Brian Fitzgerald

Ben Goodger (Firefox lead engineer) offers his perspective on the history of Firefox.

Here’s a page that will create a CSS layout for you. It is a bit more intimidating to look at than some of the others that are out there, but it has a LOT of options and would probably produce code that needs much less customization once you have it.

Word from Adobe is that Fireworks is an important piece of their web development product suite moving forward and that it will continue to be developed. WooHoo!!

Opera Labs has a new technology preview available for Opera 9. If you haven’t used Opera before, you should really give it a shot. I think it’s a little too slow to use for day-to-day browsing (at least on my powerbook) but it has a lot of features that make it worth keeping in your web development toolbox.

Apple has released a new 1GB version of the Nano for only $149 and has made the 1GB version of the shuffle only $99 with the 512 now $69. It sure would be tough to pass up the extra features of the nano for only $50.

I tend to post a lot about browsers, so I have created a page that lists many of the browsers that are available for those that wish to try out a few. With the exception of Internet Explorer (Win) and those that are cross-platform like Firefox, they are Macintosh browsers. As I have time to try and assess some Windows-only browsers I will add them to the list.

Dell has discontinued their DJ MP3 Player. I’m not happy to see iPod competitors go, but this was just another case of a hardware vendor quickly throwing together me-too product that added nothing new to the space. Create something great and people will buy it. iRiver and Creative aren’t selling the numbers of players that Apple is, but I get the impression that they are doing pretty well. They make very nice players with unique features.

Technorati has released some statistics regarding the Blogs that they track. The most interesting to me is that 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after they have created their blog. That’s just a little better than half. That’s pretty good in my experience. Here’s a summary of the rest of the stats.

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Since I haven’t been able to post for the last month-plus, here are some things I’ve wanted to get up here.

Regarding Browsers

• The public alpha of Firefox 2.0 (codename: bon echo) is scheduled to be released on Feb 10. What's in store? While I'm sure that they will always continue to work on improving the rendering, the focus of bon echo is the experience. Two things expected in the new version are a improved interface with more operating system ties and inline spell checking.
• Flock .6 is scheduled to be released around Feb 15. I'm not sure what to expect from this, but I have really liked what I've seen from Flock so far.
• Internet Explorer 7 beta is now available from Microsoft and so far it seems that it does not suck. There are parts of the interface that I don't care for, but the rendering seems to be very solid.
• Camino 1.0 b2 was just released and OmniWeb 5.5 is on the way.

Apple Goodies

• Garageband 3's new podcasting features are great. When you create a podcast it gives you a time-based timeline (instead of measure/tempo-based one). You can easily create chapters and export to iTunes. I've done a one-hour board of education podcast using it and am curious to see if it will handle closer to two hours when the board has a busy night.
• Apple's new web site tool "iWeb" is a fantastic tool for putting together a simple site. You can easily create online homes for photos, podcasts, movies and whatever else you might have to publish. So far I have not found good options in it for customizing the look of your site, but I don't expect that most people interested in a tool like this will care.
• iPhoto 6 is a great improvement to iPhoto. It seems considerably faster than it predecessor with nice new additions such as a full-screen editor and the ability to order greeting cards and calendars.
• I had the chance to use the new MacBook Pro and its really a fantastic machine. It is slim and I love the built-in iSight and included FrontRow/Remote.

Other stuff...

• Adobe just announced that they are working on universal binary versions of their applications but that they would be released as the next versions of their applications and NOT to expect a univeral binary update to current applications. I hope and assume that this applies to the products previously owned by Macromedia, although with 8 having just come out in October, that could be a long wait.

Well, I’ve been here, but my blog has not. An OS X update nuked my blog and I haven’t had the time or will to try to fix it. The problem? A config issue in my php.ini file. Why didn’t I think of that?! Ha. Just for my own future reference (because I know I will have to do this again), I had to add /tmp/mysql.sock to the mysql.default_socket parameter.

Told you this was totally obvious. Anyway, the great thing is that it gave me an opportunity to upgrade to MySQL 5 and WordPress 2.0.1.

ZDNet has published odds on possible announcements at MacWorld.

Xoops is a PHP-based content management system. Looks like Mambo.

Sony may be coming out with a new e-book reader and I think that this may be the time for it. I have been thinking a lot about the relevancy of newspapers today and always come to the conclusion that there is no better source for information today, but that the delivery of that content is not what people want today. I have little interest in subscribing to my local newspaper (or any newspaper) and I don’t often take the time to visit their sites to read the stories. If I could subscribe to the paper and have it delivered in a way that was portable, searchable and easy to read, I would almost certainly do it. I wouldn’t even care if there were ads as long as the content was made available in a way that made it easy for me to read. I hope that Sony releases something wonderful (and Macintosh compatible).

Semi-frequent readers of my site have probably been annoyed by my constant empty “Links” posts. The problem causing this has been a script that I’ve had running every night to grab new bookmarks that I have posted to del.icio.us and list them on the site. This script creates a post whether there are new links or not. I have disabled this and will just run it manually now so that I don’t have this goofy thing posting all of the time. Sorry ‘bout those.

2005 is over and 2006 is here. I haven’t posted for a while and I have a decent excuse. My wife Amanda and I had our first child on December 15. His name is Liam and he is doing very well and we have all enjoyed our time together these past couple of weeks. I’m starting back to work on Tuesday while Amanda has the rest of the month off. Babies have a way of attracting lots of family and friends and it’s been real nice seeing everybody.

