Brian Fitzgerald

CSS3 promises the ability to have multiple columns (think newspaper layout). Exciting.

Looks like XHTML2 is coming soon and it sounds great!! Here is a presentation about it and here is the working draft.

I had never found a great Fireworks forum, but there seems to be good discussion here at geekforum.

Wikis, getting bigger and bigger, are featured in a Time article.

Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha has a podcast called Radio WillowWeb.

Nokia and others think that mp3-enabled cell phones will overtake the iPod. I think that, for the time being, they are nuts. As long as you have to buy phones from only your vendor and buying a phone usually happens only when getting a new contract, people are not going to race out and get these phones. While they may sell 12 million phones a year, I would sure be interested to know how many of those are the $500+ models. I can’t think of anybody I know that has a real fancy phone, although there are certainly many available. Additionally, you don’t need your mp3 player everywhere while you may choose to take your phone everywhere. Why allow your phone take on that additional heft for something you don’t always need?

This is a good article on how to get started listening to podcasts.

Adobe has announced the future availability of a new piece of software called co-author. It is to GoLive what Contribute is to Dreamweaver. I'm sure this product has been in the design phase for quite a while, but I question the value of introducing it now. Contribute is a well-liked, version 3 program. Why release a version 1 product that will overlap a product that you know you will be acquiring?

ZD Net's David Berlind has some ideas.

Take a look at this column (support materials) discussing the iPod shuffle's audio supremacy.

Webnote

The Sith Sense

Wow. This is going to be big. CFAjax is the AJAX implementation for coldfusion. It allows javascript to directly call ColdFusion methods without refreshing the page. The possibilities of not having to submit and request pages blows my mind.

What is Netscape? As far as I can tell, it's been reduced to nothing more than an ISP and it's new browser is just one more branded application. The new Netscape 8 browser that came out yesterday drew some attention early as it was going to be based on Firefox, but has drawn more attention in the last couple of days because it also uses the Internet Explorer engine for other sites. Less than a day after it has been released they have issued a security patch for it. It's really sad that such an important name in the history of the web has been reduced to a messed up browser shell put out by a net-zero competitor.

How do you get columns to stretch the length of the page in CSS? There are many ways I'm sure, but the one I use most often is using background images to give the appearance of columns. There is a new article about this on Macromedia's site and also the article I originally learned the technique from at A List Apart.

The New York Times ran a story yesterday discussing Rich Internet Applications

Massimo's Corner has published a well-documented and thought out javascript form validator.

NewsPipe is a sourceforge project that will take a RSS feed and allow you to process it in your email client of choice.

Take this quiz to find out which operating system your personality most matches.

ThinkMac updated the NewsMac Pro news aggregator to version 1.0.2. This aggregator has a real slick interface and allows for syncing with Palm Pilots (via iSiloX). I tried it out, but didn't see enough to encourage me to switch from NetNewsWire. Perhaps it's in there, but it was frustrating that in order to read news I had to go through each news "channel" individually. I couldn't say "just give me all unread news regardless of channel (subscription)". If you don't already have an aggregator you love though, you may want to give it a look.

Here's some commercials for Firefox that a french advertising firm put together. Part of goal was to create commercials usable interntaionally -- thus the lack of dialog in any of them.

FrogBlog offers the best tip for logo design

h2. One: AJAX

• Stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”
• PanicGoods
• Google Maps
• “GTDTiddlyWiki”:shared.snapgrid.com/gtd_tiddl…" (based on “TiddlyWiki”:tiddlywiki.com)

h2. Two: Color Sites

• “ColourLovers”:colourlovers.com
• “Color Schemer Online”:www.colorschemer.com/online.ht…
• “Color Scheme Generator”:wellstyled.com/tools/col…
• “ColorCombos”:www.colorcombos.com
• “I Like Your Colors”:www.redalt.com/Tools/ily…
• “ColorMatch 5K”:www.colormatch.dk
• “Adam Polselli”:www.adampolselli.com
• (I can’t find the site that I mentioned that allows you to upload a photo and get a scheme from it)

h2. Three: Micro-Content Driven Web

“j3t05082005.mp3”:www.brianfitz.net/j3t050820…

If you want to be able to export iPhoto galleries as beautiful customizable pages, check out the free and just updated Galerie 5.1beta.

I was reading through my aggregator this morning and came across some postings that didn't really have anything to do with things that I subscribe to. This didn't bother me as I find some of the most interesting things through these types of posts, but I did wonder where they came from. I looked at the source and it was the Macromedia aggregator. This particular news feed is one of those I am aggregating from a source that is already an aggregation. My first split-second thought was that these things shouldn't be up there since they are not macromedia or web-development related, but then I considered my own blog. I have no idea in what contexts it may be getting aggregated. When I post off topic, it is still on-topic in the realm of my blog and feed as it concerns me somehow, but if for example my blog where aggregated with other web developers, many of my postings would be very off-topic in that realm and I wouldn't even know it. As a micro-content provider, one never knows how your content is being grouped elsewhere on the web.

Is this just going to be a characteristic of the new web or will the idea of tagging and categorizing micro-content become increasingly important? Is it the responsibility of a content provider or the one who aggregates to get clean relevant information?