blogipity

PR Envy

In a WebmasterWorld thread concerning the current Google update it was suggesting that the term "PR envy" should be used to express people's disappointment over the lack of improvement in their site's PageRank.

I'm still chuckling.

I love it!

Nielsen, uh Neilsen, covers all bases

Looking for information on Jakob Neilsen?

How about Jacob Nielsen, Jakob Neilsen, Jacob Neilsen, Jakob Nielson, Jacob Nielson, Jakob Neilson, Jacob Neilson, Jakob Nilsen, Jacob Nilsen, Jakob Nelson, or Jacob Nelson?

I just read a thread at WebmasterWorld where Brett Tabke pointed out that Jakob's bio page includes tiny text at the bottom with each of the above possible misspellings of his name.

TopStyle 3

I've recently started using the latest 3.0 version of TopStyle and it's quite a step up from the previous versions.

The new version is much, much more than a CSS editor. It now includes a quality (X)HTML editor, HTML Tidy, a harmonious color picker, and many other new features.

This is one software application that could certainly justify skipping a version number ☺.

Latest reading

The latest book that I'm reading:

Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life

Again, this is another book that I've had for a few years and am just now getting around to reading.

About Schmidt

I just saw About Schmidt tonight.

A good movie.

I left the theater thinking about a scene where a recently retired Schmidt's (Jack Nicholson) wife has just died.

You see the paramedics and a police officer leave with his wife's covered body. They give a couple brief, faint glances toward the Nicholson character before leaving him alone in his now solitary home.

A touching scene.

What else could, should they do?

Opera 7 Doctype switching

I've been playing around with the Beta 2 release of Opera 7 this past week.

I'd noticed that a few pages using font-size keywords now map the keyword values as the more intuitive medium=default size way instead of previous small=default size.

I've come across some general rumblings about this release introducing Doctype-switching, but haven't come across any listing of the specific doctypes that cause the browser to go into "quirks" mode, so I decided to look into this myself.

The table below is the result of a quick and dirty test by creating a simple page with <span style="font-size:meduim;">test</span> and seeing wihcih DOCTYPEs caused the Opera to render "medium" text as the "quirky" larger than default. As you can see that vast majority of DOCTYPEs will put Opera into its new "standards" mode.

A new CSS hack

There is a discusion on Webmasterworld about a new CSS hack to hide rules from Netscape 4.x.

Apple releases Safari

In case you were sleeping under a rock yesterday, Apple released their Safari web browser.

The new browser is based on the KHTML engine (previously used for the KDE browser, Konqueror).

Mark Pilgrim has collected a very nice set of Safari-related links.

Also, Eric Meyer reports that:

Meanwhile, I've heard credible rumors that Apple, while it was working on Safari, filed Bugzilla evangelism bugs so that the Standards Evangelists at Netscape (of which I'm one) would get the sites to fix their code to work with Gecko and other standards-compliant browsers. This would then, they apparently hoped, get the sites working in Safari as well. If this turns out to be true, I'm going to be furious; just the idea that it could be true makes me angry. I don't mind helping out Apple. I'm a Macintosh guy and have been for more than a decade now. I do mind being tricked into doing their work for them. Hey, guys, what's wrong with saying, "We're both working on standards-based browsers, so let's work together to get sites to support standards?" You know, being honest? How about that? Anyone think of that?

Mozilla 1.0.2 out

Mozilla released version 1.0.2 of their browser yesterday.

You can read comments about the browser at Mozillazine.

Personally, I've found the later Mozilla releases just as stable as the 1.0 branch.

If you don't need or want a mail client included with your browser check out Phoenix. Be sure to check out my favorite Phoenix theme, Breeze.

Good Bash-scripting resource

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

Say goodbye to long distance bills

I read an article in the New York Times, "Phone Calling Over Internet Is Attracting More Interest" today.

The article mentions services like Vonage that offer more than simple voice over IP, such as the ability to keep one's present phone number.

Perhaps I'll have to give one of these services a try and kiss those long distance bills goodbye.

Working on the layout this weekend

I'm going to tweak the blog layout over this weeknd.

Please forgive any strange renderings in the interim.