Hulu is now live and streaming shows new and old from major TV networks. Watch every episode of Arrested Development right now. It’s the best show ever to be aired on television. You won’t regret it.
Now that it’s out of beta the increased load seems to be straining the content delivery network; the sound quality has decreased quite a bit. Still, there’s a bunch of content available and it looks really good. For the price (free) you can’t complain too much.
The Internet Explorer team has yielded to reason (or maybe a barage of letters and comments from angry web developers) and had a change of heart regarding the default rendering behavior in the next version of their web browser. The first sentence of the latest post on the IEBlog sums it up:
We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.
Thank you IE dev team! Now I plan to get back to thinking about the web instead of worrying about one piece of software.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a great free email client, but one thing about it has always bugged me: When you reply to a message, it puts something like “Scott Nellé wrote:” above the quoted text. Every other program I’ve ever used includes the date and time as well, which helps give context to the message. Unfortunately there’s no apparent way to change this from the options panel. But there is a way to do it. Here’s how:
Your replies should now show something like “On 2/28/2008 9:25 AM, Scott Nellé wrote:” above the text you’re responding to. Sweet.
Check Mozilla’s site for more info about reply header options in Thunderbird. Though that section mentions editing user.js, you should be able to make most changes in the config editor as mentioned above.
The debate over Internet Explorer 8’s proposed version targeting continues, and issue #253 of A List Apart features two good articles about it–one on either side of the fence. Jeremy Keith’s article (he’s on the “nay” side) suggests that IE8 should launch as a beta with version targeting disabled to see just how much it breaks the web. This is a brilliant suggestion and I can think of no better way to evaluate the need for a version targeting system. In fact, now that it’s been proposed I think it would be foolhardy of Microsoft to approach it any other way.
As a bonus, and in defense of not crippling IE8 by default, Keith’s article offers this line which is solid gold:
If IE8 is going to differentiate itself from its predecessor by having better standards support, then surely we can assess how it will render websites by simply viewing those websites in a standards-compliant browser like, say, Firefox, Safari or Opera.
Nice one, Jeremy.
Today is the day that Microsoft will be pushing out Internet Explorer 7 as an automatic update. I’ve taken a few precautions to keep IE6 at least for the time being, but with any luck I’ll be able to let it go soon. I’ll be checking stats for some of our client sites at USM with an eager eye toward any sharp drop in IE6 usage starting today.
I must admit that there’s a part of me that will miss IE6. Over the years I’ve built up a pretty extensive knowledge of its bugs, and I’ve developed a great aptitude for fixing issues triggered by those bugs. Once its gone, all that knowledge will be of no use and I’ll have one less valuable skill as a developer. For the good of everyone else, however, I’m willing to make that sacrifice.
Update: I’m a little disappointed at the ease with which I dodged the “forced update.” All it took was disabling automatic updates. The more complicated instructions that were floating around only seem to have applied to server versions of Windows. I’m still interested to see how overall IE6 usage changes going forward. A quick and unscientific survey of stats for a handful of sites shows that somewhere between 40% and 50% of Internet Explorer users are still using IE6 or lower. Those numbers come from sites with a fairly general (not specifically high tech) audience.
The web community is abuzz this week with news of Microsoft’s proposed plan to implement a special version-targeting meta tag in future versions of its Internet Explorer browser. You can read all about it in the latest issue of A List Apart and you can read plenty on both sides of the coin everywhere from Adactio to Zeldman.
The short version of my opinion is that I dislike almost everything about the proposal, but that it’s probably the only way out of the grave that Internet Explorer has dug for the majority of web users and developers. There’s a longer version which I and many others have sprinkled all over the web in articles and comments, but I’ll focus on one thing that bothers me that most people aren’t talking about: the way it all came to be.
The Internet Explorer team, along with a handful of web standards advocates to lend credibility to the final outcome, got together behind closed doors and ruminated for a little while on the issue and then came forth with what many are calling a standard. That’s it. A small group of people decided that all developers must now include a new line of code in every web page that they build or the still-market-dominating Internet Explorer browser will render it wrong (by intention) hence forth forever. Without consulting a standards body or the throngs of affected developers, they essentially declared a web standard. That just doesn’t sit well with me, and I don’t know how it sits so well with some folks who have been fighting tooth and nail to advance real web standards for nearly a decade.
Kirk at Alt Tags has spent what I imagine is a tremendous amount of time putting together some great screencasts about installing, configuring, and using WordPress. These screencasts are great for anybody who wants to use WordPress for blogging or content management. There’s a wide variety of information available, so newcomers and experienced WordPress users alike will be able to learn plenty.
I’ve become a big fan of screencasts lately; Watching one is like piping computer information directly into your brain. If that sounds appealing, check out WordPressTraining.com.
Now is the time of year when everyone posts their year-end roundup. They talk about exciting things that happened in their field of interest, and about the last year worth of posts on their site. Many pledge to post more actively in the coming year.
I have very little in the way of posts to review. In the 15 months since I made my first post, I have added a grand total of 8 posts to my archives. That’s a dizzying pace of 0.53 posts per month, or 1 post every 57 days or so. That’s pretty sad. I’m not going to pledge to post more in the coming year–such resolutions almost never survive through January. I’ll call this a benchmark post, so I can track any changes that may occur in the future. If things start to shape up around here, that would be great.
This is a basic tutorial that offers an introduction to the Ajax component of the mootools javascript library. At the end of this tutorial you’ll be able to use an HTML form to send requests to a PHP script and return a response without refreshing the page. This basic process is the foundation for most of the ajax that you see littered around the internet today. Mootools offers a simple way to get your feet wet with this technology, and plenty of room to grow once you know what you’re doing.
This tutorial is something of a followup to one that I wrote some time ago, describing the same basic process using the moo.ajax class, a precursor to mootools. That article still gets a fair number of visits on my site, but since moo.ajax has been deprecated it isn’t very useful. This tutorial expands on that one a little, but is essentially an update. By now everyone has heard of ajax, so there’s no need to repeat the introduction. Let’s get started.
Somewhat recently, Microsoft let slip the news that they are indeed developing Internet Explorer 8. Now they’ve released another interesting piece of info: As of December 12, 2007 IE8 passes the Acid2 test. If that means nothing to you, run (don’t walk) over to the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 Browser Test Page.
Passing Acid2 doesn’t necessarily mean that IE8 will be the browser that web developers have been waiting for, but it does mean that the IE developers have spent time adding features that many of us consider important. The fact that Microsoft is even thinking about Acid2 is a big win for the web, and the fact that their next browser will pass the test is huge.