I got a couple of chuckles out of it, but stamping a celebrity on your product doesn’t make your product (Vista) suddenly catch up to OS X or the good Linux distros.   Anyway here it is…

This is a fantastic Web Accessibility toolbar for Internet Explorer, which I stumbled upon recently.  It combines a lot of functions which people normally use the web developer toolbar (Firefox) for, as well as some specialised accessibility features.

Some of what it does:

• Validation shortcuts (W3C HTML Validator, W3C CSS Validator, W3C HTML Tidy, W3C Link Checker, WDG Html Validator etc)
• Screen Resize features (change resolution)
• Basic CSS functions to let you check applied styles quickly
• Image alt tag checker and image functions
• Page structure tools (DOM analyser etc)
• Tools.  Here it gets interesting, AccMonitor accessibility, The Wave accessibility tool, Webxact / Bobby and more.  Also, disability simulators including Diabetic Retinopathy, Glaucoma and Macular Degeneration.

That gives you a pretty good indication of exactly how accessible your site is.  You can download the toolbar via http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=614

I’m often discussing Javascript/PHP/HTML in a chat window and usually paste chunks of code I want to show the other people into chat.  Problem is, quite often the recipient gets smileys all through code or it does’t render properly on their chat client or the snippet gets lost along the way.

http://www.pastie.org/ looks like a pretty sweet way to share those snippets while maintaining code highlighting, formatting and also for keeping it referenced for later usage.  It’s a free service (donations accepted) so pretty handy for quickly showing off your latest ubersauce function.!

I recently installed both IE 8 beta and Google Chrome (Google’s first entry into the web browser market).  Installing IE 8 was a painful 6-7 minute process (IE 8 beta  nuked my Internet explorer 7 install).  In contrast, Google chrome installed in about 1.5 minutes and was a pretty simple process.

The main focus of Google Chrome is to provide a standardized browser interface for accessing web applications.  Gmail, Google docs and the numerous other online web apps are incredibly complex in terms of Javascript and Dom structure because they seek to accommodate the numerous browsers with all of their particular failings (yes I am looking at you Internet Explorer).  Google Chrome seeks to provide a stable platform for presenting web apps.

Google chrome has a really nice touch on the interface - the tabs are above the navigation bar.  It seems like a small change but it makes sense when using the browser.  Aesthetically Chrome is simple and clean.  When browsing it is incredibly fast and since it’s using the tested webkit  as the rendering engine (as used by Safari) we can trust that it will be a LOT closer to correctly rendering XHTML/CSS than Internet Explorer.

Chrome also has a ‘magic bar’ for the url box, which functions in the same way as the Firefox 3/IE 8 url box.  Start typing in a url and it checks your history and favourites for any matches.  Great feature.

Chrome also has a privacy mode (aka porn mode) called incognito.  Safari and IE 8 also have this feature, something FF 3 missed  out on.  When using Incognito, “Pages you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.”

Chrome also includes it’s own task manager, each tab runs on it’s own thread so theoretically if one application freaks out, the task manager can end the offending process and you can continue browsing in other tabs.  Chrome includes the ability to bookmark applications to desktop/quick launch bar which is handy.

The Javascript engine in Chrome is something special too.  The rebuilt the Javascript engine from the ground up and called it V8.  The engine runs independently of the browser, the end result being incredibly fast javascript speeds.

Did I mention Chrome has all of these features but is still FAST AS HELL.  While I will continue to use FF 3 for web development and SEO work (the plugins are fantastic), I think Chrome might be a new favourite for general web browing and when using web applications.  But I’ll be waiting for the Mac version thanks.

More Info:

Chrome Javascript Speed Tests
Thorough look at Chrome capabilities

Just stumbled across yet another cool Yahoo project.  Yahoo Upcoming is a kind of social network mashed up with an events directory.  You can create a profile, add the events you are attending/interested in to your profile, add new events, as well as watching what other events other people attend.

An example of a pretty full events list is Robert Scobel’s: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/user/138148/
You can then export your calendar of events to iCal, Outlook, Google calendar etc.

Great app for promoting your own events and keeping track of what events are upcoming.  Only problem with the site is that there isn’t much in there for Australia just yet.  Worth bookmarking though!

Hopefully this one will be much close to where Safari, Opera and Firefox 3 are in terms of complying to web standards.

I’m giving it a try in my virtual machine, looks interesting!
Download IE 8 Beta 2 now

Intitial impressions after playing with it for 20 minutes or so…

The Good:

• Browsing seems fast
• Uses webslices like safari (you can save a section of a page like an RSS feed).  Good to see MS copying good features from other browsers
• Use quicktabs like Opera (Firefox needs this imo)
• Has tab memory like Firefox
• Has private browsing mode (aka Porn viewing mode) like Safari
• Developer tools seem to be fully featured now, It does most of what web developer toolbar for firefox does.

The Bad

Well not much bad stuff found just yet (apart from the fact it took 5 minutes to install and the BETA killed my install of IE 7, wtf).  Feels snappy, IF the browser conforms to HTML/CSS/JS/DOM standards as much as Firefox/Safari/Opera already do, it looks like Microsoft might have caught up for browser software development.  If they have caught up with this, IE 9 could see them neck and neck with firefox.

…Because their income from classifieds has been destroyed by online classified websites. Also the ownership of large media companies has gone into the hands of fewer and fewer people with vested interests so the quality of investigative reporting has died. The rise of media outlets like Fox news and the various tabloids has seen a lot of people switch off.

Mainstream media outlets regurgitating old news from the internet is also a big problem from them. There was a story about a week ago on Digg concerning an iphone owner receiving a new iphone containing images of a chinese iphone factory worker on it (a cute chinese girl no less).

A week later it appears as front page news on a mainstream newspaper in Australia. It is not cutting edge news, it is not front page news, they have simply regurgitated something the reporter read on the internet a WEEK later. They expect people to buy newspapers with this regurgitated news when it is available from numerous online sources for free?  No thanks.

A friend sent me this link earlier today, http://iedeathmarch.org/.  Basically they’ve set a deadline for IE 6 to die, so to speak.  March 2009!  I really do hope the browser does die off soon because it is a constant thorn in the side of developers who create valid HTML and CSS only to see it break in Internet Explorer 6.
As they point out on the site…  IE 6 is OLD.

Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.

One of the key aspects of on-page SEO (which is often overlooked by HTML developers), is creating semantic rich documents.  It sounds like something complex, but quite simply, it is using HTML formatting appropriately.  That is using H1, H2, H3, B, UL tags in the correct fashion.

Some designers have a nasty habit of making a number of span tags which alter the text so the appearance is suitable for the page but the structure of the document is out of whack.  The H1 should describe the main subject of the page and only be used once per page.  Subsequent content sections should use H2 to establish what they are about, if there are subsections within the H2 topic, they should be H3 etc.

Search engines use semantic rich HTML to assist them in determining exactly what the page is about, so correctly using those titles (and making them narrowly defined keyphrases for your niche) will help you get sites indexed in the correct niche/category.

Tools for checking the semantic structure of you page:

Web Dev toolbar for firefox (after installing go to information > view document outline)
W3C semantic extractor

After reading this post by Kevin Rose, I decided to bump up my fitness regime and do some more strength training.  I’m doing plenty of cardio with mountain biking at the moment but my upper body strength is severely lacking.

One of the things he is doing is the 100 pushup challenge.  I remember doing 40-50 pushups when I was younger, but haven’t attempted to do them for quite a while…  I was shocked to find I could only do 9 pushups!  Starting the program tommorrow, will post my outcome!