Up until recently, I never really thought that I had very extensive browser needs, but I’ve now loaded most of a dozen Firefox extensions into my browser. The reason is pretty simple, I didn’t know what I was missing till I tried them.

My current four favourites are BugMeNot, User agent switcher, Super Drag&Go and of course Adblock. All of which are available at the official extension site and all are totally free.

I’m not going to get into this in too much detail, you can browse the links if you are that interested, but I’ll do a tiny pitch on each one to give you an idea.

Read the rest of this entry »

J.K.Rowling Official Site – Harry Potter is now up and running. I read all the Potter books for some light entertainment when my kids had them around. They are entertaining, although they get repetitive about now.

I am not much of a flash fan, and yet, this is a very neat site. It requires that you hunt around … but it also offers a text only version.

I am currently on dial-up, so this is one slow trip for me … if I had to hit the Hogwart’s Express, I might bounce off the brick wall before I got in!

Well, now this is an interesting one.

Microsoft claim that they get more virus’s not because they are less secure, but because they have more market share. It appears they were at least partially wrong.
(Actually, they are totally wrong, they have nowhere near the market share of web servers as does the open source Apache (67.3% Apache, 21.3% MS IIS), and yet Microsoft IIS (The MS web server software) has had many more critical security flaws than has Apache.)

Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to compete on a more even footing with Yahoo and Google, Microsoft is developing their own search engine, one that relies on their own search and spidering algorithms, (rather then using the results from other engines as MSN search does now.)

You can test the results now at MSN Tech preview.
The beta search is only using a database of about one billion documents, which is much much smaller then the other major search engines, but HTMLfixIT is already in there, so I guess that’s a good sign. 🙂

If Microsoft are going to use algorithms like Google in order to create their own “pagerank” type technology, that can only be seen as a good thing as my personal experience of the current MSN search has been pretty dismal, particularly when compared to Google.

Read the rest of this entry »

The world has millions of sight impaired people, Australia has at least 300,000, and other countries have an order of magnitude more.

Should they be discriminated against by web designers? Most countries have laws that give an emphatic NO! In fact, there have been court cases where companies have been sued for not providing for the disabled.

So, how does an ordinary “sighted” web designer discover if their proud works are suitable for those with vision impairments?
Up till now, you just had to follow disability guidelines and hope that was enough.

Read the rest of this entry »

Up until tonight, whenever I posted a new story on HTMLfixIT, I did so by typing it into my text editor and spell checking it there before pasting the lot into the submission form for articles.

Tonight I came across Spellbound which is a full spell checking extension for Firefox.
It installed flawlessly, I simply selected all the components by ticking the relevant boxes on the spellbound page, and then did the same for a dictionary (choosing Australian in my case.).

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official,
PHP5 is now a stable release.

Changes include:
– Object Oriented approach to XML,
– SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is included for Web services.
– SQLite and a new MySQL (MySQLi) extension are included.
– New ZendII engine and some significant enhancements to PHPs Object Oriented behavior and methods.

And a heap of other stuff. Programs written using pre-existing PHP object orientation may need some minor touch ups to work on PHP5
(or they may not, depending on how program was coded.)

For info and downloads, head over to php.net.

Regards

Franki