for 3 different companies over time.  I also delivered a USA Today route in my car in 1991.  Addresses are very easy for me to find which is why I’ll typically ask someone for the address and only the address to find my way.  They’ll still explain the “lefts” and the “rights” but it usually goes in one ear and out the other.  I can find my way around anywhere.  Since most of the east/west streets in Phoenix are named rather than numbered, the only bit of research that I need to conduct is how far north or south that street is relative to a major intersection.  Being a native Arizonan makes it fairly easy to know the major streets.  You say between Cactus and Thunderbird and I’ll find it with the address.

Where it gets confusing is where cities overlap.  One example will be Broadway road in Mesa/Tempe.  Tempe follows the same pattern as Phoenix in numbering their addresses, and so does mesa, but there’s a point on an east/west street where the address shifts from east to west or west to east based on the city you’re in, and as a result, the numbers increment in a different direction.  Make sure you know what city you’re in, then you can find anything.

Another observation is that typically any address that ends in 02 is on a northeast corner, and any address that ends in 01 is on a southeast corner.  On Yucca, for example, the address 2702 E. Yucca indicates first that it’s at 27th Street.  We know it’s street because it’s east and there are no streets west of Central, rather Avenues.  The E is a big clue that it’s east of Central.  🙂  Yucca tells you little about how far north and south the street may be, so you’d have to know the area or look it up.  By the time everyone gets around to that, we’ll all have GPS Navigation in our cars.

So, the 27 means 27th street, and the 02 means it’s the first address on the north side of the street just east of 27th, typically a corner.  2701 E. Yucca would be right across the street.  2636 E. Yucca would be on the north side of the street, most likely just west of 27th street on the other corner.

Sometimes an east/west street has no north/south street bisecting it.  Let’s say a northbound 27th Street ended in a “T” at Yucca.  In this case, there would be no northeast corner, but the house straight ahead or just to the right would still be numbered 2702 E. Yucca because Yucca crosses the 27th Street line.  Sometimes there’s not even a “T” and Yucca would have no bisecting north south street…but the addresses are still reset to 01 and 02 where Yucca crosses the north/south street’s line.

Confused yet?  It’s all the same when you’re talking about north/south streets.

There are flaws in the system, however, and they typically show up in areas where a townhome development on the corner of an intersection spans multiple streets.  One area of the development will have a north/south address and the unit just next to you will have an east/west address.  It’s very confusing in this case.  I happen to live in one of those areas :).

I am hoping that your head didn’t just explode.