Archives for May 2005

Web Developer Extention

If you are a web developer of any sort, you need Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extention for Firefox. (WHAT? You’re not using Firefox? Ok, then, you need to back up and get Firefox.)

If you have Firefox installed, go to Chris’ site and get the Web Developer extention. I honestly do not know how I survived this long without it.

Some of the things it makes easy and quick:

Displays anchors
Displays cookies
View HTTP Headers
Validate CSS & HTML
And a whole lot MORE!!!

This is the best, most worthwhile extention I have seen EVER! I would go so far as to say that it’s probably the most usable tool for a Web Developer.

Get it here. And don’t say I never gave you anything.

Thanks Chris!

OK, I have have been getting gradually worse at taking care of myself nutritionally. I mean, I want to eat better, live healthy, and take vitamins , for treat anxiety visit our page , but I just don’t. My body continues to crave greasy foods, fat, and sugar. But there is hope on the horizon. I like Jamba Juice and there is one just below my office. I have often been curious about the Wheatgrass shots. I’m sure they are healthy (at least they sound like they are) but it just sounded so digustingly gross. In fact here’s a litte story about how my daughter feels about it:

The whole family went to Jamba Juice the other day on the way back from the farm. They have the fresh wheatgrass growing on the counter for when you order it. As we were making our decsions about what we were getting, my oldest daughter asked what it was for. I told her that they squeeze the juice out of it to make a drink. She responded, “I don’t want to drink grass, daddy.”

I didn’t make her drink any.

So, today, I got a little brave and decided I would give it a shot (no pun intended). They serve a 1 oz and a 2 oz shot. I decided that being a newbie and all to the wheatgrass crowd, I would start off with the 1 oz. They offered a slice of orange with the shot. “How nice,” I thought. So foul that you need a something afterwards to wash it down. I decided I had better go with the orange slice as well.

They cut my grass, put it in the grinder, and poured my shot. It looked like pea green soup. I picked up the cup and figured I would just gulp it down. And you know what? It was not that bad. It was an interesting flavor. Not foul as I had expected, but rather it was sweet in a green kind of a way. I didn’t feel the need to quickly grab and suck down my orange slice to wash it down.

Maybe there is hope for me yet.

Old Habits Die Hard

By Chad Butler Leave a Comment

I have been a web developer for some time now, long enough to say that web developers currently entering the job market were probably entering junior high when I began working with web technologies. So most of you are either too young or too new to the Internet to recall anything other than IE as a browser. Hey, I recall back in the day we were all excited about Cello so we could browse on our PCs instead of Unix. Then came Netscape. And I was one of those die hards that didn’t switch to IE for quite some time. But, reluctantly, towards the end of the 90s, I caved in. I have been using IE pretty exclusively ever since (gasp!).

Sure, I have copies of everything else out there. As a developer, I have to. I have to know how my stuff works in other browsers. But for quite some time, cross browser testing took a back seat to other priorities because there just was very little need. I mean, hey, when 99.9% of your users come to you in IE and the rest in various other flavors, is it cost effective to test in every browser under the sun?

And then… a quiet revolution began. Firefox. A better browser. Great features. Integrated tools. Extensible plugins and themes. AND proper CSS! Well, could there be anything better? Well, actually yes. Something better would be for people to develop sites that used valid CSS and XHTML that looked better in Firefox than IE. And for quite sometime, they didn’t.

But now, with exponentially more sites coming online thanks to the blogosphere, we have more use of CSS, and more users preferring Firefox. The quiet revolution is taking hold.

Then there was me. I knew I should make the switch. But it was so easy to keep going back to the interface I was familiar with. I kept using IE. Why? I don’t know. Just a habit.

I’m kicking the habit. It’s been tough. But I’m doing it. I’m going to stick with Firefox. And you should too. If you don’t have it, get it. It’s free. Why would you want to use anything else?

And by the way, if you aren’t familiar with some of the browsers I mentioned early on (Mosaic, Cello, Opera, etc), check out the Web History of Browsers, you might learn something. When I say to my grandchildren, “I used to browse the Internet with Cello” it will be to them the equivalent of my grandparents learning to drive in a Model T or listening to an old Victrola.