Free Ajax Loading GIFs
This afternoon I was working on some ajax loading for the media player on the church’s website. I opened up ImageReady and was about to get rolling on creating a nice animated gif for a “loading”-type message. Then I asked myself the ever-important question: will I be reinventing the wheel? That’s when I searched Google and found this.
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Well Dang, Myspace
A little over three years ago I decided it would be neat to create my own personal page on this nifty website called MySpace. It seemed to be pretty popular and it was certainly growing quickly. I was able to create an account as a “band” and upload music to my page. People were writing messages and commenting on my photos. Even though these technologies were not a foreign concept to me, being in the web industry, I found the site a nice resource to share with friends.
Unfortunately MySpace because more of a monster than anything. It was a hotspot for hackers and security exploiters and quickly gained a poor reputation for that. On the flip side the advertising was going crazy and it was sold for $540 million to News Corp. I became less and less interested in the service as the years passed. I don’t frequent the site by any means but today I decided “hey, why not sign in for old time’s sake”. Upon going to myspace.com this evening I was disgusted
I’m officially a Daddy!
Last Wednesday my little girl, Brady, was brought into this world - 12 weeks prematurely. There were some complications with the pregnancy and it was the overall best action to take. I’m sure I’ll have some friends and/or family looking around here, my personal blog, for updates on her health. Her mommy and I have actually setup a separate blog dedicated just to Brady. If you are interested in staying up to date on her status head over to bradyfaith.com. Don’t hesitate to comment on our entries because we are grateful for any and all support! Thanks!
iPhone Software 2.0: A love hate relationship
I, like many many others, jumped to update my 1st Gen iPhone on Friday afternoon. Fortunately for me I had no troubles with the process. It did take a little while but it isn’t the end of the world. I was actually pretty excited about some of the apps. The night before I downloaded 4 or 5 that I knew I wanted to try out. Here’s a little recap of my first full day using the updated phone.
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Web User Statistics
From time to time I venture outside of my project’s Google Analytics and look at ‘internet-wide’ statistics. Over the past year or so this has meant going to W3Schools.org and viewing the various statistics. This habit, however, may be change now due to some newly shed light. I was reading on another blog about the statistics from W3Schools being just from their viewers. This puts things in quite a different perspective due to their target audience. A comment in said blog post referred to TheCounter.com as a more reliable source for statistics. I sought out for some ‘realistic’ stats only to stumble upon more confusion…
Break it Down
I decided to review the results from May of 2008 from three sources: W3Schools, TheCounter.com and one of my Analytics reports. Here’s what I learned:
- IE7 - 26.5%
- IE6 - 27.3%
- FF - 39.8 %
- WinXP - 74%
- Vista - 9.3%
- Mac - 4.7%
- IE7 - 41%
- IE6 - 37%
- FF - 16%
- WinXP - 76%
- Vista - 0% (or too low to consider 1%)
- WinNT - 11%
- Mac - 4%
- IE7 - 18%
- IE6 - 6%
- FF - 64%
- WinXP - 59%
- Vista - 15%
- Mac - 18%
Hmm
Clearly it depends on the lens you are looking through when retrieving such data. Does anyone know of a good, accurate representation of browser statistics? I would imagine powerhouses like Google and Amazon would be great sources for accurate statistics considering their wide usage. Unfortunately I could not find any reports directly from such sites.
Suggestions?
Does anyone have any suggestions to find an accurate representation user statistics?
TextMateTips.Com
Being completely at peace with my nerdy side I recently launched a new ‘blog’ of sorts that is a tip site dedicated to the best text editor out there, TextMate. I plan to post useful tips there fairly often and I also invite anyone in the TextMate community to contribute. Head over to TextMateTips.com and take a look!
Web 3.0?
It seems the rage these days is what many are calling ‘Web 2.0′. Well what exactly is Web 2.0? Some define it as a more interactive web experience. Others define it by the core programming that drives a web application. And then there are those that say all you need to be ‘Web 2.0′ is a shiny reflective website design and a bubbly logo. My personal opinion is that ‘Web 2.0′ is the natural evolution of how the web is used by businesses, organizations and individuals to interact with their audience.
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New Theme Selection
For the 3 of you subscribed to my RSS feed and the other 2 who visit my site occasionally it may be obvious that I changed my theme of choice. I was previously using Simplicity which was doing just fine. The purpose for using it was to have a simple design while I cooked up a design of my own. The only problem is that I’m not a designer. Somedays I accept this fact quicker than others.
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3G iPhone Letdown
Today Apple announced the new 3G iPhone for release on July 11th. I’m sure there are many Apple fans who are thrilled about getting their hands on the new updated piece of handheld goodness. I, on the other hand, am highly unmoved by this new release. The main new features include 3G data speeds and connections, GPS functionality built in, new black plastic back and a white backing option at the 16gb level, better battery life, louder audio, logical headphone jack. Here’s how I break these details down as a user:
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Robots Standards Reference
One very useful tool for Web Administrators lies in the Robots Exclusion Protocol. It’s a handy way to tell search engines certain actions you want them to take when crawling your site(s). This is typically done via a robots.txt file or various META tags within the (x)html. I knew about these tools and have been using them for a couple of years. What I did not know is that Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft have been collaborating on these efforts for a while now.
Over the last couple of years, we’ve been collaborating with Google and Microsoft to make webmasters’ efforts more effective across the major search engines. By bringing standards such as Sitemaps and improvements like auto-discovery and cross-host submission, webmasters can simplify their account management across the different search engines.
Yahoo!, in their Yahoo! Search Blog, has outlined all the details needed to successfully create this data. Take a look at their site because it’s a reference you may need!
One Standard Fits All: Robots Exclusion Protocol for Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft
