According to this post over at jkOnTheRun, CompUSA is closing up to half of its brick and mortar stores. While customers should be able to clean up with discounts starting around 20% off, the big question to me is why.
Personally, I think this is a natural cycle for the computer industry. The consumer base has gotten comfortable with Internet purchasing of big-ticket items like computers and HD TVs among other things. At the same time, more and more technology products have been comoditized to the point that you can find almost everything you need at Wal-Mart, Target, or K-Mart. Not to mention long-time technology chains like BestBuy and Circuit City carrying everything from laptops, to cell phones, to car stereos, to HD TVs, to refrigerators, to… you get the point.
Trying to be a computer superstore when computing products are as common as toasters is a tough business. I’m not surprised that they are reducing the number of retail outlets when you factor it all in. Of course, this is my opinion of what’s happening, and did not contact CompUSA for any information on the topic, so take it for what its worth.
I’m testing BlogJet to see if it works better with the XHTML requirements of the theme I’m now using. While I may have only heard of BlogJet in passing previously, James Kendrick over at jkOnTheRun has recommended it in a post or two, so I thought I’d check it out.
Pretty nifty tool so far, I just hope it actually generates clean XHTML compliant output. I’ll give it a try for awhile (the 30 day trial period) and see if it does the job.
I’ve got the sidebar issue figured out! It was improper XHTML validation, meaning that I had some syntax issues in several posts. Still do one some I’m sure – I only fixed the one’s that were on the front page so it would work. I’m sure if a person drilled down into posts from a few days to a week ago the sidebar will drop down below the posts.
What? You’re wondering what caused this? I was too! My culprit was Windows Live Writer adding some “unclean” XHTML definitions when using certain features that made WLW really useful. So I’m back to writing my posts in the browser again for the time being until I figure out if it was my tag-insert plugin or something deeper in WLW.
It may be for me. My new theme simply does not like WLW created posts – mainly because it does not create strict XHTML. Why can’t Microsoft adhere to a standard? It really frosts my balls when they have some great (and complex) products, but they can’t follow something as simple as XHTML.
Ugh!
And it was a nice WYSIWYG editor as far as I was concerned. Figures!
I’m trying out a different theme (again) and am having some issues with the sidebar. The them is MistyLook by Sadish Bala. Its a great WordPress 2.1 compatible theme that answers a lot of what I’ve been looking for.
But beware, I’ve disabled a number of plugins that I use regularly here to try an d find the issue with the sidebar dropping to the bottom of the posts. I’ll get it eventually – there are some great threads on the theme’s site – so we’ll figure it out!
Any comments on the updated theme? The Water 3 theme by the undersigned I was using previously was very crisp, but was not as clean and though-out as I had hoped when I first saw it. The text was too small, and some components like list bullets didn’t line up properly. I just want a simple, clean theme with lots of white space that doesn’t get cluttered up easily.
Another note, I’m going to trim out a lot of the plugins that I think have been slowing down the site. Including advertising. I’m going to pick one, maybe two subtle ads and the rest go bye-bye. Your feedback is always welcome!
As this article at Network Computing indicates, the chance of a widespread mobile-device virus attack is exceptionally slim. This will probably change as mobile devices become the dominant information access device world-wide – something that PCs still h
The Democrats running for Governor must have failed their math classes. The “high speed rail” boondoggle in California already cost the state taxpayers billions of dollars. The mess there shows that I saved the hard-working taxpayers in Wisconsin from a scam that would have cost
