If you are thinking about setting up a blog, there are many good options out there. However, it is my opinion that Wordpress is the best blogging platform currently available. It is also one of the most widely used due to its robust features, extendability and ease of use.

If you decide to use Wordpress, there are 2 ways you can do it. You can use the free hosted version of Wordpress.com, or you can host it yourself. Both versions have their pros and cons. Ideally, you want to host your own copy of Wordpress to have the most flexibility. This is not for everyone though. If you are not up to the task of running your site yourself, the hosted version is the way to go.

Also, when you are starting out with a new blog, Wordpress.com is a big help due to the automatic domain authority you get from having a subdomain of Wordpress.com. This means you can instantly get good search engine rankings which drive traffic to your site. This is the main reason to set up a hosted version and quickly build up some decent traffic.

Let’s say that you do decide to go with Wordpress.com. What happens if you one day want to host your blog yourself? In that case, it is possible to transfer your blog to your own hosted version of Wordpress without losing any data or traffic.

The key to this is having your own domain. When you sign up for a Wordpress.com blog, your blog address will be a subdomain of wordpress.com, as in yourblog.wordpress.com. What you want to do is buy your own domain name and point it at your Wordpress.com blog. Wordpress.com allows you to do this for $10 a year, plus the cost of your domain. This works no matter when you set it up because Wordpress.com automatically redirects traffic from your wordpress.com subdomain to your custom domain, without having to do your own redirects.

Once your links and search engine results are pointing to your new domain, you should be able to transfer all your files to your new host. The second important part of this is importing all your Wordpress data into your new custom Wordpress setup. With Wordpress, this is very simple to do, and it will keep your url’s the same on your new site as they were on your old site. This is critical to making this work. You will also want to keep the same template so that your site appears to change as little as possible.

After your files and data are transferred, you can point your domain back at your new host. Also, Wordpress will redirect any traffic to your old blog to your new one as long as you have the custom domain active in your Wordpress settings. It’s that simple!

In case you didn’t know, there is a beta version of the Mac browser Safari available on Windows as of last year. I’m not sure why it is still in beta status as it has been out for awhile, and Safari 3 for Mac is now part of Tiger and Leopard and not in beta.

Anyway, if you are wanting to debug your HTML and CSS in Safari, you should have Web Inspector. Web Inspector is a debugging tool for Safari similar to the Firefox plugin, Firebug. Well, now that I am on a Windows machine at work, I installed Safari for Windows. So, I wondered if Web Inspector was available for Windows as well, and it is. Check out the directions for enabling it here. Basically, you edit your WebKitPreferences.plist file and add this line of code.

<key>WebKitDeveloperExtras</key>
<true/>

Restart Safari, and that’s it. To use Web Inspector, open any web page in Safari, and right click on any html element you wish to inspect. You should see an option for Inspect Element. Click that option, and Web Inspector will open on that element. That’s it.

So I ran across a nasty bug the other day in Internet Explorer 6 that I had never seen before. The bug is when you have 2 adjacent elements and one of them is floated, IE6 adds a 3 pixel margin to the floated element. You can read about it here on Position is Everything.

I ran a pretty thorough test on it to make sure that is what is occurring. I also tested every fix I could think of before coming up with one. The fix I came up with is to float the other element. This causes the 3 pixel margin to disappear. It doesn’t matter if you float it left or right, either works. Nothing else did.

Click on the following links for examples and source code of the bug and the fix. I realize that the float fix may not be ideal for all situations. It depends on how your site is laid out. That being said, it does work, although it may require you to redesign your site a little bit to apply this fix. It all depends on how bad you want it to work correctly in IE6.

So this is a bit off topic, but it’s personal blog. Deal with it. This is too important of an issue to not say anything about it. I’m always amazed to see how much disregard humans can have for their surroundings. This applies to many things, but in this case, I am talking about the environment.

Mountaintop removal is something I am hearing about for the first time, but now that I am aware of it, I am completely sickened by it. Mountaintop removal is a radical form of coal mining where entire mountains are literally blown up — devastating communities throughout Appalachia, polluting drinking water and destroying rivers. How can we do this to ourselves? Does no one realize the consequences of this?  If we allow this type of destruction to continue, there will be nothing left, and nature will be a memory.

Check out this site, http://www.ilovemountains.org/, and see this for yourself. See if a plant near you is using coal from mountaintop removal mines. Then, make others aware of it. I am guessing that most Americans have no idea this is going on. The more public awareness we can create the better chance we have of stopping it soon.

I am very close to it, being in East Tennessee. It is happening in Kentucky, and according to this site, the Bull Run Steam plant, which is near me, is using this type of coal. I really hope something can be done.

So this happened last week, and I’m just getting around to posting it, but it’s still a big deal. Firefox Beta 3 was released. You can download it here, and check out the release notes here. It’s noted that this is a test version and not recommended for public consumption. If you’re interested, check out the known issues so far.

Seems like there are still lots of bugs, so it’s probably not quite ready for release. Still, Beta is a good sign. I have only heard good things about version 3 so far. I can’t wait to test it, but I’m not quite ready to give it a try yet. If you find any bugs, be sure to report them.