Virginia is pretty great too, it’s beautiful out here.  Mountains west and north of us, and hundreds of square miles of beautiful greenery in between.

The site re-design has sort of been victimized by the whole moving process,  but every now and then i’ve had a chance to go in and make a little change, most of which have little to no visual impact , but are important nonetheless.  IE6  rendering isn’t as bad as I expected, but there’s still a little housecleaning there to be done.  That’s about as low as i’m going to go on trying to give a browser the full experience, anything older will have to suffer through a little ugliness.  With IE7 out now, 99% of the population really has no excuse to not be using a halfway decent browser, and I don’t feel any responsibility to enable them by making things pretty at the cost of awkward hacks and invalid code.  That’s the real joy of having a personal site, not having to cater to everyone!

There’s still a lot of little WP template issues i’m sure.  Forms on obscure pages I haven’t even looked at yet, etc, so I apologize to anyone happening across any ugliness on here.  I’m working on it!

I’m pretty happy with the color scheme and the few graphics.  I like the nice open, airy layout.  Much less “confining” than my previous MovableType templates.  WordPress is a DREAM to code for in comparison.  Getting the site to validate as XHTML Strict on MT would have taken an act of God.  WordPress offered me no resistance at all.  Hopefully in the next few days I’ll have her all polished and pretty.  Comments are welcome, as always.

The first day I installed the toolbar for Firefox, it seemed like every single time I clicked the “Stumble!” button, I was taken to a page that was either extremely useful or cool or both, and that happened probably a good hundred times in a row. I’ve been hooked ever since. It really is a marvelous little toy to tinker with, and I highly recommend it. You can see the pages I’ve liked by viewing my StumbleUpon homepage.

For some time now I’ve had this little javascript “The Secret” banner across the corner of my site’s index. I first watched the movie in July of 2006. I thought it was fantastic, and still do. Since then, it’s had a lot of skeptical press and negativity rained down upon it by about every media outlet on earth. I think they are misunderstanding the film.

Unless you are a really vapid individual, you don’t view The Secret and then start thinking that you can conjure things from midair, which is apparently what these media types are taking from the film. What the film is trying to tell people is that positive people attract positivity into their lives, and that no one ever successfully jumped through a hoop without thinking about successfully jumping through a hoop first. It’s about believing in yourself, and caring enough about the things you want to try and make them happen. The presentation is gorgeous and engaging, and the message is sterling and clear. If you don’t feel energized and excited after watching the movie, your skepticism has murdered your imagination, and you should immediately make every effort to snap out of it and regain some shred of the spark for life you were born with.

Since I lost all my readers when I quit updating with any frequency, this is mainly to make me feel less guilty about having a cobweb-ridden page sitting around taking up space on the web. I’ve had all kinds of ideas and intentions floating around in my brain for a few months about freshening the design around here and making an effort to resume posting, but then I get busy doing something else and forget all about it for a month.

I’ve meant to sort of transform the site into a place where I can put my web-work portfolio and such for a couple of years now, and ironically i’ve been too busy creating websites to do that. On the bright side, once I get around to it, my portfolio will be nice and fat!

The header image above is bugging me. I always meant for it to be temporary, since it is pretty poorly done, but since the colors are right I just never did anything with it. I like all the green, but next time I redo the look, i’d like to get a little brighter, more colorful. And the header is going to have to be much more crisp than the current one, for my sanity’s sake.

The first thing that’s going to happen is the entire site getting transitioned over to WordPress. MovableType is great in many ways, and has served me well on numerous sites i’ve done, but the rebuilding every time I want to update something drives me nuts. It’s slow, and clunky to a degree, which is unfortunate since I like the rest of it so much.

I’ve used WordPress for the past two blog/news type sites i’ve done this year, and it is so much easier for people to use, and so much more modular and well thought out, I must make the switch on principle alone. I make a point of using well-written, well-designed and open source software when it is feasible to do so, and this is a case where it is, once I can find the time to get everything moved. Suggestions on streamlining that process are welcome!

For me, RC2 through the Final Release which I am composing this entry on right now have been just absolutely rock-solid. We’re talking zero problems. That alone is an outstanding achievement, considering that for 12-14 hours per day I am heavily using the browser with numerous tabs, and throwing every sort of javascript error and html oddity at it you could imagine.

On top of that, it’s easier on the eyes thanks to the refined default theme, and many things I previously used extensions for are now standard with the browser. All in all, once I got about:config setup the way I wanted it, I couldn’t be more pleased with 2.0. It is really a great piece of software.

As if that weren’t enough, today while casually perusing my Google Homepage, I saw an entry on Tech Crunch about some sort of top-ten list for Firefox add-ons. I always read these types of articles and end up installing one or two new and nifty extensions, only to end up never using them and uninstalling them a few weeks later. Today, however, is destined to be different.

Among the gems listed are a couple I’ve used for a long time:

Download Statusbar is perhaps a model for the “perfect” extension. I never even think about it when it’s there, but when it isn’t, it’s an intolerable gap in functionality for me. Trust me when I tell you, you’ll love it.

ChatZilla is a really great IRC client, conveniently located in a tab within Firefox. I don’t IRC as much as I used to, but when I do, this is all I use.

Greasemonkey is just art. For the profoundly picky, there is no greater tool. The level of customization of individual websites it allows is practically boundless, and for folks less hackerly, there are a huge number of pre-built scripts available on the web.

AdBlock Plus speaks for itself. Many people prefer to never see an ad, and this will help them achieve that goal. Personally, I prefer to get rid of only the obnoxious ads, because I do occasionally click ads and even buy product from clicked ads on sites I value and enjoy supporting. It allows me that freedom as well.

