As you may know, I am a big Wordpress fan and I use it on a few of my ‘killer’ sites. Anyway, I just discovered that the Wordpress nerds have used the Google Gears project to speed up the Wordpress admin user interface.

What is Gears?

Gears is basically a browser add-on that allows Javascript code to run much faster. To use Gears, you as a programmer, has to build it into your Javascript code (as the Wordpress people did ..) and for people to benefit from Gears, it has to be installed into their browsers.

.. You can learn more about this in this video I just created:

You can install Gears (into your web browser) here:

http://tools.google.com/gears/

Please note that Gears works with Firefox and Explorer only.

I hope you guys find this useful.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Once in a while, I use email questions sent to me as the subject of an article, this time the question is about whether someone should use a Mac or a PC if they want to get into web design.

… I’m thinking of becoming a web designer and I was wondering if I would be better off with a Mac or a PC? Is there any advantage to using one over the other when building websites?

Thanks,

Jason

Short answer: there is no real advantage on either PC (Windows) or Mac when it comes to web design. Here are the two reasons why:

• The technology’s behind websites (HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP etc…) are universal.
• All the major software used in web design production can be found on both Mac and PC. The one exception maybe Web Expression from Microsoft.

Outside of web design, some would argue for Mac and others for PC. I use both, but I can see how some might prefer one or the other. That said, prior to the soon to be released Windows 7, Mac has had Windows beat hand-downs … all things considered.

With Windows 7 coming out though, I’ve heard from many reliable nerd sources, that Microsoft has really improved things a lot.

… I will almost certainly be upgrading my XP box when Windows 7 comes out.

Conclusion:

If you are looking to jump into web design, you are pretty much free with regards to which type of computer to get. I would be making my computer choice based on other things, for example:

• Stability of the operating system.
• Ease of use.
• Cost
• What looks nicer to you!

I hope that helps,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

I just updated to Firefox 3.5.2 in hopes that it might fix some issues I have been having with it on Mac. I can’t say if it has fixed anything yet, but I did discover something new: Firefox now supports the free Open Video Format.

What? Don’t we have Flash already?

Yes, we have Flash, Windows Media, Quicktime and others to embed video into our web pages, but in all those cases, we need to use an outside plugin. With this new video format, you just use plain old HTML!

Some details from Wiki:

As originally recommended by HTML 5, these browsers support Theora when embedded by the video element:

* Mozilla Firefox 3.5
* Google Chrome as of version 3.0.182.2 [1]
* Opera video build

-

Theora is the name of this free video compression format/codec and it produces video quality that is about the same as h.264 – the video format Adobe has decided to use to replace their own FLV format. So it should be pretty good.

To encode your videos into Theora, you will need to find a video encoder that does this. There are already several out there and I am sure more will come out over time … since already several browsers can play Theora videos. For now, you may want to try a video encoder that you can install right into Firefox!

Learn more about Theora.

Final comment

This is cool except for the fact that until Internet Explorer allows us to embed Theora … it’s a no go. Internet Explorer still has the vast majority of browser market, so we as web designers have to build within its’ limitations.

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

I’m a big fan of Firefox and it has been my primary browser for a few years now. That said, Firefox can never seem to get it right on the Mac – it always seems to have some problem somewhere.

At this time, I am using the latest release of Firefox for the Mac (3.0.13) and this release fixes some earlier bugs Firefox had that made it crash a lot. But in exchange, now the Flash player is not working to well .. it doesn’t seem to respond to mouse clicks and I have to use the keyboard to do things like play a Youtube video.

… The solution maybe to reinstall the Flash player, I still have to try.

The Larger Point

Maybe it’s me, but the consistent problems that Firefox on Mac has, is not something you see on Windows. Yes, Firefox on Windows seems to work just fine. The Firefox team should push a little more of that donated money towards Mac development.

Meanwhile, I’ll be using Safari on my Mac.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

This is just going to be a quick blog post, because I am still busy getting killersites.com up and running properly after an emergency server move I had to make.

The short story …

I had been using the same hosting company for many years and generally with not too many issues. But in the last year, things started to go downhill fast. The server was very slow (overloaded) and it went down way too often.

The last straw that broke my weak nerd-back, was a complete shutdown of my account by some pencil-necked twit who decided that killersites.com had too much traffic … so this no-nothing nerd suspended the account!

