I wish I had a xyle scope! I was reading today how Mike over at MikeIndustries.com spiffied up a myspace page. He used his “xyle scope” that allowed him to look under the hood. Now I have parts of this functionality thanks to my Web Developer extension in Firefox, but it appeared as though this might just be slicker. Unfortunately I swore off any hope of a Mac after they mistreated me a few months ago with my daughter’s new but not working right i-Pod. To think that I had to use up my free consultation … without them asking me if I wanted to … to fix a problem that the item shipped with. Jerks!

I like Google! There is rumor that Google may be moving to Grand Rapids, Michigan … oh boy I sure hope so. One of its latest Google Lab Projects has been something called Google Page Creator. It is really a cross between static web pages I suppose and blogging. It allows someone to create pages in a what you see is what you get format. The pages are then hosted on Google (http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com).

What is the advantage over a blog type of format? Nothing I can think of other than look. It seems to be the new geocities of the net to me. They allow you 100 megabytes of space. Certainly enough for most people.

This will be great I suppose for non-profits and others, especially as you can buy a domain name for under $10 and then point it to your Google Pages site.

One other interesting thing is the section on how to make your pages work well with Google Search. Well worth the read!

Need help setting one of these up? Contact me … and for a modest fee, I’ll talk you through the process.

CoComment is a site that looks very promising. It will allow you to track where you leave comments, put a copy of the comments you leave here and there on your own website for your readers. It brings everything full circle. Sadly it is a popularity contest apparently as you need an invitation code and nobody sent me one. Maybe I can trade a gmail invite (or wait that was then) or a Newsvine tip or two?

I love finding sites that help you pick colors. Today I happened onto a nice utility on-line that lets you select from many preset color patterns and then shows you how they might be used. My only slam on it is that it will not let you pick two colors as the base and then contrast and compare between them. I already have my first two colors and am looking for the third. So this is not the answer tonight, it will be many other days. This is hitting my permanent web design toolbox.

Adobe is releasing a new product that will allow you to pass a three dimensional image that can be rotated and scaled in the pdf format. It is expected to be used heavily in the manufacturing market, however it seems to me that it could easily be expanded into the medical and many other fields with great results.

If you have Adobe Reader Version 7, you can view a demo to see what the buzz is about. Right click on an image and choose show toolbar. It is fairly intuitive after that. I have taken a small screenshot of the sample three dimensional turbine.

This is a nice feature. This Firefox extension called View Rendered Source Chart will graphically show you sections of defined code in a web page. Really an advanced form of syntax highlighting or intellegent indenting might be a way to think of this extension. See the screenshots on the extension page or over here where the history of the extension is laid out in great detail to demonstrate how well maintained the extension is.

At year end, everybody and their brother (and sister) issue the best of lists. There are hundreds of them. Somehow by following a link in one of them from some guy named Red, I wound up over at a site called Duct Tape Marketing. Now as may be obvious, I am not all that much into marketing (you can donate to keep htmlfixit up and running by the way — how is that for actually marketing us?), but I followed the link because I like duct tape — in fact, it has often been described as man’s best friend, and I happen to agree.

Two interesting things struck me, first, the lead story suggested that you give something away to get people into your location. The best part of the advice, to my way of thinking, was what he said — do not ruin a free offer with small print. That is something we do well here at htmlfixit.com. We give away our statistical hit counter and a download script free of charge. There is no hook, period. You can use them freely, modify them, give them away to friends at the holidays if you are strapped for a gift (and you didn’t find a good idea in da Yoopers song, everybody can use some back bacon, eh?). Our only hope is that you either donate volunantarily to us, or that you buy one of our advanced scripts (that are only $10 by the way). I am not sure if we do a good job of selling you something once you get here — although that also isn’t our primary purpose, but we do need to pay the bills to stay up and running.