Brian Fitzgerald

Extreme tech has posted a new article detailing the current available browsing alternatives to WinIE.

Digital-web magazine has published a story called The Four Best Web Design Books You May Have Missed. Included are Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards, June Cohen's Unusually Useful Web Book, and a book I don't have by Eric T. Peterson titled Web Analytics Demystified. With our web statistics software recently upgraded at work, I am particularly interested in this topic right now. Looks like I'll be visiting Amazon soon...

Microsoft has released their new search engine: an updated MSN search. The search, which is supposed to be faster than Google, has in my opinion a terrible interface once you get past the search screen and according to some who have used it, poor search results. Of the newer generation of search engines that are competing with Google, the one that intrigues me most is Amazon's A9. Still, with all of these new options available, I still have found no reason to stop using Google.

Skype has released version 1.0 for the macintosh (along with version 1.0 for Linux and Pocket PC, and version 1.1 for Windows).

I am once again back to Panther (Mac OS 10.3) on my home computer after, what was a pretty successful couple of weeks using Tiger (Mac OS 10.4), I allowed it to upgrade and it broke Audio Hijack Pro. Having the choice of staying with Tiger or having AHP, I reverted back to Panther.

Here's pictures from last weekend's auto show in Omaha at the Qwest Center. I don't know enough about cars to take intelligent photographs of them, so my wife's brother Aaron snapped the camera. Lots of great rides... take a look.

The one thing that I really really want in Contribute is the ability to have user-created reusable items. So many things have gotten so much better in the product since version one, but management of a site's navigation is still restricted (as far as I can tell) to editing a single page and then copying and pasting those changes to the other pages of the site. This may be fine for a small site and perhaps there are some extracontribute based ideas that can make this easier, but I really think that this needs to be something that is in the program. It's really a pain for those starting with it to have to create a bunch of pages, then create a navigation, then copy that navigation across the pages. It's certainly not, in my opinion, a good method for the audience that Contribute serves.

Ben Goodger, one of the primary people responsible for Firefox has been hired by Google. What does this mean? His blog indicates that while this may delay the release of Firefox 1.1, it does not mean that he is off the project. I would like to think that this in fact means that a google browser is in the works and will be built on top of Firefox. So what? This would give Firefox the respect and recognition that it really needs to be successful. Firefox has already started becoming popular among those that have gotten tired of IE's spyware, popups, viruses and lack of standards support, but it is still mostly an unknown that is not seeing widespread adoption either at in the workplace or in homes. Simply adding the name "Google" to the browser, with no changes would drive people to start using it. Throw the resources behind the browser that Google would be able to and you would quickly have a serious contender to Internet Explorer.

Lately I've been enjoying a couple of "podcasts". PodCasts are audio web log postings. The thing that is starting to make these fun is that news aggregators, like NetNewsWire, are starting to be able to automatically take the postings and put them into iTunes ready for your next iPod sync. Interested? For one of the genres best, check out Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, then find others at ipodder.org.

I lost my website again. I backed up my server, installed Tiger and then found that my backup was bad. I'm starting over for what is now the fourth or fifth time in as many years. I've got to get better at this.

"Firefox should look to see if a page is optimized for IE and abide by Microsoft?s nonstandard formatting and render the pages as their authors intended." Holy crap. This is insane. So WinIE is the standard? Considering that ActiveX controls will never work on any platform but windows it's stupid to think that a browser that is trying to be "standard" should support them. If it were to support them, we would immediately have to start talking about Win-Firefox versus Non-Win-Firefox. That is exactly what we should be moving away from.