… You have to understand, I had been with these guys for 5-6 years, I’ve spoken to the founder/owner on several occasions and they used killersites.com as a feather in their cap:

‘… we proudly host killersites.com.’

So this unannounced shut down of the entire site was shall we say, vexing.

When it get’s that bad, it’s time to leave fast!

A quick threat of legal action got the site back up quickly, but I was warned killersites.com had too much traffic and I had to move it. So, I moved it to our own dedicated servers right away … within hours.

So why did I not change over to our own dedicated server years ago?

Answer: Configuration.

Killersites.com has been around for about 13 years now and it has a lot of old legacy stuff floating around. Specifically, we are talking about old Perl scripts and a couple of Java based web applications.

… Once you get these sort of things working, you’d best leave them alone. That hassle combined with my general laziness caused me to keep killersites.com sitting on the old server, even when some early evidence of trouble started to brew. You can’t underestimate laziness!

Continued trouble …

So as I write, I have still to get the old Java forum up and running again and the Perl based directory is not fully operational. The nice thing though, is that all the PHP based applications:

- Wordpress blogs
- Newsletter script
- PHP based forum (to replace the Java created forum)

… migrated easily and are working fine. Once again, no hassles with PHP and I highly recommend you learn PHP as a web designer.

Bye for now.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Once and a while I mention things that fall outside the realms of web design and web programming; I only do so when I feel it is something important to point out.

The Giant Housing Scam

This time around, it is the giant fraud put forth by the US financial players … this whole housing bubble was a giant ponzi scheme and a new giant ponzi scheme is being engineered now. Check out this Rolling Stone article – it sums up what happened and what is gearing up to happen over the next several years.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine

Though Americans are going to get hosed the most (as they are now) the rest of the world will feel the pain of the scam as well .. as we are all now.

Stefan

This is part 2 of my video tutorial on how to use Youtube to deploy videos in web pages. You can may want to also watch part 1 of my Youtube video embed tutorial.

Some final notes:

Video Processing Notes:

Dimensions: 1280 x 720
h.264 (MP4)
5000 kbits/sec

Dimensions: 640 x 480 / 640 x 360
h.264 (MP4)
3000 kbits/sec

Nerd’s Choice: I find 640 x 360 works well for live action videos.

As always, thanks for dropping by.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi Guys,

This is interesting news for web designers as it seems Safari is even getting traction in the Windows world:

Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of its new Safari 4 web browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by users of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.

Some interesting points about the new Safari 4:

- It uses the Nitro JavaScript engine that executes Javascript code several times faster than IE 8 or Firefox 3.

- Safari (according to Apple) renders HTML three times faster than Firefox 3 or IE 8.

And for Mac users, this is an interesting point:

With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this September, Safari will run as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent, Apple claims.

Besides the speed improvements, Safari 4 has some really cool features like the Topsites feature that basically gives you a large thumbnail preview of recently viewed web pages.

You can read the full article here:

Apple 11 million downloads …

You can check out Safari’s 150 features here:

Safari’s cool features.

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

This is just a quick warning that the trial download of Premiere CS4 is buggy .. at best.

Install Process Craps Out

I tried to install it on my Mac several times and I kept getting an error message that did not help. In the end, after rebooting several times and following all trouble shooting instructions that Adobe provides .. it would not install.

… Talk about lousy software!

Seriously, when a company can’t even make their install process work … you have to wonder! I should also point out that (after some digging with Google) that I am not the only one who has had this problem. That said, the trial worked fine on Windows XP.

Premiere’s Trial Version is Crippled!

The not so nice thing (due to licensing issues,) is that the trial version cannot work with several common video file types like h.264! That meant that I could not test how well Premiere would handle editing the file types I deal with daily. Sucks.

Oh well, I guess I will have to take a look at Final Cut.

Stefan Mischook

I recently put out a few new videos on Javascript event handlers:

Javascript Event Handlers Part 1

Javascript Event Handlers Part 2

Javascript Event Handlers Part 3

These are part of my new growing collection of Javascript video tutorials that aim to teach total beginners how to read and write practical Javascript.

I would like to point out that I’ve invested in making the sound for these videos as clear as possible … so let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com