This is a posting of some random topics and small news items we wanted to share with you, our dear reader. We think they all have a some level of relevance or importance and may be of concern or interest to you.
Importation Blues
After being in business for fifteen years, some weekly tasks are getting more difficult instead of easier. Namely the importation of good bugs from Canada, which is tremendously challenging as is, is becoming harder than ever. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), who manages our importation permits, is so busy with myriad new tasks assigned by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that they’re falling behind; and this hasn’t made life any easier for us, despite our long and honorable track record. A recent experience shared by others in the industry exemplifies this:
We were sent a standard renewal notice. Our permits expired on July 7th of this year (we’ve been using an extension since). We were informed of this by mail. The letter we received, dated April 20th, was postmarked July 17th and was thus somewhat ineffective in giving us due notice. Fortunately we are on top of things here and had already applied for renewals back in March. Permits used to be issued for ten years, but this is no longer the case.
Add to this, changes within FedEx have created even more challenges. Thus you may be seeing some changes on our end for 2007. Freshness and quality have always been our most important concerns, and we feel getting our bugs from Canada was always in the best interest of our customers, but due to customer pressures to ship earlier in the week, we may have to start handling more bugs from Europe. Ironically, importing from European nations is a lot less challenging.
ANBP Membership
Due to irreconcilable differences on how our membership dues have been spent in the past, we have chosen to let our membership with the Association of Natural Biocontrol Producers (ANBP) lapse. We still support their mission, but our dues, like income tax money, are something we can’t bear to see being spent unwisely; in this case we have a choice. We still adhere to the ANBP’s best practices and industry ethics created a few years ago and always will — we’ve been around longer than they have and followed these practices before they even existed. Please don’t think less of us even though we’re not a dues-paying member.
RSS Feed Fixed
Good news for our RSS Newsmaker subscribers who noted we had a bug in our feed: Our Extensible Markup Language (XML) output had no proper “Link” element. This is no longer the case and our feed is fixed. Thus, if you want to subscribe and not only get article updates, but to also get a proper link back to the posted items, now you can. We apologize for the inconvenience this oversight has caused in the past.
Also, in the interest of enhanced accessibility — unlike most feeds — the links which are now provided to the posted items will lead you directly to the applicable heading, not just the page. This last bit of news won’t be that important to most users, but if you’re using assistive technology such as a screen reader or text browser, or if your browser doesn’t support style sheets, this small detail will be very beneficial to you.
If you want to subscribe and stay up to date in real time, subscribe to our raw output RSS feed or do so through our Feedburner feed. New to RSS? Please follow our Feedburner link or visit Feedburner.com for more information and links to a few common RSS Feed-Readers.
Exemplary Accessibility
This website was recently honored in that it was featured in a book about web accessibility titled “Web Accessibility - Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance.” We tried to make this site as accessible as possible so it’s an honor to be featured in such a well-respected book. A screen shot and accompanying text appear in the chapter about heading navigation. The screen shot shows our “Bamboo” style — which is still available on our User Settings page, but it’s not the styling that the site is mentioned for, but rather the underlying markup. In fact, due to a special bit of web software, the heading markup is designed to show up in the screen shot: The <h2></h2> heading, for example, as shown in the first photo. (The book images for this article courtesy of a friend and fellow web developer Karl Dawson. Thanks Karl!)
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: June 8th, 2007 at 12:01 am →
The site mentioned in the book is our last design. This design is even better.