My web goals for the coming year? 1) Continue working on site construction methods using semantic-xhtml and CSS. 2) Find some time to start learning Ruby on Rails. The language itself may be a bit of a fad (I don’t know) but the concepts that have everybody excited about it will be helpful in lots of ways. 3) Finally acquire some respectable skills with Javascript. 4) Re-acquaint myself with Adobe’s software given their acquisition of Macromedia.

• Nuvvo Learning Management System A hosted, AJAX-based learning management system that offers free accounts.

Adobe is expected to announce tomorrow the completed acquisition of Macromedia.

• Official Delicious Plug-In for Firefox Official Delicious Plug-In for Firefox
• A well-presented list of open source projects for the macintosh. A well-presented list of open source projects for the macintosh. The list is broken into two sections. The first section contains the most popular applications divided by type. The second section lists many more, less popular applications. The quality of

Mozilla hasn’t announced it yet, but it’s out there. You can get the final 1.5 for macintosh here.

Word on the net is that Firefox 1.5 final will be released today.

The photo to the right is a snapshot of the front page of the Journal Star web page (our local daily paper) today. I realize that they did $100,000 in damage and that’s pretty incredible, but really – is this front page news? DC had their beltway sniper, we have… “Get the whole story on their site”:www.journalstar.com/articles/…

This morning I worked with two students from Cambridge, Nebraska on web development topics. Here are the links and other resources that I mentioned during that time.

h3. Downloadable Files

• "Completed _America_ Project":[www.brianfitz.net/america_f...](http://www.brianfitz.net/america_finished.zip)

h3. Web Sites

• "CSS Zen Garden":[www.csszengarden.com](http://www.csszengarden.com/) This site show what's possible with CSS by inviting CSS designers to contribute stylesheets to style a common html file.
• "CSS Vault":[www.cssvault.com](http://www.cssvault.com/) A showcase of CSS sites
• "Stylegala":[www.stylegala.com](http://www.stylegala.com/) Another showcase/magazine covering css
• "Layout-o-matic":[www.inknoise.com/experimen...](http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php) Have the basics of a css layout built for you.
• "List-o-matic":[www.accessify.com/tools-and...](http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/developer-tools/list-o-matic/) Have a css-based navigation created with a list built for you
• "Glish":[glish.com/css/](http://glish.com/css/) A source for solid, basic css layouts.
• "Digital-Web Magazine":[www.digital-web.com](http://www.digital-web.com/) IMHO, One of the best standards-based web design magazines
• "A List Apart":[www.alistapart.com](http://www.alistapart.com/) What some may consider the center of the standards universe, this is where you will find some of the best articles and information about standards-based design.

h3. Books

• "Designing with Web Standards (Jeffrey Zeldman)":[www.amazon.com/exec/obid...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735712018/qid=1114802761/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-1101931-0476668?v=glance&s=books&n=507846&id=1114802761/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-1101931-0476668?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) If you are serious about learning standards based design, this book is a great place to start. It won't teach you any particular skills, but it will give you all of the background you need to know why you are doing what you are doing?
• "Eric Meyer on CSS":[www.amazon.com/gp/produc...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073571245X/102-4391777-8320103?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance) This is a good book for a beginning CSS developer as it takes web page elements that everyone builds like navigations and teaches how to build them with CSS using solid techniques.
• "More Eric Meyer on CSS":[www.amazon.com/gp/produc...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735714258/102-4391777-8320103?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance) An extension of the previous book.
• "CSS Pocket Reference":href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596007779/102-4391777-8320103?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance The other books are too large to carry everywhere you go. This one is small enough to bring with you and will remind you that you change font with font-family, not text-family.
• "Bulletproof Web Design":[www.amazon.com/gp/produc...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321346939/102-4391777-8320103?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance) A recent publication that, like the Eric Meyer books talks about how to create web pages using cascading style sheets that will be compatible with all browsers.

• Blind Access Journal The Blind Access Journal is a blog centered around the goal of making the web and the content delivered over it accessibile to everyone.
• InterLinc: City of Lincoln: 5 CITY-TV Program guide for Lincoln's Educational Channel 21
• Steadman A fantastic british band that provides free downloads to their music

Google has a few new things out.

• First, in my right column, you see a link to download Firefox with the Google Toolbar. Clicking on this link AND installing the software earns me a dollar. Yep! Google is paying a buck to those that get people to switch to Firefox. Want to earn money? Sign up.
• How do you sign up? That's the second thing. You can click on the image right under the Firefox image to sign up for Google AdSense. Once registered, you will receive the HTML needed to place the Firefox and other ads on your own blog.
• Third, as another blog tool, Google now offers a free statistics site. Sign up for the service, place the code on your pages and get great reports about who is visiting your site.
• Finally, something for everybody (including non-bloggers), is Google Base. A free online database service where you can create a online storage area for recipies, inventories or anything else. I'm sure that Google has some grand scheme here, but I'm not sure what it is.
  

Today was my birthday and my wife got us tickets to see harry potter tonight. We thought that the line would be sick, so got there early and we were almost the first ones -- felt kinda dorky (but got great seats!!). Line was much worse for the movie after ours -- it reminded me of the star wars opening weekend. Anyway. If you like potter, see it. It's good. It's dark, but I think they toned parts of it down. My memories of the book are a little more evil. The movie makes assumptions that everyone pretty much knows all of the characters, so I imagine that somebody new to the series would be pretty confused. For a book that really featured more quidditch (sp?) than any of the others, this movie had not a single game -- only a short scene at the beginning of people gathering for the world cup. Even with dropping the games and glossing over parts of the book and the characters, the movie weighs in at around 2 hours and 15 minutes while focusing primarily on the events surrounding the tri-wizard tournament and Harry's, Ron's and Hermione's adolescent spats.