Category Archives: Community

Community

Download Firefox 3

June 17, 2008 – 10:50 am

If you didn’t know already, today is Download Firefox 3 Day. They’re trying to set a World Record for the most downloads in a single day. I read somewhere that the fun begins around 10:00 a.m. PST.

I’ve been runing the pre-release versions for a while, and I can confirm that the memory management and speed are much improved. I normally have about a dozen tabs open at any given time, and I occassionaly have had 40 or 50 tabs going. In Firefox 2, this would cause major memory problems, even after I closed the tabs. [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in Browsers | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Syndactyly forums up and running again

June 7, 2008 – 11:12 am

When I switched to my new host, I was in a rush to get all my domains up and running, and I somehow managed to forget to re-install bbPress for my Syndactyly Forums. If any of you stopped by the site before and got a “sorry, I can’t find that” message, my apologies. The forums are up and running again, and on the latest version of bbPress.

By Dougal | Also posted in Announcements | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (5)

Atlanta PHP

April 2, 2008 – 11:42 am

Tomorrow night, I will be attending the April Atlanta PHP meeting. My friend Glen Gordon will be giving a presentation titled, “I’m a PHP dev! Why should I care about Microsoft?”

There are a host of technologies and tools from Microsoft that can add value to your PHP solutions, save you time, and are just plain cool. [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in Development, Operating Systems, Servers, Tech, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Internet Explorer 8: Progress!

March 6, 2008 – 10:35 am

It seems that Microsoft has reversed their previous decision to make Internet Explorer 8 crippled by default. They will be enabling the standards compliant mode by default in IE8, and webmasters will have to use the X-UA-Compatible header to force it into IE7 mode, for sites that can’t be updated immediately. Huzzah for progress!

And on that note, I’ll mention that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download. [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in Browsers, CSS, Design, Development, Standards, Tech, Web Design | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (6)

Internet Explorer 8: This is progress?

January 23, 2008 – 9:25 am

Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test. Huzzah!

But waitaminnit… What’s this stuff about forward compatibility by adding some new X-UA-Compatible header to my pages or my server? Am I reading this right? Are you telling me that in order for IE8 to use its fully compliant rendering, we have to add something new to our pages? And that if we don’t, it will fall back to rendering pages just like IE7? Is that what this means?

That’s just dumb.

Screw their stupid “don’t break the web” motto. [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in Browsers, CSS, Design, Development, Standards, Tech, Web Design | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (16)

International Delete Your MySpace Account Day

January 22, 2008 – 8:37 am

I just found out that January 30th is International Delete Your MySpace Account Day. What an awesome birthday present — I’m there, dude!

I’ve been thinking about deleting my Myspace account almost since the day I got it but always opted out of doing so because of the few friends I have who don’t have Facebook accounts. But by remaining on Myspace, I realize, I’m becoming an enabler. I’m giving those friends no reason to switch over from Myspace by giving them access to my Myspace profile.

The only reason I even have a MySpace account in the first place is because at my last job, we needed to test how to format our video player embed code on MySpace. [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in Holidays, Humor, Services | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (15)

No more daily Twitter posts

January 15, 2008 – 2:11 pm

Just as with my daily del.icio.us link posting experiment in the past, I have decided to discontinue my automated daily Twitter summary. I will continue posting to Twitter, and the most recent of my tweets will be displayed in my sidebar here. But think they should remain separate from my main blog content. I just feel like they “clutter” things up here, and the things I post on Twitter are different in scope from what I normally post in my blog.

I will likely continue to post mostly technical observations here in my blog (with the occasional side-track into non-technical areas). [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in Blogging, Services, Tech | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Twitterings

December 13, 2007 – 6:04 pm

You might have already noticed, but I finally hopped onto the Twitter bandwagon. You can see my latest tweets in the sidebar (it’s the “What I’m Doing” section), and I currently have it auto-posting a daily summary here on the blog (courtesy of the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress). I’m not sure if I’ll continue that or not, though. Of course, if you are also on Twitter, you can just follow my tweets with whatever method you prefer.

When Twitter first started, I didn’t think I’d see much value in it. [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in Blogging, Plugins, Services, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (26)

Benefits of Blogging

April 27, 2007 – 11:33 am

My brother-in-law, Bob, has been keeping a blog on wordpress.com for a while now called Arcane Code. He mostly writes about software development using Microsoft tools, because that’s what he does for a living. He’s also had some interesting posts lately about installing various flavors of Linux under Virtual PC, and a long series digging deeply into SQL Server. But one of his most recent posts caught my eye and I wanted to share it: Arcane Thoughts: Benefits of Blogging.

In this article, Bob briefly outlines six benefits that he gets from writing on his blog: Meet and Greet, Self Documenting, Self Promotion, Mentoring, Education, and Giving Back. [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in Blogging, Blogs, Family, Personal, WordPress | Tagged , | Comments (12)

WordPress.com supports OpenID

March 6, 2007 – 4:36 pm

The word just went out today that the WordPress.com blog hosting service now supports OpenID, both as a server and a consumer. Supporting it as a server means that if you have a blog on WordPress.com, you can use your blog URL as an OpenID. Supporting it as a consumer means that you can use any OpenID to login to your WordPress.com account (once you’ve associated your OpenIDs with your regular login). [...]

By Dougal | Also posted in OpenID, Services, Standards, Tech, WordPress | Tagged , , , , | Comments (6)