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.

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.

For example, before moving my domains to Hover.com I did a quick check of my site and realized that my RSS Feeds were down. The way my feeds are setup is using a CNAME entry in my DNS records to redirect my URL to FeedBurner (you can read more about that at quickonlinetips.com). Godaddy’s Domain Manager is so busy and confusing I never looked into doing this myself before, and always had to open a Support Ticket with my web-host and have them modify their Name Server for me, which last time took a day or two of back and forth making it work.

After reading the help section at Hover.com (this tutorial in particular) I saw how simple it was to use Hover.com’s name servers to point to my web-host, and Google Accounts for Mail. So I transfered the domain to Hover.com pointed my web-host and everything still works fine.

Then after reading another Hover.com Tutorial, which by the way is the simplest and best intro to DNS I have seen and should be read even if you are not with hover.com, I changed my CNAME record myself. Instantly I was able to refresh the URL feeds.codemonkeyx.net/cmx and it went to FeedBurner.com correctly.

This post ended up being a little more gushy about how great Hover.com is so far, but sites that empower me to do more and learn new things always get me excited.

Oh and before I forget the, the big thing… PRICE.

At first when I saw the $15 price tag per domain I thought, well that’s a little high. But then when I compared to GoDaddy which advertises much lower prices I realized that on top of the domain name I also had to pay for Private Domain registration which was another $9 a year just for that, and added another whole layer of crap that I had to jump through when I wanted to change or transfer. So Hover.com’s $15 fee is lower than what I was paying at GoDaddy! when you factor in the premium add-on.

With Hover.com all I had to do to make my domain Private was to click the check box!! Because it’s included in the price! So far no hidden fees, no “premium add-on” services except e-mail hosting. Just a simple site that gets the job done.

Note: If you decided to use Hover.com be sure to use twit.hover.com to get a 10% discount. I am not affiliated with hover or twit but 10% off is nice, and both hover and twit are great.

Say I am using twitter and some @replies me about a Tweet from four hours ago, I might reply to them “Good Point.” Now no one else following me stream has any idea about the context of that reply. They could probably piece it together, but it not worth the effort.

Facebook is meant to be much more closed off, although they are trying hard to get our personal information out there weather we like it or not. Facebook is much better at maintaining the contexts of comments by maintaining a comment thread. But the comments are not valued nearly as much as the original post. It can be hard to see if new comments have been added etc because posts are not bumped up when a new comment is made.

Google Buzz is like a hybrid of both Twitter and Facebook, it allows for completely public posting and followers, but at the same time you can do private posts to a group of people you designate at Friends, Coworkers, etc.

For me however the biggest difference is the way Google Buzz handles replies to Buzz’s. When a person replies or comments to a Buzz that buzz is bumped up in all the followers feeds. This effectively makes peoples comments as powerful as the original posters, and behaves much more like a traditional forum.

The way Buzz works right now is still a little un-wielding and I find it hard to follow public figures using Buzz just because the many people commenting keep all the “popular” buzz right at the top and drowns out everything else. This can be fixed with UI changes etc.

Buzz as a framework though is has some very powerful applications in integrating other services together, and I think might be a stepping stone to get people ready for the idea of using products like Wave.

Overall I am still using Twitter to keep track of things, and Facebook to stay in contact with Friends. But I hope that Google can make Buzz good enough that I can replace both of them.

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.

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.

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.