When it comes to voting for the future president of the United States, or even for the primary election to choose which candidate your party will choose, the decision can be difficult. There is health care, the war in Iraq and the economy amongst major issues for the 2008 presidential election. One of the major issues probably isn’t whether their web site’s design looks good or has valid code. However, most of us visiting this web site are probably at least curious. I know I am. I would totally run a poll to see who thought which web site’s design was best amongst the presidential candidates— but we all already know who has an obsessed and loyal following on the internet. Needless to say, the results would be a little skewed.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 16%

I have heard a lot of people have some trouble with locating their polling location so they could vote for Super Tuesday (and other primary election days) in the primaries and caucuses for the presidential election. I know I had a little trouble finding my polling location. To help out, Barack Obama has an awesome web app setup to help you find your polling location so you can vote in your states primary election. When you get to that page you simply click on your state and enter your address information to find out exactly where you can vote.

Super Tuesday’s primary election will have Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah voting in primaries and caucuses.

So it is going to be a busy Super Tuesday today.

Popularity: 7%

As I am sure most of you have heard, Microsoft has made an unsolicited offer to Yahoo in the sum of $44 billion.
The Sunnyvale, CA based business started in January of 1994 at Standford University by two graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. The orginal website was called “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” In April of that same year they renamed the company “Yahoo.”

There are a ton of news articles out there on the topic right now, it is going to be an interesting situation to watch. With Yahoo! and Microsoft struggling against Google in the search arena, anything is possible.

New York Times: An Offer Yahoo Can’t Refuse

TechCrunch: What would a combined Yahoo-Microsoft look like?

Washington Post: Microsoft Offers To Buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion

Reuters: Microsoft says Yahoo would help it turn a web profit

Popularity: 8%

Ian Hickson has announced that the acid3 test is completed and available for testing on browsers. The test uses DOM scripting to evaluate HTTP, CSS, HTML, ECMAScript, SVG and even XML. So far none of the released browsers pass it, most aren’t even close. Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t know whats going on and Firefox 3 only gets 58/100. So it looks like the browser vendors have a little ways to go before they are ready. Ian began working on the acid3 test about the same time that Microsoft announced IE8 passed the acid2 test (with special http headers being passed).

Popularity: 10%

SEOMoz is doing a survey of search marketing professionals, if you work at all with search engine marketing, social media marketing, PPC advertising or any related field I’m sure it would help a great deal with their survey results. Also, you could win an iPhone (or $400 if you have one). Be patient though, their site is running kind of slow with all of the traffic they are getting.

Popularity: 7%

It is rare to come across a tool that works across all of these browsers but it looks like there is one that can be very helpful. It is a lot like Aardvark meets the Web Developer toolbar. The tool is called XRAY and it is a bookmarklet that you can drag to your links toolbar in order to click and activate it on any web site you want. The tool works by you activating it and then selecting an object on the web page you are on. Once you have selected the object it will give you information about the position, width, height, float, border, margin and padding as well as the exact height and width of the object you have selected while highlighting the entire object. A very handy addition to your web development arsenal.

Popularity: 11%

I don’t have much to say on this topic yet because I haven’t even gone over it much. Check it out though if you are interested in some specs and general information about the future of HTML5. The HTML5 Working Draft for January 22, 2008.

Popularity: 12%

I consider myself one of those people that monitor 100s of RSS feeds daily and actually read a large portion of the articles I see a day. So when it comes to using a feed reader, you need it to be very good at what it does. At one point I used Opera’s built-in reader but with the amount of feeds I had it wasn’t running very fast and so I ditched it. Firefox is the same way, I can’t use their live bookmarks or feed reader extensions because I already bog it down too much with extensions.

I’ve gone through all of the RSS feed readers I can find online, I can’t use the feed readers that are local software because I need to be able to access my feeds from work, home and on the go with my Treo. It is also handy for when I am using my laptop at Coffee shops and Cafes. So using an online-based service is paramount to me when it comes to making a decision for RSS and Atom feed readers. So here is my list of my favorite online feed readers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 15%

We have all used the great Firefox extensions that make our lives easier, there are thousands of lists out there of the top 10-15 Firefox extensions for web developers. There is of course a lot of resistance from web developers against using Internet Explorer because of its lack of standards support. A lot of this is carried over from IE 6 being so fundamentally broken at rendering web pages with CSS. There are always time though when we need to test web sites in IE6 or IE7 and just like we use our extensions for development in Firefox— it is a huge help to have add-ons installed for Internet Explorer that will allow us to do our job more effectively.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 33%