It’s probably safe to announce now that I am changing jobs. I have been with Mediapulse in Knoxville, TN for almost 3 years. I decided to change jobs a few months ago, and ended up getting hired by Scripps Networks to do front end development. Scripps owns HGTV, Food Network, Fine Living, DIY and GAC.

I’m really excited about this opportunity. At the same time, I’m sad to leave Mediapulse. When you put a lot of your life into something, it’s always hard to leave. Mediapulse is a great company, and I wish them all the best in the future.

Microsoft updated their IE blog last Friday, with a post on the one year anniversary of IE7. Most interesting to me, was this piece.

There are over 300 million users are experiencing the web with IE7. This makes IE7 the second most popular browser after IE6. IE7 is already #1 in the US and UK, and we expect IE7 to surpass IE6 worldwide shortly.

Let’s hope that comes true. If you are an IE user and haven’t upgraded to IE7 yet, here are a few reasons why you should.

1. Improved security
2. Fraud protection
3. Fewer bugs

Of course if you care about web design standards, you should upgrade to IE7 for it’s improved support for CSS. The problem with this is that IE7 only fixed known bugs and added support for CSS properties that were already being used in current browsers. IE7 did nothing to advance support for CSS, and it is still behind IE6 in its user base.

What web designers want to know, Microsoft, is where is IE8 and how do you plan on using it to advance support for CSS and web standards. If you need more proof of this, just read the comments on your own blog.

I am really digging Safari 3. One of the cool features in Safari 3 is web inspector. Web inspector is a tool mainly for web developers to use in debugging web pages. It is basically Firebug for Safari.

Web inspector is not new. It has been available for a while in Safari 2. But it has been redesigned for Safari 3. Here is a screenshot of it.

The tricky part is that you need to enable it in order to use it. First, if you are using Tiger, you need to get 10.4.11 in order to make sure you have Safari 3. If you are using Leopard, you already have Safari 3. Once you have it you need to be able to use command line in Terminal. To enable Web inspector, open up Terminal and type the followwing command.

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

Now you have it enabled. To use it, restart Safari and right click on any element on a web page and select Inspect Element. This will open up Web inspector.

I won’t take the time here to give a thorough review of everything it does, but play around with it and test it out. It lets you view the underlying code of your page along with the CSS applied to each element in the correct cascade order of the properties. It also gives you an error view and a network view. The network view shows you how each item on the page downloaded and how long it took. There is also an element inspector that lets you view each element that was downloaded that can be very useful for developers.

I also have to comment on how fast Safari 3 is. I noticed while using it that it is much faster than Firefox. It was enough to get me to switch to Safari from Firefox while using a web application. It’s that much faster.

So there you go. If you aren’t using Safari yet, I just gave you two good reasons to check it out.

You may or may not know that Apple released Safari 3 with Leopard. If you are like me, you were wondering when it was coming out for non-Leopard Mac-users, or if they were going to release it at all. Well, today is the day. Safari 3 is now available on Tiger. Read about it here.

To get Safari, you need to get Mac OS 10.4.11 which is out today. You can either get it through automatic upgrades or install it manually. It requires a restart if you were wondering. It appears to be worth it. I haven’t installed it yet, but from what I hear, it is much improved over the previous versions.

What are the improvements? Surfin’ Safari has a list of ten new things in Safari 3. The biggest performance improvements in my opinion are the enhanced rich text editing, faster javascript and DOM and faster page loading. Chris in my office installed Safari 3  already and noticed those 3 things right away. Hopefully, enhanced rich text editing means that I can use Wordpress, which uses TinyMCE for editing, in Safari now. I also think the developer tools will be useful. I can’t wait to try it out!

Heard of Hulu yet? Well, you may have heard that NBC has pulled their content from iTunes and YouTube. So their plan was to create their own YouTube with their content and ads and social features. NBC’s original plan was to get other networks to join up and put their content on this site. The only one that did was Fox. Hulu is the result of their efforts.

It recently launched in beta, and I signed up to receive beta access to the site. Yesterday, I received a login to the beta website. The press has given NBC a lot of crap about this idea, and I have to say they deserved it. However, my first impression of the site is that it is pretty freakin’ awesome. The implementation is great! I’m watching the most recent episode on Family Guy right now. The video quality is great. They do force you to watch ads though, although they are fairly short, but the site is otherwise free to use.

I tested it out at work, and I felt the need to say make sure you have a fast connection. I have a faster connection at home than at work, and at work it was very jumpy because it wasn’t downloading it fast enough.

I haven’t really tested out many of the social features, but I will continue to play around with the site. It looks like you can pop out the video and play it in its own window. There is also a sharing feature and a feature to make the video play fullscreen. It also looks like the videos are embeddable. I played around with adding it to this post, and it worked but it was breaking the layout of the page so I left it out. It looks like a good feature though.

Hulu has current hit shows like The Office, Prison Break, The Simpsons, Heroes, and many more. You’ll also find a large number of classic television series, including Arrested Development, Miami Vice, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The A-Team. In addition, they are including movies in the beta with an initial selection of feature films that includes Conan the Barbarian, Sideways and The Blues Brothers. What they aren’t telling you is that content is only available for five weeks. I understand that applies to new shows, but I’m not sure how that applies to older shows and movies. My question is with this time limit how are they going to handle the content expiration dates while the writer’s strike is on and there are no new episodes. Seems like they should get rid of the expiration date and use it to their advantage by telling people they can go online and watch back episodes while the strike is going on.

