LaughingMeme: WordPress RSS Aggregator, very neat. Hat tip: Geof.
Updated About Page
Reload for extra fun, including a picture of me in my underwear. 😉
Google Fight
MT vs. WP Google fight. Hat tip: Mark.
Mac Software
The fantastic comments keep pouring in on the Mac thread, thank you so much guys. I’m going through every single suggestion in that thread and when I’ve had time to kick the tires of everything I’ll write about what I end up with.
Versioning Scheme
How come no one has ever done a reverse version scheme? Now that WP up to 1.2 I’d like to start counting back down. When we reach 0.0 we’ll be perfect.
Writing A Book
Exploding Crayons
Going crazy with CSS, Craig said it looks like a crayon factory exploded. 🙂 I think it gets the point across: With a little CSS you can do anything. (But that doesn’t mean that you should.)
Alton Brown On Fast Food
Burgers don’t kill people. People kill people. Looks like a genuinely interesting blog too. I’ll have to start cooking sometime. (Someday.) Hat tip: Andrew Grumet.
Fiery Redesign
Design by Fire redesigns, I like the look though I’m not crazy about scrolling back up to read comments. I hate it when print stuff makes me jump back and forth between pages too. Basic permalinks, but that’s not his fault. Are italics cool again? (Or hot?)
Batteries
Dunstan Version 2
Dunstan details his gorgeous and scarily functional redesign. I’m proud to host this guy. 🙂 Someone hire him quick.
More Casino Spam
I got casino spam in Japanese today. The domain was in english so my moderation filter caught it.
A Foot of Mac
I broke down:
Now I’m just walking around with a big goofy grin on my face. First thoughts:
- I cannot tab in forms like I used to
- Enter lets you change the filename instead of drilling down
- The aliasing of the fonts looks funny at first but you get used to it
- It’s faster than my Vaio
- Things are very intuitive (e.g., setting up my bluetooth mouse)
- iSync rocks
- Setting up my phone as a GPRS modem was not intuitive.
- I want something like Putty
- 256MB of memory is not enough
- I’m getting used the quirks pretty quickly
- I keep hitting the trackpad when I’m typing and erasing stuff
It’s not a total switch, I still have Windows XP on a laptop and a desktop that I use daily, and my Gentoo desktop has been running very well. This is just getting my feet wet on a new platform, and greatly expanding my testing enviroment. A big part of my motivation was that a grossly disproportionate part of my audience (about one in six) is on OS X, a platform that I previously had no easy way to test on.
I would love to hear software recommendations and general tips and tricks. One thing I really miss is I used to have shortcut keys that would launch putty SSH sessions to different servers and use key authentication so I didn’t have to type anything, about 5 of them, and not having that is actually slowing me down a lot.
WordPress Meetup Day
Gallery: 7-18-2004
Auto-imported from old gallery:
Mac IE 5 Support Worth It?
In Joining the Dark Side -OR- Is Mac IE 5 Support Worth $1,500, Scott responds to Tantek’s calling out of the new Feedster’s lack of support for Mac IE. Personally I’m sympathetic to Feedster’s case because I’ve had to spend hours talking to someone with a Mac trying to debug Mac IE issues with this site and wordpress.org and ended up having to change my favorite list menu technique from using floats to display: inline
, which meant changing all the other menu styles to compensate. It was a pain.
I know that when I’m tweaking and checking things in different browsers, the number of my audience who uses that browser isn’t always the most important thing. In the previous case the only Mac IE I had heard anything from since both of the sites started was Tantek, and that was important enough to spend a couple hours of my time on. Imagine if you’re doing a job and the client’s boss uses Netscape 4, (god help you and) suddenly that browser becomes much more important in your testing, and you should triple your rate.
However, is this something the Web Standards Project should be interested in the same way we have been All Music or Odeon? I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but in my opinion it’s not the same at all. Feedster’s pages are a few trivial mistakes away from valid XHTML 1.1 and valid CSS, which is no easy task. (MIME issues aside.) Of course they should fix those mistakes, but it is a matter of a few minutes rather than 1-1.5 days. They aren’t writing to one browser or propietary technologies, they’re writing to modern standards and excluding browsers that have serious flaws in that area. Is that so different from the browser upgrade campaign?
From a user experience point of view, excluding Mac IE users might be a good idea as well. If Feedster allowed Mac IE users to visit and they saw a messed up layout (or no layout at all), as Tantek has suggested, then their perception of the Feedster brand, reliability, and image would be negative. I bet Keith would have some great thoughts on this. If they’re given a message that the site doesn’t support Mac IE, (honestly) they’ve probably seen this before and will just switch to another browser for that site. In my experience Mac users tend to be total browser flirts, and have every browser you’ve ever heard of installed. I would rather they open up my site in Safari or Firefox.
If Tantek was here I imagine he would counter that those browser options are really only valid for users on OS X, and that ignores hundreds of iMacs and such in libraries and such. Of course the question that a site owner needs to ask himself then is that in terms of costs and benefits, does that half of a single percent audience in libraries on older computers overlap with the audience you’re targetting with your site? If I was doing an ecommerce selling something like BMW accessories, I wouldn’t even give it a second thought. This isn’t about the many innovations that Mac IE introduced or its excellent standards support for its time, the issue is where Mac IE stands today.
On the bright side, Feedster has characterized this as a business cost/benefit decision and said if anyone sends them Mac IE CSS they’ll use it, which seems like a good concession. Of course I think Feedster should support Mac IE, and a day and a half to add support seems a little high, but if they choose not to I can understand.
New Download Page
New Feedster
The new Feedster is out and seems to be a world better in terms of speed and reliability. The new system is certainly influenced by Technorati (or is it vice versa? I don’t know.) in everything from “claiming” blogs down to the waiting image. They’ve got some neat services. You can read Scott’s entry on the launch, complete with a picture of a cat. Looks good, but that is the most horrid permalink I have ever seen on a blog. Is that s9y default? Update: And thank goodness they took the beta label off! I hope this is a trend. Update 2: It doesn’t play with IE 5 Mac though.
W3C Weblogs
Karl Dubost asks about weblogs by W3C team members. Can blogging bring the W3C back to relevancy? (Notice any similarities about the three weblogs he links? 🙂 )