Henry's blog

Being a non-dual-booting Mac user, I hit a snare when working on a website the other week. I knew that it worked fine in both Safari and Firefox, but it was untested in Internet Explorer. For as much as people tend to rag on Internet Explorer, it still dominates the browser market share, and because of this, ensuring a site works in Internet Explorer is critical. Even on this blog — one I would think to be pretty technologically savvy — 62% of my visitors use Internet Explorer.

Now, back to my original dilemma: I had a website untested in Internet Explorer, and had no way of getting Internet Explorer on my computer. After some Googling, I came upon Netrenderer. It allows you to paste a URL you’d like tested, and unlike other services, instantly outputs a screenshot of your site as it would appear in IE 6 or 7, based on your preference. Though it does cut off at the fold, or the bottom of the browser window, this has proven to be an invaluable tool for me in ensuring compatibility in IE for sites I design.

As talked about in length in a past post, I got a Nikon D40 about a month ago. Since then, I’ve been quite the photog, jumping at every chance I get to go out and take photos. For those looking for a D40 that want sample photos, or those just interested in seeing my progress these past four weeks, here is my best of for photos I’ve uploaded to my Flickr photo sharing account since I’ve had the rockin’ camera.

Enjoy!

It’s been a wild past few days since unbeknown to me, an article I’d written was submitted by someone to the social news site Digg a day and a half ago.

My initial reaction was disbelief, as never before had I even dreamt of an article I’d written getting on one of my favorite sites (no less, one with over one million registered users and many more unregistered). Then came the excitement as slowly but surely more and more people dugg the article, which, for the record, I don’t even think is that amazing an article. I suppose the fact that the trailing question mark was excluded from the title, “New Google Search Feature?” may have excited people — all it was, in fact, was an error when you searched for the term “review:” on Google and I predicted from there (Digg users sure do love rumors and predictions!). Either way, after about four hours, the article hit the home page, though was quickly buried (modded down and removed from the home page by users) when Google remedied the issue and the bug I encountered couldn’t be replicated. But hey, even though I only got 70 diggs, it was really fun while it lasted; I’ll let these stats speak for themselves:

I think I've stumbled upon a little yet-to-be-released Google search feature: "review:". Similar to "define:" to look up definitions, I predict this will work in conjunction with the recently re-branded Google Products (formerly Froogle) to let you quickly access Google Products' functionality directly from the main search.

The reason this is plausible is due to the fact that as of about 10:15 PM EDT, any Google search that starts with review: returns a persistent "502 Server Error" (example). Perhaps this means Google's about ready to release this. Either that, or I've unintentionally disturbed some delicate balance holding together the very internet as we know it!

Well, I made some minor changes to the site tonight. I added a logo-like thing next to the title, tidied up some alignments, and added a footer — just some simple things to make the design a little more pleasing.

Also, after toying around with the idea of it for a while, I’ve decided to sign up for the new tumblelog service everyone’s been talking about, Tumblr. I may start posting sidenote-type entries found here in the past to the new site, but I mainly have other intentions — those of the tumblelog acting as an aggregator for content of mine scattered around the web with different services. This is possible thanks to Tumblr’s great feed aggregation function, and I’ve set it up so that it syndicates my blog posts, Flickr photos, saved Del.icio.us links, and Diggs to the site.

This way, instead of visiting several different sites, you can now simply visit yum.henryetc.com. The name? I thought to myself, mmm, lots o’ tasty content, yum. Thus the site was born.

Enjoy.

Though I’m not a fan of the popular buzzword web framework, Ruby On Rails, I noticed something the other day: there seems to be a correlation between design beauty and use of Rails. Every app or site I’ve stumbled upon that uses the framework has a great, often minimal design that is quite pleasing to the eye. Perhaps it’s the fact that the people who design these sites have similar tastes in methodologies when it comes to programming languages: sweet, clean, and simple.

Those are just my two cents, but still don’t believe me? Check out some of these sites based on Rails:

• Mir.aculo.us
• Beast Forums
• Mephisto
• Shopify
• SimpleLog
• Fluxiom

Then again, it could just be the influence of “Web 2.0″ design concepts that make all these sites look great, but largely similar in terms of design elements (yes, Web 2.0 gets quotes from me). Stupid Web 2.0.

