I checked all of my Analytics accounts earlier today and discovered a very strange coincidence. No one visited any of my Web sites yesterday.

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I opened up my copy of Opera today in order to print a Web page (in case you are not aware, Opera is fantastic for printing Web sites that don’t print properly in IE and Mozilla). When I opened it up, I was told there was a new version of Opera and I was asked if I wanted to download and install. I, of course, said yes.

After downloading the package and beginning to install it, I encountered a nice feature that I’ve not seen in any software installer before.

Opera asked me if I wanted to upgrade, or if I wanted this to be a separate install.

With a lot of software, I wouldn’t really see a point in this type of dialog. However, with Web browsers (as I’ve shown with two of my previous blog entries – Entry 1 | Entry 2), this could be invaluable. Let’s just hope that Firefox, IE and Safari begin building this type of function into their automatic updates.

Obviously we wouldn’t need this type of functionality built into minor version updates, etc. but it would be really nice to see it available in major milestone releases.

I was visiting a local radio station’s Web site today to see if they had any publicity for one of our upcoming events. Needless to say, I got a little distracted.

I came across their “link of the day” from yesterday. That link leads to the Simpsons movie Web site. The page in particular is one where you can create your own Simpsons character. Similar to the way you can create a Mii on the Nintendo Wii, you can now create a Simpsons-type character of yourself.

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Just a quick, funny note for the blog today.

I checked my bulk mail folder today to make sure no legitimate messages had popped in there. Oddly enough, I came across a junk message from a time-traveling celebrity. Apparently Vanilla Ice has gone 31 years into the future, and is sending me e-mail messages from that period in time.

If Vanilla Ice really did have the power to travel through time, don’t you think he’d go backwards rather than forwards? At least if he went back in time people might know who we was.

For those of us that are still living in the dark ages, using Internet radio instead of plugging into our iPods 24/7, I have found a very nice alternative to Launchcast. The site is called “Pandora”, and they offer quite a bit more functionality and presentation than Launchcast does.

Within this blog entry, you will find a list of pros and cons for Pandora Radio as it compares to Yahoo!’s Internet Radio application.

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Okay, so I realize that the application/tool is not actually new, but I just found out about it the other day. The tool I’m talking about is the Google Webmaster toolkit. I had never heard of this before the other day.

When I heard about it, I decided to see what they had in there. It’s not anything extremely fancy, but it is a nice little diagnostic tool. The tools help you make sure that your site is being indexed on Google, they rate your search engine ranking, they allow you to test robots.txt files and they allow you to add a sitemap for better indexing.

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A little over a month ago, I had satellite Internet service installed at my house. In this entry, you will find my review of the service so far.

Introduction
The service is pretty good overall. At it’s best, it’s not quite as fast as DSL or cable, but it is better than than the Internet service you get from wireless companies, such as AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, etc. The service is very reliable. I have only lost my connection a handful of times since I’ve had it, and it usually comes back within an hour. Most of the time, if I lose my connection, it’s storming badly enough outside that I shouldn’t have my computer turned on anyway.

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Today I decided to check each of my Analytics accounts, and came across some very interesting statistics.

On two of my sites, Firefox has actually surpassed Internet Explorer as the most popular browser (just barely, but it has). On a third site, however, the race is not even close.

As you will see from the images I’ve posted below, Analytics can be extremely important. On two of my sites, if I do not have them set up properly as cross-browser/cross-platform sites, then I will lose more than half of my visitors. On the third, however, the overwhelming majority of visitors would most likely never even notice if something on the site was broken outside of IE.

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Provided she has experience with a server-side scripting language, of course. The main point is simply that AJAX, although it is a technology that relies heavily on JavaScript, really only requires a few lines of JavaScript in order to work. Once you start the AJAX function with the teeny bit of JavaScript, everything else can be (and probably should be) handled on the back-end through a server-side language.

So, for all of you that are as afraid of AJAX as I was, here is a quick post to teach you everything you need to know about the JavaScript side of AJAX.

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