I’ve been doing CSS development for a couple years now. My standard M.O. is to get the site working perfectly in Firefox, then tweak the CSS to make it IE5/6 friendly. The purpose for this, in theory, is that by developing for Firefox you can pretty much be sure that your code is standards compliant. If it looks good in Firefox, it should look pretty much the same in all standards-compliant browsers. Then you add little tweaks here and there to make it look good in the non-standards-compliant browsers (IE). I generally don’t worry about the smaller browsers – between Firefox and IE5/6 I am covering about 97-99% of the browsers out there, depending on whose stats you believe.

Ironically, I did not follow that procedure when developing my own site, as those of you using IE can attest to right now. Incidentally, today was the first day I actually looked at this site using IE6, and yeah, I was shocked at how mangled it is. So curiosity bit me and I fired up IE7 to see if it really is more standards compliant (as was promised). To my shock and dismay, the site does not look all that different than it does in IE6. But there are differences. I looked at another of my sites which I had perfected for both Firefox and IE5/6, and there were elements of the site that just did not line up right in IE7. This means I am going to need a new bag of tricks to get IE7 to look right without affecting IE5/6.

What is Microsoft trying to do to us?

Okay, know anyone with an Earthlink email address?  Well, they may want to consider switching ISPs.  Bob Cringely has an interesting article about Earthlink’s email woes that go back at least as far as June, 2006.  How do companies like this stay in business??  From the article:

Swimming upstream through Earthlink customer support, my buddy finally found a technical contact who freely acknowledged the problem. Since June, he was told, Earthlink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn’t bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn’t mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain. The two groups affected are those who get their mail with an Earthlink-hosted domain and those with aliased e-mail addresses like my friend’s Blackberry.

A friend and I had an idea similar to this for a desktop GUI many years ago. Your desktop would be a physical representation of your desk (or office) and you could place file folders or applications anywhere on the desk or on shelves, etc in the office.

A while ago I was researching some alternatives to the common “desktop” metaphor in computer GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces). One of the things I came across was BumpTop. It’s not so much a new desktop concept as it is an (arguable) improvement on the existing desktop concept.

A workspace in the physical world typically has piles of documents, binders and other objects arranged in a way that provides considerable subtle information to the owner. For example, items are often casually placed but their spatial position and orientation are usually meaningful. Closer items can indicate urgency, and piles of items are “automatically” ordered chronologically because new items are typically placed on top. This casual organization, prevalent in the real world, differs greatly from the GUI desktop which forces users to immediately file their documents into a rigid hierarchy.

[In BumpTop] objects can be casually dragged and tossed around, influenced by physical characteristics such as friction and mass, much like we would manipulate lightweight objects in the real world. Using a pen as the primary input device can potentially enhance the feeling of realism and directness of manipulation since objects being acted upon are visible directly under the pen tip.

How cool would it be to take the concept of a “memory palace” and incorporate some of the concepts described on the BumpTop website (take a look at the demo video, I was pretty impressed), only on a much larger scale, to create a new kind of GUI? Your local computer (or network) would be represented by a 3D rendering of your house (or whatever physical structure you’d like to use) much like an FPS game. The different rooms would be representative of the type of data stored there, and the data and applications could take on the appearance of some real-world object.

For example, the study or library could be where you store all of your relevent text documents (“My Documents”, if you will). The documents take on the physical appearance of books and are stored on shelves. Each book would have a unique appearance, and you would be able to find most things by memory because the brain is very good at remembering the location of something based on its spatial surroundings. There could also be a “card catalog” that would amount to a Google Desktop search. “Books” that you are reading at any given time could be stacked on the desk for quick retrieval.

As another example, recipes, grocery lists, etc. could be stored in the kitchen, as pinups on the ‘fridge. Items could be moved throughout the house and dropped in any location (electronic bills could be left on the kitchen counter to remind you to pay them). The “house” would know the proper location for every item in it, so you could “clean up” any area of the house with a single click (or voice command) and they would be put back to their correct location (imagine the dining room table, for example).

If anyone knows of any projects (past or present) along these lines, I would be very interested in hearing about them.

Come on, don’t be offended.  It’s an analogy.  He’s the one that started with the biblical reference, I just carried it through to a logical conclusion.

Anyway, have a great weekend.

First a little background about me
I’ve been developing websites seriously for about 6 years. I’m self-taught and have no formal training. I started out by learning HTML and table layouts — no CSS, no <DIV>’s, etc.

Pretty soon I began hearing some talk about server-side scripting and became interested in JSP. I had a short period of formal “C” training in my past, so I caught on to the Java syntax and language structure very quickly. However, for most of my clients, JSP was not a practical solution.

I started to notice that something called “PHP” was included in most hosting plans, and after some investigation discovered that it was a “lightweight” server-side scripting engine without all the overhead and server configuration required for JSP. So I dove right in and before long abandoned JSP entirely.

Then about a year ago I finally discovered the wonders of CSS and table-less layouts. What a liberation!

So up until about a month ago, my design process has been as follows:

If you’re not using the Firefox browser, you may not be familiar with that icon.  But if you do, you’ve probably noticed it once or twice, perhaps with more frequency, and may be wondering what it means.

“RSS” stands for “Really Simple Syndication“, and basically refers to a live feed of article headlines which can be published by the owner of a particular website.  If you “subscribe” to a syndication, you will recieve a constantly updated list of headlines that are available on that website.

RSS is non-intrusive – you don’t see the list unless you want to, it doesn’t involve pop-ups or tickers or any such annoyances.  If you use Firefox, you simply save the syndication as a “Live Bookmark” that sits in your “Bookmarks” menu, and when you select the bookmark the menu  expands to show you individual bookmarks to each of the (usually 10) latest stories or articles on that website.

I provide an RSS feed on this blog of my latest entries.  If you have subscribed to my “feed” by clicking on the RSS icon and creating a “Live Bookmark”, you can see (usually within minutes) when I have posted a new entry just by checking your Bookmarks menu.

This is a great way to get news from websites you visit regularly.  Now you don’t actually have to go to the website to check the latest news, you can just see a list of headlines.  If something interests you, then you can click the headline to go read the article.

I have several feeds that I monitor regularly.  Maybe some of  you might be interested in these as well.  By visiting these websites and clicking on the RSS icon pictured above, you can save a live bookmark yourself.

I, Cringely – Inside insight from the tech industry – new article once every Friday.
John C. Dvorak – Often amusing, sometimes off-the-wall opinions from another IT industry expert.
I4U News – Tech Gadgets and stuff
Slashdot – Geek-related news stories
AnandTech – Hardware news and reviews
Tom’s Hardware – More hardware news and reviews

There are RSS feeds for ALL different topics and subject matter.  Pay attention next time you’re on your favorite websites, and look for that RSS icon.

I remember the first time I went to a webpage and discovered I could delete the entire page. Don remembers this. I emailed him and said “go check out this public website” that I had just defaced. I did realize at the time that there was a history of edits and that anyone could just go back to the history and restore the page, but it still seemed to me to be a lot of extra work for what benefit?

I guess Wikipedia has proven me wrong. There have been many similar sites that have popped up that make great use of the Wiki concept. One I just came across today is wikiHow. Basically anything you might want to learn how to do is represented on that site. Granted, some of the instructions are not very detailed, and most do not cover all of the little intricacies and pitfalls you will encounter, but it seems like a great starting point for learning something new. At the bottom of each topic is a list of related topics. In the matter of a couple clicks you could be learning how to do something that you had never even considered before.

How about these for starters:

How to get started in Parkour
How to walk on your hands
How to climb a tree with no branches

Have fun!