Google Chrome

Today on my troll through the interweb I came across some interesting news. Tomorrow Google are releasing a new browser called Google Chrome. I was quite amazed I had heard nothing about this so far.

There are some screenshots available if you want to have a look. It looks to me like a nice mix between IE and Firefox in terms of style and features offered. I only hope they have proper support for W3 standards.

One thing that did sound interesting though was the fact that they have made a new javascript engine called V8.

We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

So it will be interesting to see how this develops. Could there be a new competitor in the browser wars?

My Ubiquity Commands

After playing with Ubiquity, and realizing how amazing it could be, I thought I would throw together some simple commands to see how easy it is to develop your own commands. So here they are. After about 30mins I have these three commands:

date - If you’re in an editable text area, inserts today’s date, formatted for the current locale.
time-12 - If you’re in an editable text area, inserts the current time (12 hour format)
time-24 - If you’re in an editable text area, inserts the current time (24 hour format)

If you would like to subscribe to these commands you can do so at: http://www.gilbertpellegrom.co.uk/ubiquity/. I must say I’m very impressed with Ubiquity. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs

The geniuses over at Mozilla Labs have come with an amazing experiment trying to connect the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily.

Head over there and watch the video to see how amazing this could be.

Wordpress Plugin Starter Pack

Have you ever had to do a fresh Wordpress install and then realized how much work can be involved in getting all the right plugins again? You have to find them, download then, extract them and then upload them again, and that’s before you even configure them. So to help in this process I have put together a Wordpress Plugin Starter Pack. It contains 16 plugins which I would deem essential to most Wordpress users. The starter pack includes:

• All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. (v1.4.6.13)
• cforms - cformsII offers unparalleled flexibility in deploying contact forms across your blog. (v8.6)
• Clean Notifications - Make e-mail notifications for new comments/pings cleaner and more readable. (v1.1)
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - Detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. (v2.2)
• flickrRSS - Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site. (v4.0)
• Google XML Sitemaps - Generates a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. (v3.1.0.1)
• Gravatars2 - Implements Gravatars (global avatars: gravatar.com) with enhanced caching support, cron support, & administrative interface to control default options. (v2.7.0)
• Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu - Replaces admin menus with a CSS dropdown menu bar. Saves lots of clicks and page loads! (v2.2)
• Sociable - Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites. (v2.9.1)
• Twitter Tools - A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. (v1.1b1)
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Allows a user to automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the Wordpress upgrade instructions. (v1.2.1)
• Wordpress Download Monitor - Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts. (v2.1.4)
• WP-SpamFree - An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. (v1.9.6.3)
• WP-Syntax - Syntax highlighting using GeSHi supporting a wide range of popular languages. (v0.9)
• WP Developer Assistant - A plugin by a WordPress developer for WordPress developers. (v1.0.3)
• WP Super Cache - Very fast caching module for WordPress. (v0.6.6)

If you only want to use some and not all of these plugins you can still download the pack and delete the ones you won’t use. Then just upload, update, activate and away you go.

Download Now (2.7 MB)

Web Standards Curriculum

Opera have just released the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Here is the blurb from the site:

Learning Web Standards just got easier. Opera’s new Web Standards Curriculum, released in association with the Yahoo! Developer Network, is a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics. It already has support from many organizations (including Yahoo! and the Web Standards Project) and universities. The first 23 articles are currently available, with about 30 more to be published between now and late September.

This looks like a great resource for beginner web developers and experienced ones alike.

New Site Design

So this is my new site design. As most of you know I practice my web design skills on my site quite a bit which is why the site is ever changing. This is now v9 of the site. I hope you enjoy the new look. As always comments/suggestions are more than welcome. Oh and here is a wee secret for you. This entire site was made using GIMP 2.0. No Photoshop at all! Enjoy.

Crazy Visitor Count

The other day I wrote an article on my ProgTuts site entitled “PHP Optimization Tips“. Yesterday it became a wee bit controversial with a few people commenting that they didn’t like the article. This was due to someone submitting the article on stumbleupon. So I thought “well at least this will get me some traffic”. Well. It did. I’ll let the picture explain.

We went from an average of 10 visits with a high of 65 visits on Monday to more than 2500 visits yesterday. So I’m pleased we at least got noticed. Although there were a few people commenting obviously a whole load of people read the article that didn’t comment so it might not have been quite as controversial as I thought. Maybe I should write more articles like this in the future.

Wordpress v2.6

Wordpress v2.6 was released the other day. Although it is not as big a release as v2.5 it does have some nice new features which include:

• Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
• Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
• Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging
• Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
• Word count: Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions: so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• And more…

So if you haven’t done so already why not download Wordpress v2.6.

ProgTuts Launch

I’ve been so inspired recently by sites like NETTUTS and PSDTUTS that have such high quality tutorials in their respective fields that I decided people could really do with a site that provides high quality tutorials for a range of programming languages. Thats where ProgTuts comes in.

ProgTuts will aim to cover a range of languages including:

• AJAX
• ASP.NET
• C
• C#
• C++
• CSS
• HTML
• Java
• Javascript
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• SQL

We are currently looking for tutorial suggestions and contributers for ProgTuts. So please check out the site and if you feel up to it why not submit your amazing tutorial.

I really hope this site will take off and gather a strong community base. Any comments/suggestions are always welcome. And remember to subscribe to the RSS Feed. Enjoy.

Swurl

Swurl is a cool new service which brings all your online social activity to one place. You can think of Swurl almost as a meta-blog. It supports a whole host of services including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and YouTube. Very cool.

Check out my swurl page. [via]