Yes, You!

Yesterday I noticed that 41.7% of you are still using Internet Explorer. And this is a blog written by a Mac fanatic, and which most probably cannot be understood by the common non techie english speaker. So you don’t have excuses like “that’s what my computer came with and installing software is too overwhelming for me”.

If you are using Internet Explorer, and you actually gave a thought to what browser you are using, you will probably argue in favor of features, comfort, or stability. You are missing the point, Completely.

The main technologies that run the web, (X)HTML and CSS, are not utilized to their full potential due to a lack of support from the most popular web browser, Internet Explorer. By using Internet explorer, you are helping in perpetuating the web, and making advancement more difficult.

Not to mention from my perspective (and any web developers perspective) the need to find hack to make sites look normal in a non standards compliant browser ads another %50 work time and expense, which can be used for better things.

If you want to know more about why IE is bad for you, check out Kill IE

To end this with good news, I just wand to link to this article that states that in Europe, Firefox has a 28% market share. Soon enough the world will catch up. Let’s hope.

Then a day later, my RSS notifier beeped. One of the new articles was about a new recipe search engine, with features exactly like I described above, and implementation beyond perfect. it’s called SuperCook”

Yes, I can always be no. 2, or if I work hard enough, beat them and become #1. But I’m not going to waste my time on something that was already done, especially when it was done so nicely. Kudos!

Now here comes the scary part. What if SuperCook would be launched only after I spent hundreds of hours, or worse, thousands of dollars in my new project? As far as I know, there’s no answer.

When choosing domain names do you get a keyword rich or more brandable name?

Basically, the days you can have a domain which is both nice and also actually has the a keyword or two in it are long gone.

But look at the real world: most brands, branded for people, do not contain any ‘keyword’ reference. Nissan doesn’t have the word ‘Car’ in it (although General Motors has ‘motor’) Ikea doesn’t have ‘furniture’ and even Coca-Cola doesn’t have ’sugary brown soft drink’ in it.

On the other hand, in the web media, search engines give a strong weight to domain names containing keywords, so allot of sites want keyword-rich domains.

Look at your target traffic:
If you’re building another generic site, and you plan on basing most of your traffic on one-time incoming links from search engines, then yes, get yourself a keyword rich domain. But if you plan on actually building a site that will become a brand, and people will come back and recommend your site to friends, then a more brnadable domain is better.

Of course, if you’re not going to be the next web 2.1 thing, keep the name fairly simple, because you need to be really good for people to struggle with a crazy domain such as del.icio.us.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Facebook. But the fact is that in most scenarios, I cant read certain info without adding an application, and I can’t add an application without inviting friends, and I can’t accept an invitation to add an application without adding icons and banners to my already cluttered profile.

In my opinion, all this forced noise takes allot away from the subtlety of normal socializing. And i find in quite harassing that I can’t get results for a quiz i spent a few minutes taking, without being forced to harass 5 of my friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the social aspects of social networks, and I invite friends to apps I find cool, and send them messages and wall posts. But being forced to send them requests every time I do something is a bit to much. If I like something, I love sharing it. But prompting me to invite all my friends and install 72 icons before I even try out the app is slightly outrageous.

While not the biggest believer in the traditional form of microblogging, such as twitter, (Face it, nobody really cares what you’re doing) I think that the format is excellent for group communication. That’s exactly what Prologue is. While not exactly a blog theme, Prologue stretches WordPress into the right mold in a way only WordPress can be stretched.

Prologue allows users with posting ability, to post short messages to the board straight from the home page. Mesages can be viewed for the whole group, or by author or tag.

Prologue is available as open source (GPL) via svn. I haven’t figured out how to use the whole SVN thing, and I’m too lazy to copy the files one by one, but I’m dying to try it out, and I will once I figure SVN out.

Microsoft has warned corporate administrators that it will push a new version of Internet Explorer 7 their way next month, and it has posted guidelines on how to ward off the automatic update if admins want to keep the older IE6 browser on their companies’ machines.

Read More.

While IE7 is still far from being even close to perfect, Internet Exploder 6 is ten times worse. So whatever is takes to get the IE6 installed base as low as possible, even security reasons or whatever.

I’m working on a project that needs some custom development, and one thing that was important to the client is that the site has nice and SE friendly urls. This being my first time actually manually writing a .htaccess file, I searched around and found a cool mod_rewrite cheat sheet on I Love Jack Daniels.
Looking around the site, he also has cheat sheets for HTML, HTML Entities, JavaScript, CSS, PHP And more.

The contest will run for one month, ending November 12th.

The winner will be able to choose one of three prizes:
One Year Free Enterprise Hosting With OpenReaction ­ Valued at $3629.87
or a 13” Apple MacBook – Valued at $1,099,
or Cold Hard Cash – Value $1,000.

Check it out and please spread the word.

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