Just wanted to take this opportunity to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving. If you are traveling, I hope you have a safe trip. As for myself, I’ll be doing a little bit of traveling tomorrow but after that, I’m going to be hunkered down in front of my PC to play Call Of Duty 4. I’ll be eating the traditional turkey and associated side dishes. What will you be devouring at your dinner?
Month: November 2007
FireFox 3.0 Beta Released
FireFox 3.0 Beta 1 has been released to the public. It’s available in 21 different languages for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version still has hundreds of bugs in it. Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Quality Assurance leader, did say that it is the “most thoroughly tested beta [they’ve] ever shipped” though.
- Those of you who do decide to throw caution into the wind and give it a whirl should be prepared for poor extension compatibility. Many extensions, especially those pertaining to bookmarks, will probably not function to their full potential if at all.
New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:
- Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.
- Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.
- Richer personalization through: one-click bookmarking, smart search bookmark folders, direct typing in location bar searches your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, ability to register web applications as protocol handlers, and better customization of download actions for file types.
- Improved platform features such as: new graphics and font rendering architecture, major changes to the HTML rendering engine to provide better CSS, float-, and table layout support, native web page form controls, colour profile management, and offline application support.
- Performance improvements such as: better data reliability for user profiles, architectural improvements to speed up page rendering, over 300 memory leak fixes, and a new XPCOM cycle collector to reduce entire classes of leaks.
Check out what’s all new within this beta by looking at the RELEASE NOTES.
Blogger Adds Slideshow Support
Blogger has added a new tool for their user’s called the “Slideshow Page Element“. This element adds a slideshow to your page that displays photos from your Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Photobucket or any site that supports Media RSS. The photos will appear in your blogs sidebar, fading into one another. The slideshow supports navigation and each photo links to the albums home page. According to Blogger,
Like all page elements, Slideshow requires that your blog is using Layouts templates. Still need to switch? Read our help article on the topic.
Seems like a cool new feature to add to your hosted Blogger Blog.
Bloglines Impersonated By Spammers
If you received an email from Bloglines over the weekend, you can discount it as spam. According to Bloglines, a little less than 1,000 email messages were sent to individuals over the weekend. The email contained recommendations to various posts on a Chinese blog which were sent via the “send a post to a friend” feature on Bloglines. Many people may have thought this to be an official email as the signature of these emails contained the text “The Bloglines Team”. As it turns out, no one from the official Bloglines Team sent out any of these emails.
Bloglines has since banned the user’s IP address and has suspended the “send email” feature to monitor the situation.
Bloglines sends out email to our subscribers for purposes specific to operating Bloglines (registration verification, change password, change of terms of service and other policies, significant product announcements, etc) Most product announcements can be found on the Bloglines News Feed. We take your privacy carefully and will protect our customers from spam. -Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team
How To Play Games In Meebo
Ever wanted to play a game with someone in Meebo? If so, now you can. Open a Meebo chat window to whomever to you want to play against and click on the ROCKET icon. There are a ton of games support so far such as checker, backgammon and chess. A fun way to kill some time at work.
New Features Debut On Flickr
Flickr has unveiled a new feature/project called Places. Places is a Flickr project that makes use of all of the publicly available Geotagged photos. Think of it as a new way to see a massive amount of data that otherwise, may not of been noticed. Asides from being able to see photos of places all over the world, Flickr has also developed an experimental new map which somehow displays breaking news. That is, if an event is taking place somewhere in the world such as The Oscars, chances are, there will be a number of people taking photos which will then show up on this map.
I gave the new map a try and I thought it was pretty cool. The text that appears on the World Map is the name of the event. If you click on the event text, a photo ribbon appears showing all of the photos that were taken at the event. I saw an event that appeared to be taking place in the Pacific Ocean. After clicking on it, I figured out it was a wedding in Hawaii. At any rate, Flickr has succeeded in giving user’s yet another way to kill time.
The Switch To vBulletin
Don’t mind the dust that is being kicked up by the work I’m doing to the forum. Actually, I wanted to let everyone know that I have decided to plunk down $85.00 and purchased a one year lease on vBulletin. I gave PHPBB a shot and although they have made leaps and strides over version 2, I can’t help but feel how spoiled I was when I managed a forum that was powered by Vbulletin. In my honest opinion, Vbulletin is worth every penny. It’s more user friendly, is packed with power and punch right out of the box, and provides an excellent framework for growth. Best of all, most of the things I want to use in forum software is already built into Vbulletin. I don’t have to spend every waking moment of the day installing 100 mods in order to get the functionality that I need.
Everything that was on the PHPBB forum install is now gone. We are starting over from scratch but this is as good a reason as any to do so. I have experience with Vbulletin and I know what it’s capable of. It might take me a few days to get everything the way I want before I re-launch the forums but it’s something worth waiting for.
Back To Blogging Basics
Jason Kaneshiro of BlogHerald has written up an interesting post that describes the amount of de-cluttering posts he’s seen published around the blogosphere. In this particular post, Jason describes some of the ways he has de-clutered his own blog. From cleaning up the CSS code, to uninstalling and removing plugins, to digging into PHPMyAdmin to optimize the WordPress database tables. Jason seems to have covered the gamut, in terms of cleaning up his blog.
When Web 2.0 first began with Google and Craigslist, one of the “innovations” was simplicity itself – empty, uncluttered designs that allowed users to get what needed to be done with a minimum of design elements.
I feel this basic concept has been forgotten recently, what with widgets, ads, videos, monetization, polls, spam, and splogs. Some blogs are so obscured with extra stuff that the content – the post itself – is nearly impossible to find.
It may be time to get back to basics.
As for myself, I don’t think I have overloaded the blog just yet. I’ve come close, but have been able to stop myself before it was too late. In all honesty, unless you the reader feels differently, I don’t think I need to do too much in the way of cleaning. I wouldn’t mind performing those database optimizations and I think I’ll see what I can do to clean up this theme and it’s associated CSS code. Perhaps I can substitute a few more images with CSS colors.
The biggest impact on loading time is from having third party widgets displayed on the blog. The page will only load as fast as those sites that the widgets are pulling data from. I’ve already removed the Google Analytics code from the site because at times, it was causing the site to hang. I’ve thought about removing all of the third party widgets on this site and replacing them with local WordPress plugins that provide the same functionality. However, I can’t convince myself to remove the THREE widgets in the sidebar.
What are your thoughts on the whole de-cluttering issue? After reading the article up above, do you feel the need to rethink your blog and go back to basics? If so, how do you plan on achieving that goal?
Also, I’d like to know if you think my blog is too cluttered. Does it load too slow for you? Is there too much crap getting in the way of the content?
Matt Dickman Explains AjAX
Matt Dickman, host of a self produced series called MarketingProfs has created a video which explains what the term AjAX means. Not only does he give you the definition of the term, but he explains how it works using an easy to understand real-world example. I thought it this may be helpful to anyone out their who still doesn’t understand the concept of AjAX.
Steve Ballmer On Search And More
This is a video clip of John Battelle asking Steve Ballmer questions relating to search. Steve describes search the way he and Microsoft sees it. In his outline of a successful search strategy, he pretty much describes the way Google does it. Go figure! It’s an interesting interview that goes beyond search. For example, John asks Steve if they are making money through their deal with Facebook.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 