So far I think Hulu is great. Although I’m not sure how much time I will spend watching episodes I have already seen on TV, again on the web. It may be more useful if my friends are using it. Once it gets out of beta, NBC and Fox need to promote the hell out of it to make this work. Hulu is a huge gamble for NBC. Time will tell whether or not it pays off for them, or whether they should have stuck with iTunes and YouTube.

Tumblr is a new web service similar to Twitter. When you set up an account, you create a tumblog. Anything you post to it, then gets posted to your tumblog. It’s similar to other blogging services in that, your account can be hosted on their site, or you can purchase a domain name and point that at your tumblog.

What makes it different from Twitter is that you can post more than just text. You can post a photo, a quote, a link, chat excerpts, audio or video. It is different from a blog, in that there is no way to comment on posts. There are also no other bloglike features like categories or blogrolls.

So if you already have a blog, Twitter account or a Flickr account, why do you need another service to post your stuff to? Well, you don’t really. But what interested me in Tumblr is aggregation. You can import posts from other services into your Tumblr account. Services that can be imported include Del.icio.us, Digg, Twitter, Wordpress, VOX, Blogger, LiveJournal, YouTube or any RSS feed. So rather than post the same info to different services, you can post to each service, import to Tumblr and display everything in one place. What this means is that you can track me on all these other services, or you can track me in one place on Tumblr.

I created an account to try it out. You can see my tumblog here. I am still trying it out, but my first impression is that the import feature doesn’t work like I hoped. It does import posts to Twitter. I added this blog’s RSS feed so it should import a link to each post. I also added my Flickr feed to it. It doesn’t import any old info, only new posts, but it takes a really long time. It took over 6 hours to import the Twitter posts.

So my advice is just to keep using your other services, unless you want to aggregate all your stuff like I am doing. You might want to try making this your primary blog if you aren’t using any other services, but be aware that it lacks important blogging features. I do hope they will continue to work on Tumblr and improve it. I think it has a lot of potential to be a really good service.

Imagine having access to all your social networking data on other social networking sites. Facebook started doing this earlier this year by allowing developers access to publish social networking applications on their platform.

One of the complaints people have about Facebook, however, is that there is no way to get information from your profile and applications out of Facebook. Google is seeking to change that with the launch of a new set of APIs call OpenSocial. Today Google sent out a press release on Friday that is rocking the web 2.0 world.

It is titled “Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web.” OpenSocial is a set of APIs for building social applications for websites that want to add social features. Depending on how this is implemented, this could really impact social networking in a good way.

Soon you will have access to your information across multiple websites. This will also help developers, in that they can just write one application instead of an application for every platform. Here is a list of partners that Google has already announced are supporting OpenSocial.

• Bebo
• Engage.com
• Friendster
• hi5
• Hyves
• imeem
• LinkedIn
• mixi
• MySpace
• Ning
• Oracle
• orkut
• Plaxo
• Salesforce.com
• Six Apart
• Tianji
• Viadeo
• XING

Several developers, including Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide, Theikos, and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. I am hoping that other services that I use a lot like Flickr, Twitter and Wordpress join in soon.

So far, Facebook has not announced any support for OpenSocial. In my opinion, Facebook would be making a big mistake not to. They need to announce this and quickly, or they will risk losing their credibility with developers and users.

Okay, so I have been running PHP 4 locally on my Mac OS 10.4, but I recently needed to upgrade to PHP 5. In addition, PHP 4 will no longer be supported after the end of this year. The installation instructions are the same as for PHP 4, which is not a big deal. I also installed libcurl, which is not included by default for some reason.

Why am I posting this here then? So I can reference it, whenever I need to recompile PHP again. I am installing new libs all the time, it seems like, so it helps to know what I have done each time so I can do it again the next time. This is the third or fourth time I have done this, so I won’t go into that much detail. If you need more details, look at my other posts.

For step one, download and unzip PHP 5. Then, open the folder and run configure, make and sudo make intall, like this.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2/php \
--with-curl=/usr/local/src/curl-7.17.1 \
--with-zlib-dir=/usr/local/lib \
--with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib \
--with-png-dir=/usr/local/lib \
--with-gd --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
--with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs
make
sudo make install

Remember to change your file paths, if they are different than mine. Restart Apache, and you’re done!

So here’s one more reason to upgrade to Leopard, especially if you are a developer. Leopard reportedly comes with Apache 2.2 installed. A co-worker of mine got it yesterday and was able to confirm this. This is the first I have heard on what software packages are installed with Leopard other than Ruby.

This is great news for developers. Mac OS 10.4 only comes with Apache 1.3 installed. You can upgrade to Apache 2 like I did by installing it yourself, but this way you have to manually stop and start Apache. As if I already needed a reason to upgrade, now I have an even better one. Good job on this Leopard guys!

Okay, I bought into the hype of the PNG format. I admit that on the surface, PNG is a superior format for the web versus JPEG and GIF.

There’s one problem. If you use PNG graphics with JPEG or GIF or CSS colors, the colors do not match up. This means if you use a PNG over a JPEG or colored backgound that is the same color as the PNG, the color will not look the same. This is a problem for me. So much so that I have stopped using PNGs in my designs. They only way I can use them is if the color matching is not a problem.

Also, PNG transparency is not supported in IE6. This is not such a problem because there is a workaround. But it is annoying and IE6 is still the most used browser in the world.

I found out that the reason PNG graphics do not mix with other formats is due to gamma correction. One solution is to remove the gamma information. GammaSlamma is a program for the Mac OS that does this. However, this does not work in all browsers.

I was happy to use PNGs until I figured out the problems with it. Until the technology catches up, I am still stuck using outdated graphic formats whether I want to or not.