The NY Times Design Manager Khoi Vinh has been answering a variety of questions over the past week from readers. Today’s question was most interesting:

Q: Regardless of platform or browser, NYTimes.com looks the same. This is not an easy feat to accomplish because of inconsistencies between browsers and how they handle HTML and CSS. How do you do it and with which tools?

— Neil Mansilla

A: It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.

AdaptiveBlue, maker of a variety of semantic Web products is announcing the launch of AB Meta tonight. AB Meta is simple HTML code that makes pages “smarter” by tagging them properly so that tools, including those from AdaptiveBlue, can take advantage of them.

Some examples of products that can take advantage of the AB Meta code include: books, music, movies, recipes and restaurants. I spoke with AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold who told me that his team collaborated on AB Meta with a large Web company which he can’t name currently but they will become public in the near future.

I like this type of markup because it serves an actual purpose - the classify and correctly identify a page. This will help machines better serve us the right content because the creators of the content have explained to the machine what the page is specifically for.

Check out the full AB Meta spec here.

I thought I was a geek, but I’ve got nothing on Bernie Peng.  You may have read his story on any of a number of news sites (CNN, Yahoo!, The Chicago Sun-Times, etc.).  Bernie Peng spent an entire month hacking his girlfriend’s favorite video game: Bejeweled.

Why did he do it?  So it would pop the question for him, of course.  He programmed the game to ask her to marry him once she reached a certain score.

I guess it’s a good thing they didn’t break up between the time he finished hacking the game and when she reached that score.

I saw an interesting article on Yahoo! the other day. It appears that someone at Carnegie Mellon came up with the idea to use a CAPTCHA script to mask e-mail addresses. Basically, they provide you with special link code to put in place of your normal mailto link. You can use the link anyway you want, but the script generates some HTML code automatically that looks similar to:

user<a href="http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01quxf658CWzRNQC34kj75Ug==&c=5Sc_I7orZzXLkOX6E7fontrPSKXj6NS2QC0a-5mV5Gk=" onclick="window.open('http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01quxf658CWzRNQC34kj75Ug==&c=5Sc_I7orZzXLkOX6E7fontrPSKXj6NS2QC0a-5mV5Gk=', '', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,location=0,statusbar=0,menubar=0,resizable=0,width=500,height=300'); return false;" title="Reveal this e-mail address">...</a>@example.com

In the example above, the whole e-mail address would actually be username@example.com, but the rest of the username is obscured by the script. Of course, they also supply you with just the address to the CAPTCHA page, so that you can build your own link any way you want.

The link, in turn, leads to a page with a CAPTCHA script. Once you correctly answer the CAPTCHA question, you’re lead to another page with the complete e-mail address. The script is called Mailhide, and it appears to be a completely free utility. It’s such a simple idea that I can’t believe no one thought of this before.

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Last week, Brightegg announced a private label CMS option. Last month I had the chance to speak with Brightegg CEO Jim Kieffer who provided some background on what Brightegg is. Below are my notes.

Brightegg provides templates and hosting to easily create a Web site. It appears to target small businesses where the owner isn’t ready to hire a Web developer and/or designer but is looking for a cookie-cutter approach and a few clicks and they are live online.

Jim noted that they are building a strong designer community by allowing designers to earn a revenue share on any of the “premier” themes purchased on Brightegg. The share is 50/50 and there are free designs to select from as well. If you select a premier theme, you can select exclusivity as well. The exclusive custom themes start at $699 with non-exclusive starting at $199.

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The new version of WordPress has been released. It’s the 2.5 version and I just upgraded HTMLCenter. As a reader you should see the same experience as always. The backend admin has been completely overhauled and so far, it is damn smooth. Things are in some different places but it takes advantage of a variety of newer technologies and the posting tool is sweet. I am very impressed. There are tons of new features, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has an overview of all of the features.

Here are some other good reviews of Wordpress 2.5:

• Mashable
• Paul Stamatiou takes a look at the new gallery features

A site called Hulu, which has been talked about a few times over at CenterNetworks, has gone public. It has been in private, invite-only beta mode for about six months.

Hulu per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

There is a very quiet buzz about Hulu on the Internet. An old friend of mine blogged about the other day, making it sound much better than it actually seems to be. In one sentence, Jon said “I have been able to catch up on shows that I didn’t watch the first time around”. However, when I visited Hulu, I found that there isn’t much potential to catch up on episodes you missed, unless you just missed them within the last few weeks.

I visited Hulu for the first time expecting to see a huge collection of full episodes. Unfortunately, what I found was a site with a decent selection of series, but only a handful of episodes from each series. Hulu doesn’t seem to offer any episodes of new shows that you can’t currently find on the network sites (probably because Hulu is actually owned by NBC and NewsCorp - NewsCorp is the parent company of Fox Broadcasting).

It may just be me, but as long as the networks continue to offer streaming video of full episodes from their own Web sites, and as long as Hulu continues to hold only a handful of full episodes for each series, I just don’t see the point.

Anyway, you can check it out for yourself by visiting Hulu.

Pingdom has an interesting look today into five of the top web hosts and their growth patterns over the past two-plus years. They include - accounts in parenthesis:

1. Dreamhost (625,470)
2. Ipowerweb/Ipower (414,788)
3. Bluehost (374,965)
4. Hostgator (299,463)
5. Site5 (64,737)

One thing to note is that more accounts doesn’t necessarily mean more revenue as Dreamhost has the most accounts but prices their accounts very low and caters to the entry level crowd.

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A few weeks ago, I encountered the major downside of satellite Internet service:  bandwidth restrictions.  Apparently, it is common practice for satellite Internet providers to restrict the amount of data you can download and upload over your connection.

With WildBlue, the service for which I signed up, the restrictions occur on a rolling 30-day basis.  With HughesNet, they occur on a rolling 24-hour basis.  I’m not sure what other satellite providers are out there, but I’m sure they have similar restrictions.

My service plan restricts me to downloading 17,000 megabytes and uploading 5,000 megabytes within any 30-day period.  Unfortunately, according to the terms of service, if you reach 80% of either of those limits, they cut your connection speed back to “128 kbps”. In reality, this apparently translates to a connection speed similar to the old 9,600 baud per second dial-up modems, possibly a 14.4 kbps modem connection.  Regardless, the connection speed is so slow that 99% of the Web sites on the Internet time out before ever loading, and those that do load take up to ten minutes to do so.

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Microsoft has posted a new announcement regarding several updates to how they handle APIs, documentation and interoperability today. The announcement is regarding the following products: Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007. The four principles that have been declared are:

1. ensuring open connections
2. promoting data portability
3. enhancing support for industry standards
4. fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

Please check out all of the live call notes on our sister site CenterNetworks.