In looking through the list of top fifteen world skylines according to one person, I have to say I really liked Toronto and Sydney the best. Now keep in mind that other than Dallas and New York, I don’t think I have been to any of these places, so I am totally using the pictures provided there. What I liked about those two cities is that they showed a symetry with the largest buildings grouped in one space, and then a phased out (or down) step to the non-highrise district.

Sau Paulo and New York looked simply — well — a mess. There is no organization. It appears you can put up a building anywhere and just create a jumble.

Anywhere you turn in life you must be vigilant to guard against people seeking to take advantage of you. Sales of big ticket items, such as automobiles on the internet are very suceptable to scammers because the payoff from a successful scam is of sufficient size to make it worth your while.

The other night my son asked me why vehicle pictures on ebay had the license plates masked. I do not know the real answer, but I would guess it is because it is an unneccessary bit of personal information that could lead to identity theft.

The rules are still the same …
1. anything too good to be true is too good to be true ….
and when you decide not this time it is not,
2. go back to rule number one!

Big news from our friend and business associate Reese!

Several years ago we met this bright and talented young designer from Canada in our html fix it live chat. The night I met her I troubleshot and fixed a minor mySQL issue necessary to allow proper function of a blog run on the WordPress platform. Over the years our relationship has grown and we have collaborated with her on a number of projects. Often we provide back-end php scripts, css coding, database modifications and other services to her as an aid to her providing the top notch design services to clients that she is now know for.

This designer was most recently working at em two Web Studios. She had developed a nice niche working on Expression Engine driven content managed sites, among other areas of specialty. As her business has grown and changed, she decided it was time to launch a new site to display her business better and give her more control as she seeks to serve her customer’s on-line business needs.

So welcome Design by Reese to the web design world.

May we also comment that we like your sliding door mouseovers on your new site. We have found that working with her has driven us towards deeper design (shadows, small nuances, etc.) that has more depth to the image being viewed. In turn, we have often found an ability to encourage her to drive her sites to be more efficient and utilize images in ways that, while preserving that wonderful depth, are not too resource intensive. It has — to our way of thinking — been a wonderful mix of work and growth for both of us. So good luck with Design by Reese!

In a repeat of prior news … Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has a security hole and a third party has released a patch to fix it prior to Microsoft doing so. What takes a company with the resources at their disposal longer than a third party? The current active scripting hole allows a site that you visit to install spyware. Now there is a pleasant thought.

Do yourself a favor, get Firefox and support Mozilla.

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.

We have been long-time fans of WordPress a great cms/blogging software that has been available for free for a long time. While donations are certainly helpful, they have never required a dime. Our support/enthusiasm is waning … with the quiet release of a security update 2.0.2.

We have several dozen WordPress installs for clients. When they upgrade, they do not — in our experience and despite signing up for their release list — ever get any notice. There have been major security issues as far back as version 1.2 and into the 1.5 version. Yet they never gave out a public notice.

With the recent release of 2.0.2 being a security update, would it not make sense that it be somehow featured on the front page of their site? It isn’t.

Updating is a time consuming process because it requires a complete replacement of the existing install. Especially given that many of our installs involve some customization, that can be time consuming.

So our advice to WordPress:
1. always email all users and if the issue is security, consider seeking out all users — the bad guys do.
2. put the latest release clearly on the front page of your site … I always have to look further to see if a new release is out.
3. start making security patches or upgrade patches to simplify the update process.

I am considering using Expression Engine for more and more installs to be honest because updates are much easier. I like many features of WordPress better (page feature, fold menu plug-in, semi-static home page etc.), but I also have to value my time.

I did something dumb the other day. I was so excited at the prospect of using WindizUpdate within Firefox as an alternative to Windows Update within Internet Explorer, that I showed my complete ignorance of K-Meleon as a browser. The comments feature of HTMLfixIT is temporarily disabled, but if it were functional I’m guessing that I would be getting a hiding from a heap of loyal K-Meleon users.

To make amends, I have pulled my head in and checked out K-Meleon. For those folks who don’t know, K-Meleon is a web browser based on Gecko, the layout engine written by the Mozilla Foundation and also used in Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Application Suite, and SeaMonkey. According to Wikipedia, the aim of K-Meleon is to provide a light-weight browser running under Microsoft Windows using the operating system’s native interface for the application’s toolbars and menus – similar to Galeon or Epiphany on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, and Camino on Mac OS X.

Wikipedia further reports that because of the lower resource requirement, K-Meleon is more responsive than most other Gecko based web browsers. It is beneficial for systems where the hardware is aged and system resources are limited. It is also stated that it starts up much faster than one of its competitors, Firefox.

I have now tried K-Meleon out for myself, and found it to be an easy browser to use. Like Firefox it uses “layered” (tabbed) browsing, and like Opera is uses mouse gestures for navigation. The default skin is boring, but what default skin isn’t? There are a range of macros available, providing functionality not unlike Firefox Extensions.

The claims of fast load times seem to be valid, and this is something that really appeals to me. Allow me to explain why. The most popular PC in my house is a Dell notebook with a modest 1.5GHz processor and 512MB RAM, and between my 3 children the PC can be logged on / switched between any number of users at a time. With limited resources it often slows to a painful crawl when switching between users, sometimes proving too poor for Firefox, killing it off and stopping it from responding. If K-Meleon can make life easier in this regard, I’ll be converted to a fan!

Go on, give K-Meleon a try for yourself!