Firebug

This tools is mostly used for one thing by a System Administrator who is not concerned with any design elements of a website, to see how fast the website loads on the client. Some times clients will call and say that somethign is wrong with the server because their website is taking 25 seconds to load, well this little tool will show you each element being called from the webpage and how long it is taking to load. To use it, click on the icon that looks like a bug in the lower-right hand of your browser and click on All then click on Net.

So if some images are loading in 8ms and others are missing and holding up for a few seconds, or if there is some horrible JS doing something nasty, you’ll pretty much nail it down and point out to them that the server is not slow but it is infact their poorly designed website which just has way too much client-side elements loading. I’ve used this in the past and my clients simply loved me, they saw the screenshots I sent them and passed them on to their designers!

 And at the end you see it all coming from a Coca-cola bottle, very smart and visually it looks brilliant.

Why should a government of the same old men be in control of an industry which they do not fully understand? Their short term greed in keeping prices high and giving poor service has a negative impact on the country’s economic abilities. They do not get the fact that by allowing companies to establish new infrastructure and develop a proper IT industry, that other industries will also benefit from more business opportunities, the chump change they are making today is holding the entire country back from economic growth.

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Unfortunately the RIAA has cracked down on Pandora’s licenses and a while ago, they were forced to stop letting you listen unless you lived in the US. Pandora played dumb and all you had to do was give them a US zip code in order to listen to music, I put 90210 not knowing any other valid US zip codes. Yesterday I received an email telling me that although I provided a valid US zip code, my IP address was traced to be from Australia, so now they are going to block me from listening.

Pandora was definitely forced into this, as a move like this is definitely going to hurt their rivalry over Last.fm, a competing internet radio site which brought social networking into it. Pandora answered this by developing similar features, however Pandora still tops it with their very intelligent rating system. Unfortunately a lot of people around the world are not going to be able to listen to their favorite internet radio site anymore due to shear US Government greediness in their pathetic fight against free music.

What the US fails to see is that internet radio was actually helping them eliminate pirated downloads, many people turned to Pandora for great music which they would listen to right from the site, and Pandora paid for the licenses to play the music. Now there is large retaliation against this move, and hopefully Pandora will be able to overcome this. In fact I think it is going to make them stronger, the same thing happened when ThePirateBay.org got shut down by the Swedish government, they moved their hosting to a country that does not have such tight laws, and that little blow they took gave them immense support by BitTorrent downloaders from all over the Internet, today they stand as one of the most popular BT sites in the world.

The way I see it, the internet is slowly but surely taking out industries that exploit their consumers and producers that overcharge for their products. However the industries that chose to embrace the internet and adapt to fit within it have not suffered at all. Do you see the NY Times banning blogging? No way. TIME magazine’s person of the year is “You.” depicting their appreciation for the new era coming in global news, this era is described as “We, the media” where the consumer is no longer just a passive reader but a commentator and even a producer of media.

The RIAA however has refused time and time again to adopt strategies to help their artists, record labels, and listeners and for this ignoranc, they have and will continue to lose heavily. Their first win was against Napster in the late 90’s, they won the battle but the war rages on, and the RIAA are now helpless to stop global music downloads. It is very evident in that now iTunes are considering removing DRM from their music and charging only monthly fees to their subscribers, Microsoft’s Zune is soon to follow suit. Eventually the corporate giants will have to bow down to the people, and I foresee a bright future for Pandora and Internet Radio if people keep on voicing their opinions and continue to act on them.

For the time being, if you are outside the US and wish to continue to listen to Pandora, you can try using some proxy servers in the US, through which you will be able to listen, or you can go through your listened to history and go off and find that music on torrents. If you do, have a listen to some of my stations visible on the right, I will not be taking them down even though I will no longer be able to listen to them for the time being.

I hope someone in the US finds a loophole where they can create open proxy servers which allow everyone to listen to Pandora through. Music is a part of life and no one should take away that freedom from us. Resistance is futile!

It is common knowledge among web designers that IE sucks, basically it is one of the least W3C compliant browsers, and renders designs very poorly where other browsers (namely Firefox and Opera) do so splendidly. IE7 was supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to the thousands of designers’ rage, however it too has proven itself to be marginal in its improvements since version 6.

Firefox is a designers dream come true, and it is quickly eating up the browser market share from IE, due to its security, innovational and intuitive interface. However Firefox is a long way away from becoming the mainstream browser we all want it to be, and so until then, many designers still have to work very hard to make their websites cross-browser compatible.

I personally despise IE for the countless extra hours I have to put into my designs just to get it to work with IE6, I have to sit and tweak my CSS code for ages and have had to even scrap some designs altogether due to the fact that it just wouldn’t work properly in IE. Fortunately, many have come up with answers to IE’s infamous flaws, these are called IE Hacks.

SoldStateGroup.com have come up with teh ultimatewhitepaper for IE hacks that will let you modify your styles on a per-browser basis, allowing you to come up with the solution to making your site behave and look the same in all browsers, Firefox, IE7, IE6, Opera, Safari and others. Their white paper on CSS hacks and issues, is something no web designer should be without, it gives tips on creating cross-browser websites, fixing issues with IE6 rendering transparent PNG’s, and removing the dotted outlines from hyperlinks in Firefox — which is not without its issues, although very minor in comparison to the hideous monster IE is.

Here is a link to the IE hacks: http://www.solidstategroup.com/page/1592

Here is a link to a PDF document of the same hacks: http://www.solidstategroup.com/document/33

Now that paper is absolutely great for tweaking up an existing design to make it more cross-browser compatible, however if you are building a new design from scratch, I do recommend you visit this page: http://www.search-this.com/2007/03/12/no-margin-for-error/ — No Margin For Error, title says it all. It gives you a step-by-step guide to eliminating default styles from all browsers thus eliminating the problem right from the start.

Here’s a more recent one I’ve found: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/, you can use this to start any design with. It will reset all your stylesheets and you can go ahead and begin to create more defined CSS tags, this will work really well. It’s the simplest one and I haven’t tried it out myself, but it looks like it should be great.

I hope these documents will one day become obsolete when the W3C comes up with stricter standards for browser rendering, and all websites and browsers can co-exist in harmony.