Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

I got an interesting email today:

Your Yahoo! Mail Beta is coming soon.

Thanks for your interest in the new Yahoo! Mail Beta. Your turn is coming soon.

We know you can’t wait to get your hands on the new Yahoo! Mail and we’re just as excited about delivering it to you. Right now we’re working around-the-clock to make sure it’s everything you expect and more.

So stay tuned for further word. In the meantime, there’s no need to do anything. Your place in line is secure, and you’ll get the green light as soon as possible.

Thanks again,

Yahoo! Mail Team

I’m very excited. Although I’ve switched 90% of my email to Gmail I still use Yahoo Mail for some things. I’ve seen some screen shots of Yahoo’s new email client and it looks like Yahoo has picked up the gauntlet that Google thew down last April Fool’s Day. I hear it’s all AJAXy and I think I heard a rumor of tabbed email, but I could be mistaken on that.

Anyone else out there in the interweb already using the Beta?

Update
Christopher pointed to a screen capture movie of someone demostrating Yahoo’s new mail features – it does indeed have tabs. You can have a few emails open, along with multiple new messages waiting to be sent. Drag-in-drop messages between folders, which you can create and edit all on the fly. The Yahoo Mail (Beta) looks like it behaves exactly like Thunderbird (or Outlook, or Eudora) does on the desktop.

And it’s done in freakin Javascript

Anyone remember way back when (18 months ago?) Javascript was just a backwater cousin to ‘real’ programming languages? Yeah, it was nifty for doing image swaps in a mouse-over and setting cookies and such, but two years ago did anyone really think that Javascript could replace C\C++ as an enterprise-class application building language?

Update 2:
To further my point about using dhtml \ javascript in applications that have always lived in the desktop realm, Writely is a Web Word Processor. Think MS Word, in your browser.

Long story, but I’m moving this weekend and I needed to change auto insurance companies, because my current one thought I was moving to the ghetto or something, and made my new rates ridiculous. Anyway, I ended up with Progressive and I had to sign some electronic documents on their site. I click on the link, sign in and then I get presented with some serious OS-racism: “Compatibility Error: Please click here to download Internet Explorer 5.0″ Ouch…and no. There is no way I’m letting that most horrible of horrible browsers on my beautiful iMac. Hell I don’t think you can even download it from Microsoft’s website still can you?

Either way, that was my situation. So I reach for my trusty Safari Debug menu and change the user agent to “IE 6 Windows” and reload. No dice. I tried using Firefox…also denied. Luckily I have Virtual PC installed on my machine which I’m now having to use for this stupid task. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find this very unacceptable.

OS-racism must end. Take the extra time to make a site that works in ALL MODERN BROWSERS. That means: Safari, Firefox, Opera (Yes, Opera), Camino, Internet Explorer 6 (Yes, IE). It does not mean: IE 5.0 for mac. If Microsoft doesn’t support it, no one else should. In fact, that should be the rule: If a browser is no longer updated, web developers (like myself) no longer need to support it. It might be nice if they did for a while, but they don’t have to.

Let it be spoken, let it be done!

Stopping by Gadgetopia today, I found this: FavIcon from Pics Dz found a site that will make you a favicon (translation: That little picture that site have next to their name in your address bar) out of any image for free. Its a nice little site with a good purpose, which is something I admire because I run a site with no purpose.

As you can see above, I tried the site out, and with no other ideas I used the contest winning picture of myself as the favicon. As fun as it is to look at my mug up there, I would like something that isn’t all about me. It would be fine if this was a site all about how “the world is a dark pit of dispair and I hate my job at Cinnabon“, but its not. So I looking for any and all ideas for a more permanant picture for Hell Yeah Bitch! .com’s favicon. Just remember the longer takes for all of you to comment with some suggestions, the longer you have to see my face in your bookmarks menu and address bar. Scary huh?

Links:
Gadgetopia | Favicon from Pics
FavIcon from Pics (Direct link to site)
This link explains the “Cinnabon” comment.

Sub Title: How bored are you?

The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. It’s primary role is to make web designer’s or web developer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.

Typetester is a new web-based tool (does that make it web 2.0?) that allows “webheads” to play with font controls and view the results without having to refresh their site 2,000 times before getting the look they want. It also allows the boardest of the board to do something boring.

If you are part of this niche audience and you have something very specific to check out, its a nice little tool. Otherwise your time is better spent kicking old people.

Sweet Christ, its a slow news day.

