WordPress, jQuery and Other Stuff
As I’ve been a bit starved of design work at my day job of late I thought I would take the opportunity to vent my creative spleen by creating a fancy pants new design for the Concept Fusion blog as well as finally getting my portfolio site up.
Look out on November 1st (CSS Reboot day) for the first stage of the new design, with the portfolio to follow soon after. Sneek peek below:
I can SO relate to this, having long been a double digit coffee drinker!
Having recently cut down to a single cup in the morning followed by Jasmine Tea for the remainder of the day and I have to say, I feel considerably better for it.
Looks like Internet Explorer 7 is officially out in the wild!
The large software company I work for has rolled out an official IE7 blocker as several of our key enterprise apps don’t work with it, so it looks like I’ll be sticking to testing inside of a VM.
Ironic isn’t it that an “Upgrade” stands to break so many existing apps… hopefully things will improve in the coming weeks/months as developers (like myself) work to bring sites an applications in line with these new fangled web standards things (insert sarcasm smiley here!). I’ve just upgraded to the latest Firefox 2 release candidate from Firefox 1.5 and while it probably doesn’t change anywhere near as much as IE7 does from IE6 it also doesn’t break anything… at least yet!
Two new browsers… interesting times lay ahead!
Having just installed the new Windows Live Writer blogging applicationI thought I’d postsome initial thoughts.
Installation was straight forward, my wordpress blog was picked up after I entered just the base url, my username and password but it was unable to get my custom css so I was informed that editing would not use my styles. Not to worry for now, I’m sure this can be rectified at a later stage.
My categories were picked up fine after a refresh but I got an error relating to the “metaWeblog.getRecentPosts” method when trying to pull recent articles back from the blog.
I also downloaded two of the three available plugins, Fickr4Writer and Tag4Writer. The Flickr plugin didn’t seem to want to recognise my username so no go there, but the tag plugin seemed to work just fine adding a list of tags linked to tecnorati at the end of the post(why
this functionality isn’t just built straight into the editor I don’t know).
You can add maps from Virtual earththrough a VERY simplistic and clunky interface. I was able to find my home town and insert it though (see below). On a side-note, I’m more of a Google Maps/Earth kinda guy myself so Virtual Earth seemed a little under-whelming.
Unfortunately, while Live Writer was able to write several “Test Draft Posts” to my blog in an attempt to discover the CSS information (not cleaning up after itself which was very annoying) it was unable topublish eitherthe draft or the finished post to the server, which kind of renders it useless. Obviously, this being a beta, and an early one at that this is not really a huge surprise and I’m sure the wrinkles will get ironed out fairly quickly. In the end howeverI had to post this from Ecto,
which I’ve beentrailingrecently.
Problems aside I can see there being a market fora tool like thiswith non-technical bloggers (your mum & dad or grand parents) but for now at least there are a lot of more sophisticated tools available for the hardcore bloggers out there. Personally I’m just as happy using the browser based posting functionality of the blog itself and can’t wait until WordPress implement the new Shuttle admin interface.
Tags: Windows+Live!+Writer
The New York Times and Cnet News.com this morning ran a story with some more details on one of the nets worst kept secrets, Microsoft's proposed "iPod Killer" or "xPod" as I've now heard it dubbed. Basically the killer feature they talk about is wireless connectivity, which you would have to assume is also on the cards for the next version of the iPod.
So, is it really going to be an iPod killer? Well, Microsoft say that the player will be out in time for the holiday season, and based on their past efforts at meeting product deadlines it would be no surprise for them to miss this one too, or worse rush to market and deliver a half baked product. Apple also are rumored to be behind schedule with the next generation iPod so it is likely that both players will hit the market at around the same time and with the iPod's already strong position in that market it still doesn't look favourable for Microsoft.
Then there is the history. I own an iMate Jam Smartphone running Windows Mobile, I run a Windows Media Center in my home and I run a Windows XP desktop at work. These three devices all have something in common, other than being Microsoft products of course, they crash… with remarkable regularity, especially, and a little surprisingly, the phone! I also have an iPod Nano and not surprisingly it has never crashed… not once.
Finally there's the small issue of marketing. Apple with their slick, simple, well targeted advertising or Microsoft with their noisy, confusing and often misleading advertising (I just love this).
The bottom line? I think it's fair to say we won't be seeing any iPods killing frenzies anytime soon.
