What is SOPA or PIPA? And why are thousands of websites across the Internet striking to try and stop these 2 US bills that are currently racing through Congress. The reason these bills have garnered so much attention and genuine concern from people is that they threaten prosperity, online security, and freedom of expression.
One thing we want to make clear right off the back, we do not condone theft (physical removal of an object) or piracy (taking a copy of someone’s copyrighted material and leaving the original). We do believe that the laws that would be put in place under this bill disguised as an anti-piracy bill, would threaten the open flow of information and transparency that the Internet still promises to be. The Internet must remain open and uncensored to all.
Though we are a Canadian company, the SOPA bill affects us all. Tomorrow our website will go offline, joining hundreds of thousands of others in protest. We encourage you to share this message and day of protest with your friends and family in the US. You can share the website www.americancensorship.org on Facebook or on Twitter along with the hashtag #SOPAstrike to help make this protest bigger and more widespread.
We have realized our numerous years of working with social media that it is an incredibly useful tool that can help to bring about change. But this bill and the technology it uses (DNS blocking) is similar to the technology that is used to censor undemocratic countries such as China, North Korea, and Syria. All of these countries have used this technology to clamp down and monitor social media sites for activists or government opponents. Our chief concern is that this “security through censorship” approach will stifle free speech.
To our customers, we have worked with many of you to create websites, some that generate income directly, and some that are just used as promotional tools. In any case, it is important for you to know how SOPA will negatively affect the internet as we know it, and your businesses.
Closing Statement: For the reasons listed above we will be joining the strike tomorrow and encourage all our American customers and fans to do so as well. If you are a Canadian or a citizen from another country, you can share this message with your American family or friends, or share it amongst your friends. We know social media can be a fantastic tool for social good!
Find out more at www.sopastrike.com.
As soon as Facebook developed their Pages functionality, business began flocking to establish their brand on the world’s most popular social network. Facebook originally offered only limited functionality for brands, but businesses soon demanded more. One of the initial ways brands could customize their pages was by creating a welcome page — a conversion page, away from the news feed, designed to convince the user to become a fan — through a Facebook application called Static FBML (aka. “FaceBook Markup Language”). This application allowed developers to create basic HTML/CSS web pages to display within Facebook, with all the files hosted on Facebook.
Throughout the evolution of the web, most web browsers have displayed websites slightly different. Although most browsers these days display very similar, sometimes certain aspects of a website won’t work with certain web browsers. Anytime a new or popular browser is released or updated, It is a good idea to review your site in detail for minor presentational or functionality issues. This should be done anytime a new browser with a significant user base is updated, yet most of the time you won’t have any issues. 
