Finally IE6 is Dieing!
Tue, July 6th 2010 at 05:06pm
Amazingly enough even though we are at version 8 of Internet Explorer IE6 still seems to be clinging on and holding back the internet. IE7 and 8 are still poor, but atleast Microsoft is finally starting to see that if they continue to ignore standards their market share will continue to dwindle despite having the huge advantage of shipping with Windows.
However when I was admiring the nice new design of Dan Cederholm’s new micro-blog theme I noticed that the only CSS directive he had was the following:
<!--[if gte IE 7]><!-->
<link rel="stylesheet" media="screen, projection" href="http://simplebits.com/-/css/bitstream.css" />
<!-- <![endif]-->
After looking at this and CSS for awhile I could not figure out how he handled the IE6 problem with all the transparent icons he is using. Then I used Adobe’s Browser Lab in CS Live to view his site in several browsers and he handled the IE6 problem by completely ignoring it! This makes me very happy because I have been considering doing this for a long time.
Obviously a personally micro-blog is hardly a mission critical site that must work, but I think having high profile web developers start to shun these poor browsers from Microsoft is a great start.
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Hover.com – Simple Domain Name’s
Wed, June 9th 2010 at 12:20am
For a long time now I have been a GoDaddy user, simply because of the low price and advertising blitz. When I was looking for a Domain name they always just popped to mind. I suffered through using their appallingly complex user interface, and getting nickel and dimmed for essential services.
Then recently on twit.tv I saw an ad for Hover.com and from the screenshots of the site I could see right away that they are doing things better. The site is very Web 2.0, clean efficient and just there to help you get your work done. more »
Google Buzz – What’s the Difference?
Sun, February 28th 2010 at 11:21am
After using Buzz for a little while it seems to be quite a different animal than Twitter or Facebook. While all three services are similar for the user posting the way they all handle replies from other users is what sets them apart.
more »
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Defensio Spam Detection
Mon, October 12th 2009 at 03:31pm
Recently when I was looking into updating my blogging software I spent a bit of time looking at comment spam solutions. Before the site upgrade I had had comments disabled for a long time, even with user accounts the number of spammy users, and comments was high on my Drupal blog. So I knew I needed some solution if I was going to activate comments again.
Defensio was the solution I chose on Drupal so when I installed WordPress I decided to go with it for my WordPress blog too. It turned out to be a very easy install, you basically just sign up for an account with them, then install the WordPress plug-in. Once that is done Defensio reviews all your comments and gives them a “spammy” value.
What I like about Defensio is that it is an adaptive filter that learns what is spam based on input from you, or other content administrators on your site. The more input your give it the better it becomes. Even on a small blog like mine where I have only had a few comments I still get nearly one hundred spam comments a week, and so far Defensio has caught all of them with zero false positives.
For a site with heavier usage I would guess that solution would workout even better, because the more input you give Defensio the better it can identify what is spam and what is a valid comment.
It is still early days, I have only been using it for a couple of months, but so far I am quite impressed with it.
Defensio uses a pretty simple API and seems to have plug-ins for many blogs and forum packages.
Thanks for Visiting
Sat, August 15th 2009 at 11:46am
After upgrading the site I decided to spend a little time actually tracking visitors to the site, which I have not really done in the past. So I signed up for Google Analytics installed the small blob of JS code and let it go.
The amount of data Google Analytics let’s you track in an easy way is pretty amazing. You can see entrance and exit pages, which links on a page were clicked on and a whole host of other things. It’s a huge step up from the standard Webalizer I used to use, which basically just shows how many visitors you have.
Anyway, I was actually quite surprised how many people visit the site (apart from me debugging 
) and just wanted say thanks for coming and I will try to post some more useful stuff soon.
I was also quite interested how many hits very old posts were getting. A lot of hits were going to “node/36″ which is a 404 now and linked to an old wallpaper I posted while playing around with Photoshop. It showed me how important old content can be when moving a site. If nothing else it can act as a gateway to get people into the rest of the site.
Just because I forgot about something I did a few years ago does not mean Google forgot about it. I just wish all the CMS systems will settle on a standard URL format so it would be easier to migrate to new systems and map old URLs onto you new system.
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The Google Wave is Here?!
Sat, August 8th 2009 at 10:32pm
I was just listening to This Week in Google episode two and they were discussing PubSubHubBub which is a Google Code project implementing push notifications on the web. The basic idea is that instead of having multiple clients poll your website feeds for new posts you site will push the content out immediately when you post it. So for example if I have this enable on my site when I hit the publish button my post is stored on the server, and simultaneously a ping is sent to Pubsubhubbub (terrible name fyi) with the new content. That is then pushed to anyone who is subscribed to the feed.
With Google Wave everyone is focused on the application, and will it replace e-mail. But for me the Google Wave application is more of a technical demo than the whole architecture. If the Google Wave application fails it does not mean that Google Wave the architecture fails. The Pubsubhubbub project is a perfect example of this, we are already getting Wave functionality today without even having the Wave application. If you use Feedburner you can already enable “PingShot” which use push notifications to instantly push your posts to compatible sites. Right now very few sites support it, I believe Friend Feed is one of them. But when this sort of technology catches on it will already implement one of the biggest features of Wave which is the instantaneous updates from the web.
When this is made two-way then people will be able to instantly post comments on your posts from their consuming applications, and even collaborate on Wiki style pages from Within Wave applications.
So in short Google Wave is more of a way of doing things than one application, or even one protocol. And while it will not replace e-mail anytime soon, it will certainly change the way we do things on the web.