A note to fellow fans of the rockin’ band Wilco: tonight, at 11:00 PM EST, there will be a live streaming of the band’s entire new album called Sky Blue Sky, set to be released May 15th!

I’m extremely excited for this, not only because Wilco’s one of my favorite bands, and this will be their newest album in almost two years, but also because Wilco realizes the power of the internet for distribution and garnering hype — something the rest of the music industry largely doesn’t. It’s groundbreaking for a band themselves to put a pre-release copy of an album on the net, and my hat’s off to Wilco.

Some very strange things are happening on the photo pages of users of Flickr. As of my first sighting of this at 8:00 PM tonight, it appears that on the second page, halfway down on some Flickr users’ photo streams, there are one or two photo’s whose thumbnails do not match the higher-resolution pictures viewable when the thumbnail is clicked on. Typically these thumbnails are pixelated and poorly scaled.

Two examples of this can be found on the second page, halfway down on my photostream for the fourth picture titled “Ice Storm” and the third entitled “The Nintendo Wii”.

In addition to this, it appears that for some, if not all photos, when the “all sizes” option is selected on the individual photo pages, an entirely different image is displayed.

An example of this can be found by clicking the “all sizes” icon on this page.

Hopefully this is just intermittent data center issues Flickr’s having and will improve soon.

Updates as they happen.

Update x1: Flickr’s typical ’system down’ message — “Flickr is having a massage.” — is up. Hopefully it’s just a minor glitch in the software and things will be back up soon.

Update x2: This entry was just posted on the Flickr blog. Apparently they had a small issue with their image cache and things should be up and running shortly. Hooray!

Update x3: According to the Flickr blog, everything should be in order now. If you still see mismatched images on photo pages, try emptying your cache, or do a hard refresh (I believe it’s shift + ctrl-r on Windows, not sure about Mac).

With the version 2 release of the ever-popular Mint web analytics software two days ago, a part of me got to thinking, are stats I already get for free with a combination of a WordPress plugin called FireStats and Google Analytics really worth $30, just so that they may be delivered in a more attractive package?

Well, unless I’m terribly misinformed, and there’s some killer feature of Mint I’m unaware of, I really don’t think so. But, then again, another part of me got to thinking that there is that jaw-droppingly beautiful interface, and the UI is the most important thing next to, of course, functionality…

Still, 30 bucks, who am I kidding!?

I was playing around with the status service Twitter the other day. I’ve known about it for a while, though hadn’t signed up until recently. Basically, it’s a quick and easy way to inform your friends (or whomever else, for that matter) of what you’re up to, or alternatively check on their status (all of which can be done via IM, text message, or through the site itself). As the site puts it:

Consider Twitter the medium between your friends and yourself; we just relay the information.

Aside from its convenient intended uses, I think an interesting aspect of the site is the many ways in which you could adapt it to fit your needs. You could this by simply being creative (read: makeshift link/tumblelog–hey, that’s a good idea), or by utilizing software that makes use of Twitter’s API. One interesting use of Twitter that I’ve seen is syndicating your blog’s feed through the service, with each Twitter update being a new item in the feed.

Twitter’s been fun to use so far and is really quite a good idea, if not, heh, a bit stalker-friendly (though you can set your profile to only be viewable by friend). I’ll have to see how my use pans out, though, and typically my litmus test is whether I still use it throughout the course of one week when I have other things to do than play around with status updaters and other fun time-wasters!

Wow, I haven’t laughed as hard as I did in a long time when I watched some of the hilarious video ramblings of Phone Guy the other day.

So who is Phone Guy? Well, this particular phone guy’s secret identity happens to be that of 43 Folders‘ Merlin Mann, but I’m sure there’s at least one phone guy you know of, if not personally. A phone guy, you see, is simply enough the guy who’s always on the phone, wherever you go–restaurants, lobbies, parks, you name it. Of course, in addition to this, a true phone guy will always be talking far too loudly than is comfortable for those surrounding him, and the way he speaks will almost sound like he’s intentionally ensuring you hear his conversation, as if that’s the only way he knows of to get attention.

So, if you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare, and you need a good laugh, then check out the site, and prepare to spend 30 Seconds with Phone Guy.