Web Developer Toolbar has been a long-time stalwart in my extension warchest as well. Troubleshooting webpage code has never been easier, when you combine this handy little tool with Notepad++, the world’s greatest text editor.

In addition to these fantastic Add-Ons, a couple were listed that I hadn’t messed with before. Two are now permanent members of my add-on stable:

FireFTP is a no-brainer. I had heard of this before, but never downloaded it. Who knows why. It’s perfect, and I guarantee i’ll be using it constantly.

Firebug is a logical progression of Firefox’s own error console. It allows you to step through JavaScript code, line by line, for troubleshooting purposes, just like every real development environment has since God only knows when. I anticipate it saving me a lot of time during complex projects.

Another really great extension I use all the time that didn’t make the cut for the Top Ten list is ColorZilla. It allows you to instantly retrieve the hex code for any color on any webpage, just by mousing over it. I can hear web designers out there madly rushing to download it now.

I sort of wanted to upgrade and I sort of didn’t. My old machine worked fine… (until it died), and I didn’t see any good reason to drop hundreds of dollars on a new one. All I really use it for is web surfing, email and web design. The most torturous thing my PC’s go through is Photoshop by a long shot. I’m not much of a gamer, and on the occasions I want to play one, I usually head for the PS2 instead of the PC.

With that being said, Civilization 4 is out, and i *really* love that series of games. My old PC didn’t meet the minimum specs for the new version, so I haven’t bought it yet, but it was bugging me in the back of my mind. I broke down the other day and ordered all the parts for a new machine from Newegg. With next day shipping it came to around $809, which I think is a pretty fair deal for what I got. Athlon64 3000+, Asus A8N-E (S939), a gig of Corsair XMS, a WD 120GB SATA2.0 drive, a really nice Antec TruePower2 430 watt PSU, a DVD burner, and a beautiful CoolerMaster Cavalier 3 case. I skimped on the video card, since I’m not really into PC games, and got a Radeon X300SE 256MB. I actually considered buying something pre-built (for the first time ever), and called Dell. Not only was the customer service person I talked to Hispanic and very seriously lacking in the mastery of the english language department, but they quoted something like 600 bucks for a very low-end P4 system with zero bells and whistles and a proprietary case/psu. I’ll pass. I prefer AMD chips anyway.

The new PC is shockingly fast, and was the easiest build I’ve ever done. I put it all together and booted it, and everything worked perfectly. That’s a first for me. There’s always SOMETHING that’s borked at first, be it a dead component or a conflict or what have you. Not this time though, it was a very smooth and simple process. Here I am 4 hours later and XP is fully updated and patched, and I’ve got most of my basic stuff installed and configured. Still need to get the stuff off my old HD though. Maybe tomorrow. I’m quite happy with the purchase so far, and I hope it has the same staying power as my old one did.

I now have this better idea. For a week now, since the upgrade, I’ve thought that Murphy’s Law was taking hold of the site and sending spammers elsewhere to prevent me from properly testing the new installation. Turns out I was wrong! While tooling around on the Comment screen of my MT control panel just now, I noticed a new tab that said “Junk Comments”. I clicked it, and lo and behold, HUNDREDS of spam comments that Movable Type 3.2 just quietly disposed of, never wasting my time alerting me of their presence. Needless to say, I’m thrilled. Now, not only is my site effectively battling evil spam, but it’s doing it 100% without any input or interaction with me at all. Not so much as an email! This is wonderful. It took me months to get MT Blacklist’s exception list full enough to have that effect, and now MT 3.2 has done it right out of the box. What a fantastic improvement to what was already really great software. Thanks Six Apart!

Click the screen shot above for a bigger view. I really like the blogging features, and I can’t wait until they all work properly so I can test them more thoroughly, but this is very promising! It definitely makes the whole process very easy and intuitive, and it works just fine with Movable Type 3.2 for me, even though the site said it wouldn’t.

Most of my bookmarks aren’t things that anyone else would find interesting, or they’re work-related and thus not eligible for sharing, so the favorites-sharing features don’t really interest me, and I haven’t tried them.

I can vouch for the rest though. They took Firefox and prettied it up while adding some advanced functionality that isn’t really available via extensions or plugins at the moment, and thus is extremely valuable to those who have a blog or desire some of the community-oriented features that are present here. I’ll put some more screen shots up later on for anyone who is interested.

Even though MT-Blacklist has served me beautifully, and I have waxed amorously about its effectiveness more than once on here, I love messing with new gizmos. 3.2 has new spam gizmos, so I installed it. In keeping with Murphy’s Law, my site is experiencing a respite from spam since the new software was installed, so unfortunately I can’t yet know how good these new gizmos are. I will update as warranted, or far less than warranted, as usual.

P.S. - a few entries back, I mentioned that I had switched from Firefox to Maxthon, and pledged to explain why at a later date. I was reminded yesterday that I failed to do that, so here is the latest on my browsing equipment: I switched back to Firefox again. Originally, I quit using Firefox because of a memory leak in 0.6 or whatever version was current back then, which caused it to eventually eat my entire gig of ram. Maxthon served me well during that period, and I still use it today when I need IE6 for something. However, Firefox had its memory leak fixed, so I switched back. I also quit using the Moog builds, finding that I preferred to be bleeding-edge than a hair quicker. Currently, I’m using the Firefox 1.5 beta 2 build, and I like it quite a bit. Maybe soon I’ll do a post about my extremely tailored configuration, but that time is not now.