Hey kids! Do you want to play with the new cool programming language sweeping the world? Do you not have a place to that will host those files for you? Well then get your parents permission and come on down to RailsPlayground.com

You get:
* 20 MB Disk Space
* 500 MB/Month Bandwidth
* 1 MySQL Database, 1 PostgreSQL Database
* FastCGI Ruby On Rails Support
* PHP 4.4.0, Perl 5.8.7
* FREE Setup, No Monthly Fee, No Ads on your site.
No catch from what I can see, though I confess I did not read all of their Terms

I signed up for one to check it out, but it seems like a nice way to play with Ruby on Rails. I have been using my linux server at home to mess around with this stuff (That is until my webhost will install Ruby and Rails!), but it could be useful to have a public place to play with at times.

If you use this to make something cool, feel free to post a link below and share.

Ruby on Rails is the shiniest, newest thing in the world of web development (my books should be coming soon from Amazon), because it allows the programmer to do away with hundreds of lines of code to do basic database driven website stuff. For example, a simple blog that has adding, editing and deleting entries can take 10 times the amount of code in PHP as it can in a Ruby on Rails version. So does this mean the end to our beloved PHP? Not if CakePHP has anything to do with it.
Here are CakePHP’s features:

Features

* compatibile with PHP4 and PHP5
* supplies integrated CRUD for database and simplified querying so you shouldn’t need to write SQL for basic operations (although some familiarity with SQL is strongly recommended)
* request dispatcher with good-looking, custom URLs
* fast, flexible templating (PHP syntax with helper methods)
* works from a website subdirectory, with very little Apache configuration involved (requires .htaccess files and mod_rewrite to work; these are available on most web servers)

Hmm. I’m going to have to give this a try. I still plan on using Ruby on Rails, but this could be nice for those large PHP projects most developers have lying around. Has anyone out there used CakePHP yet?

Let it not be said that I dump on all things Microsoft! I really like the beta of their new start.com. In fact I really like start.com. It has a nice feel to it. Very clean, everything works, its easy to add feeds or modify the look. If Microsoft keeps this going in this direction, and doesn’t add a bunch of useless crap on here…like forcing one of your feeds to be their blog or something, then they really have something here.

Check it out. Its a really nice use of Web 2.0 features with a clean interface for everything.

Good job (so far) Microsoft.

Postings on this site have been sparce lately, and I applogize. The last week of work has, well, been a lot of work. I am working on tweaking the interface, and adding features to the shopping cart that I build for Artfinale.com. Things seem to be going well, but the interesting thing is why things are going well. …I’ll explain.

For instance, the total of user-created shopping carts jumped when we did the following changes:
1. Changed the wording on the button, from “Buy Now” to “Add To Cart”.
2. Changed the color of the button to red.

Thats it. We have made more changes to other areas like adding a Live Help chatting system, and I’ve working on some new features for the cart itself, but those changes stated before were what made the difference on getting people to put things in their cart.

Do you find yourself clicking on things that are bright red more often? And what about the wording? Is “Buy Now” really worse than “Add To Cart”?

I know what you are thinking! “The permalink on this post has an ugly extension on it! ‘.php’? What the hell is that? Get with the times man!” Yes, I know clean URLs are one of the cool hip new steps to becoming part of the “Web 2.0″ movement. Well I finally decided into looking into cleaning up my URLs, the problem is, I don’t want to do the work. Do you want to dig ourself out of a self-created extension mess? Here are some links to help:

The first link is a great tutorial on the way this all works and how you can do it yourself via PHP [ Making "clean" URLs with Apache and PHP ]

This is just a .htaccess file that someone wrote up that will take a passed, clean, URL and show the user a .php that has the information they’re looking for. This a nice way to go if you don’t want to actually change your URLs around. [ Neat Tip for Clean URLs ]

Ok, great huh? Clear as mud right? Well I would like to implement my whole site with clean URLs, not just my media page. I think I have a plan or two, but neither sound fun. Are there any users of MovableType out there that have made this switch? Any suggestions to save my self some time? I don’t exactly use a stock setup of MT, but I’ll take any ideas that come this way. Hell even if you aren’t using MT I would love to hear what a huge pain in the ass this is to syke myself up.

I’m working on a fairly boxy design for a website, and have a page with not much on it except 3 checkboxes, descriptions of the options and a submit button. Everything looked great except the 3 checkboxes – they were far too small and did not match the rest of the page design. I tried adding a style=”width: 20px; height: 20px;” to the input decleration and ho-boy, I’ve got big checkboxes! The height of the checkboxes now matches the height of the description container. I had never thought that you could change the size of those things at all, but you can with CSS. Works for radio buttons too. Read on for examples…

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