Do you find yourself fighting your editor? The common text editors of today work quite well as long you work they way they want you to. Yet, when you stray from their paradigm, even when they seem to offer infinite flexibility, it can be a chore to get even simple things done. What is a developer to do?
I spent the last two days watching football and fixing up a few odds & ins around my sites. Probably the biggest change is the top menu. I’ve tried to match the style across each major site, including font and minor format changes. I also added my 360voice Dynamic Usersbars as a top-level site.
I decided to play around a bit and try a different font for my site. My original goal was to use something with better kerning and ligatures, but most browsers don’t seem ready for that yet. I settled on using Trebuchet MS as my new site font. It has a bit more character than Verdana and better reflects the style I was looking for. It is a generally web safe font supported by most platforms.
I’ve been having a bit of a problem lately getting Safari to keep working! Seems it keeps crashing every few minutes with a library issue that I can’t seem to fix.
Flickr has become my new favorite place to share my LEGO creations. I tend to use Facebook for family and friends, mainly because that is what my family and friends use. But I digress. It is pretty easy now to use available tools, mine being Windows Live Photo Gallary, that allow easy publishing. That means more time building and less time cropping and uploading. In all, a good use of technology.
Well, as of today my GeoCities site of the last 12 years is no more. I’m a bit saddened as it has been a place of comfort, seeing me through different ISP’s and such. It is because of GeoCities that I use Yahoo! mail, even if Yahoo! then turned around and removed the best features of GeoCities. I still feel that GeoCities was killed many years ago by Yahoo! and that it was only kept around due to its legacy. I’m not surprised by its shuttering in these times of Web 2.0 and the emergence of the Social Internet site.
Yahoo! will be shutting down Geocities tomorrow, 10/26/09, which means an end to my old LEGO and ZX81 website. Although I hadn’t updated those sites much since Yahoo! turned off ftp access, Geocities had remained my presence on the web for almost 12 years. Sad to say, it will be sad to see it go.
Needless to say, one of the many reasons I started Reid’s For Fun was because of Yahoo!’s neutering of GeoCities: removal of ftp and a paltry 4.2MB hourly limit. It was, however, my friend in the hey day of Internet growth and I am saddened at its (un)timely demise.
Okay, Safari 4 is out, showed up in my update today. I was a bit surprised as I thought I already had 4 installed, but it didn’t take more than a quick peek at my existing Safari to realize it was the non-beta version. Like a kid opening a present, I quickly cut out of what I was doing and hit the Install button. A short time later, I was ready to load the latest experience. That was when disappointment set in.
I’ve been building web sites for over 13 years and have been escaping HTML for years. You know, converting & to & or " to ". Easy stuff, right? Then why did I completely forget that you have to do the same within attributes? Perhaps I just never had a need or realized that it was required. It is.
I noticed a few errors with my 360voice Dynamic Userbars today, so I decided I should probably fix them. One was with my watched list. I limit the list to 20, but it wasn’t actually working properly for users not watching anyone. The other bug was in challenges where it would stop displaying members after it found the callers gamertag. Fortunately, both were easy fixes.
If you hadn’t noticed, in addition to adding reflections, I’ve been updating the images I use for my articles. I did this once before, but I added a silly highlight that just didn’t look right. I decided I need to make some changes.
When I added that visitor map yesterday, I wasn’t all that concerned that it used an embed object. That is, I wasn’t concerned till I tried to validate my site. It isn’t something I do that often, but I’d made enough changes that I thought it would be a good idea. I expected a few validation errors, I tend to forget to encode the ampersands in URL’s, but I was surprised about all the errors around the embed tag. I don’t tend to play with plug-in’s myself, so I was blissfully unaware that the standards based tag is object. Although I’m not a big standards freak, I do like to see my pages validate. I was on a mission.
A number of other sites that I frequent are using a visitor counter service called Who's Amung Us. The site is easy to start using, just request the url, select a style and add to your site. Bingo, all done.
I never thought I’d change browsers again, but I’ve found myself using Safari full time now. I really enjoyed using IE7, but a few of Firefox’s features had me hooked on it. The problem is, I’ve always had memory issues and, lately anyway, frequent hangs and crashes. I tried Firefox 3 beta, but it wasn’t much better and the plugins I used hadn’t been converted yet. IE8 is horrible, more alpha then beta. So, I decided to give Safari a try again. I haven’t regretted it.
So, I actually liked IE7, but ended up going to FireFox because I really liked some of its features and plug-ins. However, I’ve always enjoyed the look and feel of IE7, so when IE8 Beta was announced, I wanted to give it a try to see if IE8 was going to win me back. I have to say, it won’t with this beta. I have to say, I hope beta 2 is better because IE8 isn’t winning me over.
I’ve been having a lot of stuttering and slowness of late on my Internet connection. I’m thinking it may be my router, but I decided to validate my Internet Speed (1.5MB DSL) and ran into a pretty good speed test site. My Internet looks pretty good (hit 1.2MB to Chicago), so I’m still not sure what is going on. Thought I’d share the one I tried.
This is pretty cool. Hawty McBloggy blogged about a site that generates some spawn time stats (Halo 3 - Time Wasted Respawning). The script is interesting. But more interesting was that it makes use of a Halo API.
Due to issues Ive been having where Xbox Live!’s gamer card, I've converted my gamer card to one from MyGamerCard.net. Recently, it appears that Xbox Live! has been requiring you to sign into their site before showing someone’s gamer card.
It appears that a new version of Safari is out: 3.0.4. It is still a public beta, but they did fix a few niggles from the last version. For one, tool tips now work. For another, the inline spell checking is now working. Looks like IE7 is still lagging in that area. Surprising since Microsoft Word started whole trend. However, Safari, not to be one upped by Firefox, has also seen fit to include a grammar checker. Although, it tends to error on mundane things, like titles and numbers with periods.
I’ve been hearing a lot about the Web 2.0, but not sure how much I’ve been participating. I signed up for a Digg account, but didn’t really get into it. I’m still not sure what is considered Web 2.0. If you check out Wiki's definition of Web 2.0, I’ve already been part of the whole Web 2.0 deal by blogging and using and creating RSS feeds. In many ways, my use of 360voice and its API probably qualify as well. After thinking about, maybe I do a lot more with Web 2.0 than I thought.