It’s ridiculous how every time I come back to my blog I find there’s been a new version of WordPress released. It’s even more pervasive than Firefox’s updater - and that’s saying something. The new WordPress 2.7 RC1 actually includes an updater that doesn’t require you to constantly download and extract the update files and then upload them every time there’s a new point release. So I figured it was worth updating *again* just to get the feature in the hope that it will solve my woes next time round.

As usual, the latest update broke the theme I customised from the last update (only a month ago) so I’ve literally used an out of the box theme called Foliage. I hope you like it. :)

It’s finally the start of school holidays! This week has been quite a challenge with all the renovations going on at home. Following on from the new deck and courtyard out the back, we’ve been progressively moving through the house renovating sections to bring the place up to date. Needless to say that surviving without a kitchen (or a floor for the great majority of the house) for over a week now has been a little frustrating. The good thing is that we’re on track to have most of it finished by the middle of next week. I’m going to be attacking the floor this afternoon to take care of the nails that are poking up all over the place.

The photos below make it a little easier to understand what I’m talking about…

It seems like forever since I last touched the blogosphere and I guess it has been quite a while. But for those who are still visiting the site - yes, I am still alive!

So what’s been happening in the past six months? The short answer is: a lot! Looking back, the last entry I made was before I took on my new job and since then it’s been a whirlwind journey that has kept me pretty busy (if that was at all possible). But that being said, I am enjoying myself and I love the challenge of taking on something new. With each passing day there are new things that need fixing and although the list seems to be ever increasing, there’s a great sense of satisfaction that comes from crossing something off.

The difficulty I have when it comes to my blog is finding the healthy balance between keeping the content interesting, while not compromising my position in the grander scheme of things. That’s part of the reason it’s been so quiet around here. It’s perhaps an excuse to help cover my laziness but in all honesty, I have been missing the chance to rant about things and read the comments my visitors leave behind.

I’m going to make a bit of an effort to post more regularly and if you’re reading this now, you’ve obviously been hanging around for the day that I do - so thanks and keep on visiting!

There’s a constant battle online over browser supremacy - which is better than the other and why that may be the case. Being a web developer, I’m stuck in the middle of all these browsers as I constantly have to check the sites I’m developing to make sure that they all play nicely across different platforms and browsers alike. It usually involves many a long day swearing at Internet Explorer and wondering what exactly was crossing the minds of the young Redmond programmers when they made it behave like that.

We all know that Microsoft like to create their own standards and then ignore even the most established practices (Silverlight, anyone?), but when it comes to web standards, what are some of these browsers trying to prove? With the recent release of the Acid 3 test, an online set of tests that put a browser through it’s paces, you can start to quantify the usefulness of each browser in today’s Internet hungry world. With demand for Web 2.0 apps only going to increase, it’s vital for the modern browser to be able to keep up with the latest technology.

Steven Noonan has compiled a list of browsers and their scores on his blog, and it doesn’t take long to realise just how wide the playing field is. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Safari is at the top in both the beta and released version - it’s the browser I use every day and it really is up there. Mind you, I’m in the minority with Safari being mainly used by my Mac counterparts out there. Firefox is the weapon of choice for the largest percentage of Internet users, and in my case, a good alternative. When it comes to standards, if your site works in Safari and Firefox, it’s got a good chance of appeasing the other browsers too. Opera is also giving the Acid 3 test a run for it’s money, but I’ve never been a fan of the somewhat cluttered interface it offers. I guess that’s more personal preference than anything. The real challenge is when you take aim at Internet Explorer. As you can see from the results, the below 15% results that it achieves, even in the very latest releases, mean you have a rocky road ahead. It’s an endless source of frustration, particularly when you are looking at CSS and you end up with elements that position themselves in places that you couldn’t hope to position them in even if you wanted to.

When you look at the stats above (of the browsers that are used to access this site), you can see that Internet Explorer, although it’s share is slowly declining, is still using a good 35% of the market. It’s a pity really, I’d love to just be able to ignore it and spend my time doing better things. Maybe I’m just being pedantic, maybe I’m demanding too much from my poor browsers, but maybe, just maybe, the Internet Explorer fan clubs out there are missing out on the best parts of the web that are on offer because they just don’t see them in all their glory. I’ll leave that for you to decide…

What a day. It’s amazing how much you rely on something when it’s suddenly taken away. When you actually sit down and look at it, there’s a lot of things that rely on the time - or more specifically, the time being correct.

The problem is, when the Australian State Governments start to fiddle with the dates that daylight savings operate through, modern devices and technology that rely on the information can’t keep up. With the lead time of just a few months, many people found themselves with devices that didn’t know the changeover date has been pushed back a week. Today I found myself taking on the role of the “timekeeper” while I hunted out rogue systems that were missing the relevant patches that correct the time zone information. It seemed that with every problem we discovered, another one crept up as a result.

It begs the question, is it really worth moving it forward one week? Australia now has four separate time zones when you take into consideration all the differing daylight savings periods. Lucky my Mac knows what’s going on - it got the update from Apple months ago!

For all those bloggers out there, Wordpress 2.5 was released today. Of course this means that there’s time for another round of updating files, tweaking themes to match, and inevitably finding updated plug-ins that work with the latest version. Because of this, normally I’d hold off for a while, but I decided about a week ago that I needed to fix up my hosting (due mainly to the speed of the old one) and so while I was moving all my data across, I thought I might as well bite the bullet and upgrade Wordpress at the same time.

The result is what you see here!

• A new host, thanks to LemonJar - bye bye Dreamhost (although they were good to me for two years). The site is much, much faster so hopefully you’ll notice the difference.
• A new theme (it’s based off Aperio prototype - I stress it is a prototype and will need a little tweaking)
• A new Wordpress - It’s now running version 2.5 which has a host of new features that makes everything worthwhile.

As usual, feel free to leave comments. There may be the odd broken image around the place. I’m still fixing some things up. :)