Don’t be ridiculous! Well it’s 08:50am GMT here, and the ticker on the Firefox Download Day website is showing a total number of 4,985,460 downloads - with nearly another 12 hours still to go! I think we can call it a safe win for the record!

So is FF3 any good? Again, don’t be ridiculous! This is Mozilla here, and Firefox has been by far the supreme web browser for years now and hardly willing to give up it’s crown so easily.

The Firefox 3 website boasts over 15,000 improvements - many of which must be limited to removing the odd bit of white space in the code and adding extra ‘glossyness’ to small buttons… but a lot of effort has gone into making Firefox even faster, even smoother, even safer, even smarter and even more gimmicky than ever!

I have no doubts about FF3, I’m going to make a solid switch over to it after finishing this post. As a web designer, the main appeal of Firefox to me is it’s wide array of developer tools, add-ons and even the simplest right-click functions not offered in other browsers (namely IE).

Firefox offers visions of a brighter future. One without the plagues of poorly built browsers but instead with full, up-to-date CSS rendering functionality and a continuing push towards more open-source software.

Now let’s see what IE8 has to offer…

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When a band you love disappears for a few years, it could be worrying. As is the way with the music industry, some bands make one great album then evaporate, while some hang on for years producing crap.

When a band releases a Greatest Hits (or in this case - The Singles) after 5 albums, it’s usually a sign of the end. They’ve called it a day and are wrapping everything up and grabbing their pension money while someone still knows who they are. Ever skeptical - these were my fears regarding the fantastic Feeder.

But do not fear - they have returned triumphantly with a pretty darn good album - Silent Cry, released on Monday 16th June. Through perfectly legal (depending on how you look at it) sources I’ve obtained and listened intently to the new album. I’m not disappointed. It’s still match for Echo Park, but will anything ever be?

Silent Cry returns to the rocky roots, while still throwing in a few more relaxed tracks - reminiscent of Just The Way I’m Feeling and the more ‘Comfort in Sound’… sound. But there’s a good bunch of happy rocking tunes that’ll get the crowds jumping at this years Leeds Festival (and whatever other festivals/gigs Feeder happen to be playing - I however will be destroying my vocal chords at Leeds this year!).

Anyway, I’m not a music critic - why don’t you just download the album and listen to it yourselves! My favourite track is Miss You, but that could all change…

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Hey all

Sorry this month’s been so quiet on my front. Even with so much stuff happening at the moment - the Yahoo/Google/Microsoft parades, news of the new iPhone release on the 11th July, MySpace is set to be redesigned and Jakob Nielson is still moaning about usability issues on the web.

I have however been busy starting my new job at Flame Digital in Manchester. It’s very similar to my old job - but now I have to get up 3 hours earlier, work 4 hours more each day, have to actually get dressed and can’t take a day off whenever I feel like it. That’s right - I have become employed!

But it’s all good. Flame’s a great place to work and promises to offer lots of opportunities to learn and better myself, while meeting new people and getting the chance to put my name to some big projects.

I will still be freelancing on the side and desperately trying to find time to update this blog. However balancing a full time job, freelance work and trying to maintain my youth (aka making regular visits to the pub) leaves little room for massive tutorials and articles. But I’ll try, I promise

Visit the Flame site at www.flamedigital.com, the new version will be up soon. Sometime this summer I will look to update the design of this blog and possibly my portfolio site if I get time. So much to keep up with in this industry!

Filed under: Personal, The Site by admin
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Yeah you all know, everyone knows - the Web Marketing Association’s 2008 Web Awards entry deadlines has been delayed till the 13th June… which for some reason doesn’t surprise me.

I would love to have entered some of my work in the awards, not that I expect to win but let’s not forget it’s the taking part that counts! But to enter a site it’s £$195! Or to me that’s about £100. Which honestly is a joke.

Yeah I know judges and admins need to get paid and some bigwig has to make a nice killing off it but $195 is a joke. And even if you win, the benefits really aren’t all that fantastic - as you can see on the ‘benefits of participation‘ page!

And to be honest the previous winners aren’t really much to go by. If you take a look at some of the previous winners, the sites are by no means awful but seriously don’t compare to some of the awesome material you can find on CSS showcase sites such as CSS Remix and the like.

In my opinion the Web Awards is a complete money making farce. Good websites should be hunted, found and awarded. I can’t afford to pay £100 to enter even my best sites. And I’m sure even some of the finest designers out there would simply refuse to pay to have their work acknowledged.

Opinions please

Filed under: Design, Web Culture by admin
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Hello

I have to post this because I want to spread the word. I haven’t had this problem for a very long time because of the designs of my sites. But today I’ve been working on rebuilding someone’s site with valid mark-up, and while converting the table-based layout to semantic divs - I encountered the dreaded Firefox Height bug.

This problem is when you have a ‘container’ or ‘wrapper’ div that has a background image, colour or border that you want to repeat to the bottom. Unfortunately, specifying 100% height in your CSS for the html or body just doesn’t cut it - the background will only stretch to the bottom of the viewable window and no further when you scroll, or for some reason just doesn’t even display at all.

Anyway, after lots of hunting and stressing out, I’ve found a fix which wonderfully works! As so:

#wrapper {
width: 775px;
min-height: 100%;
margin: 0 auto;
border: 1px solid #888;
}

.clearfix:after,div#wrapper:after {
content: “.”;
display: block;
clear: both;
height: 0;
font-size:0;
visibility:hidden;
}
.clearfix,div#wrapper {display: inline-block;}

/* Hide from IE5/Mac \*/
* html .clearfix {height: 1px;}
* html div#wrapper {height:100%;}
.clearfix,div#wrapper {display:block;}
/* End hide */

In the instance of my example, I use ‘wrapper’ whereas many use container or something similar.

It works for me - I sincerely hope people discover this and find it useful. Let me know if it helps!

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For some reason, for the past few weeks I’ve been directing links from my blog articles by going ‘click here’ or something similar instead of properly describing the link.

I’m really sorry! It’s not like me and it’s only when a good friend pointed out that I was throwing out these heinous links that I realised I’d been doing it.

So, from now on it will be back to good standards and accessibility - don’t click here, instead visit the W3C website for more information on web standards and accessibility,  and here’s a good article on accessible link text.

Filed under: Standards, The Site by admin
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I used to be obsessed with Google Pagerank - constantly checking my sites to see if they’ve been upgraded, using SEO tools to analyse predicted future Pageranks and researching how long it had been since the last update and when we were due for the next.

But how reliable is Pagerank really? Please excuse my language but I find it to be f**king useless. The reason I’m just mentioning this is because, after months, Google seems to have thrown out some page rank around the web. But it’s so inconclusive. Some of my websites that are attracting ten times the amount of traffic as others are getting half the page rank credit and some sites that I’ve done no SEO on are getting an initial rating of 3 or 4.

How is that a useful guide to Google’s measure of your site’s importance? A lot of professional SEOs (which I far from claim myself to be) will probably mention that they’ve never trusted Pagerank, whereas some people swear by it.

But for me, I’m sick of it. It gets updated now about twice a year and is so vague it’s useless. I’m sticking to Analytics!

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Hey all

Just an announcement to let you know that I’m now offering HTML email design as another branch of my services.

For pricing and examples please get in touch.

Thanks

Nathan

Filed under: Business, Design, Personal by admin
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