Somewhat Tuned

Finally - “Microsoft backs down” as Wired puts it. My own opinion - I’ll believe it when I see it. My skeptical money is that what M$ will end up calling compliance will be something different from actual compliance as developers need to actually utilize cross-browser standardization.

As I’ve gotten more freelance and development work this has been a bigger issue - to make sites consistently look good across browsers - and IE and CSS are the biggest pain to deal with - as most developers will tell you.

As an aside, to see the size of this issue in the web developer world - last I looked, the top dugg story in the last 365 days was “digg this if you’re tired of IE costing you money”.

Here’s a link to the story.

written by msouden

It’s been too long since writing or posting anything to the blog so this is a 1/2-hearted attempt to remedy that. Let’s see things tech I’ve been playing with recently… I successfully migrated a blog with 1000+ posts from Blogware to a Wordpress site recently. Rather proud of that one - and very happy not to have to [ctrl-c] [ctrl-v] until I wanted to jump from something high.

I’m looking a Joomla again for a possible upcoming project. It needs multiple levels of authoring, and other nifties that WP can’t do.

Oh - and I need to remember to look into a new-on-the-scene CMS that’s award or near-award winning and has lots of interesting sounding ajax in it… something like blue streak or silver streak or something….

In other news I’m an uncle again Carlyanne Smith was born yesterday morning. Some more about that on Maya’s blog.

My ride to dinner is here so more to post later.

Cheers,

Matt

written by msouden

READ CAREFULLY. By opening this web page you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (”BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

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Thank you Cory Doctorow for giving us this. It’s been around for a while, but I still get a kick out of it. He encourages us to place this on emails, stick it to those foot-long reciepts, and put anywhere else it seems fitting.

written by msouden

Merlin Mann  of 43folders.com posted this to his blog, and as a mac newbie, I’m also posting it here for further exploration. Some of these I know about and some are new. Merlin said it’s a good list, so I’ll try at least some of these.

http://techmagazine.ws/mac-software/

written by msouden

Thanks to Ed Vielmetti for bringing these to A2B3 this week. What a great bit of really cheap swag. Checkout PocketMod.

written by msouden

So this from MacBreak weekly - a podcast I’m listening to right now, so I’ll have to find the links for it later. Evidently one easy way to get a color palate is to find a piece of artwork or image - or take picture of something with a nice sense of color you’d like for a web site and then upload this image to the “Big Huge Labs” palate generator. As the name suggests, this supplies you with a color palate to use in building the site.

Next I’d be interested in seeing a shortcut tool to add the palate into the css of a WordPress site theme.

written by msouden

frequent mistakes of freelancers.

written by msouden

The original post uses the “W** 2.0″ buzzword, but I’ll just call it a lengthy (not complete, although complete is probably impossible) list of APIs for interesting/innovative use. If you don’t know what an API is, here is the wikipedia page.

Here’s the link to the list of APIs. I know of a few they’ve left off including SugarCRM and Asterisk among others.

written by msouden

http://www.tzunami.com/No-More-Harddrive.php

written by msouden

We’ve started using Google docs and calendar for weekly household budgeting. The privacy issues I guess don’t really bother me. About all anyone would see is that we drop $130 frequently at Trader Joe’s were someone to take the trouble to find out. The important stuff is all offline.

That said I found this kind of cool little bit of added security for Google applications:

“Create bookmarks (or modify them if you already have them) for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and iGoogle (your Google homepage) using https instead of http, like so: https://mail.google.com/mail/”

This encrypts data as it is transferred between you and Google - whereas when you log in to the “http” address all that is encrypted is your login. Once logged in, everything sent (email, calendar events, notes, IM, etc. is sent in plain text, which can be easily captured and read by 3rd parties. Encrypting this data makes it much harder to eavesdrop on.

A more in-depth explanation and why you might want to do this is at the link above. The only catch I saw was that using the links between different applications on the Google sites themselves will always still take you back to the unencrypted pages.

written by msouden