Well, I’ve been sick for the last three days, and I’ve pretty much decided that it stinks. I don’t get sick very often, but when I do, it knocks me on my butt. I went to bed on Sunday evening feeling pretty bad and woke up on Monday morning feeling horrible. Throughout Monday and Tuesday, I felt like I had the flu (no nausea, but the serious body aches, fever, etc.). Then, I woke up this morning (the first day I actually stayed home from work - but that was planned for a different reason) feeling terrible in a different way. The body aches had slightly subsided, but now I had a terrible pain in my throat, jaw and ear. I’ve been coughing all day, which makes my whole body hurt.

Hopefully I’ll feel better soon, but until then, I’m not getting a whole lot of writing or coding done. I look forward to seeing you all when I get back on my feet.

The first beta release of Firefox 3 was released about a week ago, and there is a lot of buzz around the Internet about its pros and cons. A pretty decent review of the beta release can be found on this site. Another good, in-depth look at Firefox 3 Beta 1 can be found on CNET’s blogs.

The main questions people around the Web seem to be asking are:
What features will be added?
Will the new Firefox handle memory more efficiently than current and older versions?
Which bugs will be fixed?
Which standards of CSS will Firefox 3 support?

You can view the official plan for Firefox 3 on Mozilla’s wiki. You can view the complete list of developer information (how to update extensions, etc.) on the Mozilla Developer Center.

The old school developers will remember, and for the new ones, a quick history lesson. In the 1990s, Netscape Navigator (Mozilla rendering engine) was the dominant browser. It “had a few bugs”, and as a result, when Internet Explorer started playing catch-up, there were a lot of reasons to start using IE instead of Netscape. Towards the end of the paradigm shift, we all started doing something deemed unacceptable by todays standards. The dreaded “Your browser is not supported” page.

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Well, another Black Friday is upon us. For those of you that work in retail, I offer you my condolences for having to deal with all the crazies out there. For those of you in parts of the world other than the U.S., I apologize for making such a localized post. For those of you crazy enough to run out and brave the crowds to find some insane deals, I salute you.

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I caught an article on Yahoo! yesterday talking about a new innovation in technology. The Eye-Fi memory card is an amazing new gadget that enables you to connect your digital camera to your computer without any wires and without removing your card from your camera. What’s more, the Eye-Fi card will even allow you to automatically upload your pictures from your camera to your favorite social networking or photo gallery Web site.

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More and more mobile phones users are browsing and searching the Internet on their handsets. The UK, for example, has neared saturation for mobile phones and many handset browsers can now handle sites designed for viewing on computers. Indeed 20% of UK mobile phone users now use the Internet on their mobile devices (source: 3G.co.uk).

If you design websites for PC viewing the you need to consider how your sites will look and work on mobiles. The bar for mobile specific sites has been raised by some good sites and others need to close their gap. As the mobile Internet has developed savvy users have come to expect higher standards when browsing on their handsets.

These 7 guidelines are based on actual user research conducted with mobile phone users. Users were asked to carry out typical tasks on popular websites using a mobile phone browser. The issues they encountered were used to produce these guidelines.

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Just like the last post, I am looking for some ideas. As you probably know by now, I have been working very slowly over the last year or two on developing my own content management system. I am at the point now where I am simply trying to finish up a few pieces of code before I make an official release.

However, while I’m working on the system, I am always looking for ideas on how I can improve the software.

When you research content management systems for your Web sites, what features do you look for?

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With the release of YaBB 2.2, and my reinvigoration toward hobby coding, I am curious:

What features would you like to see in a forum?

If you were to install a discussion forum on your own Web site, what features would you want the software to have?

If you were to visit a site that has a forum, what features would you want at your fingertips as a regular user?

What are your thoughts on the matter?

As promised in the last installment, here is an update on what I’ve been doing over the last few weekends.

Two weekends ago, I spent almost the entire weekend coding the CMS that I’ve been very slowly chipping away at for the last year or so. I actually got a great deal of coding done. I applied my newfound knowledge of PHP object-oriented programming (OOP) to create a “user” class rather than trying to fiddle around with a lot of arrays and cookies and stuff.

If I can get two or three more weekends to do that much programming, I should be able to put together an actual release of my CMS and start using it on some production sites.

Then, last weekend, I spent all weekend upgrading the forums on my Web site. As mentioned in an earlier post, YaBB 2.2 has been released. Because we have had some issues with our Web host, I had previously moved our forums from one server to another. I figured that it made sense to move our forums back to their original location while I was upgrading to Y2.2. Unfortunately, though, the combination of my slow connection and the overwhelming number of files made for a very long weekend of sitting around and watching files download and upload to and from my various servers.

Anyway, that’s about all I spent my time on over the last few weekends. Hopefully I’ll have more good news updates in the near future.

For anyone who does read the HTMLCenter blog regularly, I must apologize for slacking a little bit lately. Up until a few weeks ago, I had been trying to release a new post every other day. However, recently I’ve been elbow-deep in programming, and haven’t had much energy to make blog posts, resulting in some posts being spaced out three days or more apart from each other. Here’s an update on what I’ve been doing.

First of all, we’ve had a lot of stuff going on at work. I’ve been in meetings pretty much all day each day for the last three or four business days. I attended a conference and worked on a few new initiatives with varied groups of people. I also had to make a presentation at each of our campuses over the last few days.

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