I made the jump from IE to Firefox as soon as I was told about it and I have never regretted it for a moment. The experience was faster, slicker, more accurate and altogether more enjoyable. This was when tabbed browsing had just been introduced and so that was welcome as well.

Over the years Firefox has grown up. As the market share continues to increase more and more developers are bringing out really cool and useful tools and plugins that make Firefox very powerful, especially for the web designer/developer. I would actually go so far as to say Firefox is now an essential part of my workflow as a designer.

Tools such as Firebug for HTML/CSS debugging, Colorzilla for grabbing a particular colour off screen, and SearchStatus for SEO information are just 3 examples of tools that I would really struggle to do without.

It is not all good news though. The more advanced Firefox has got the more problems it seems to have, especially on the Mac platform. It seems to have got progressively more sluggish and often consumes complete cores of CPU for no apparent reason (albeit more often than not it is Flash related). Stability is not what it used to be, and while all this is going on the competition are reigning it in and in certain areas overtaking it.

If you judge the browsers on a performance basis only then Google Chrome blows Firefox away, mainly in the javascript execution area but also arguably in stability. Firefox doesn’t even come second!

Unfortunately Firefox seems to have cornered the market in terms of plugins in the same way IE forced itself in the market based on being bundled with the most popular Operating System in the world. I say unfortunately because we are now in a situation where one of the best browsers available has a lot of people using it that have nowhere to go and no other alternative. This situation is never good for the end user.

The ideal situation is either one of the other smaller competitors will introduce a versatile plugin system to rival Firefox’s offering, or someone new will enter the fray with another, probably webkit based, browser which will force Firefox to pull its finger out and tidy up its core product.

Ok, this is not something I would normally do, but it seems I am out of favour with the Googlemeister at the moment. It seems I requested an invite at the same time everyone else did, yet the great God of Google has yet to take it upon himself to reward me with an invitation to the Wave party.

I was hoping to do a write up of Google Wave once I had chance to see it, but at this rate I guess it will be a bit late. So, if anyone happens to have a Google Wave invite going spare and would care to hook me up with one it would be much appreciated.

Thanks

It seems that not for the first time UK based Fasthosts Internet have experienced massive outages, this time to their email service. As reported in the UK Business Forums lots of people have found that they have lost access to their email over the past 24 hours. The situation is starting to get resolved for some users, but for many they have lost an entire days worth of email access.

This is not the first time it has happened either. Back in 2007 Fasthosts broke their email system and didn’t have reliable backups. Further back than that their backbone went down for nearly a week.

For a company that claims to provide reliable hosting and support they do not exactly have the best track record. I jumped ship with Fasthosts after one of their big outages as it cost me business. One of their flagship products is reseller hosting, encouraging customers to put all their eggs in one basket. That’s all well and good, but when things go wrong their phonelines tie up and they drop those eggs all over the floor.

This might be ok if you have some hobby sites, but if you rely on hosting for a percentage of your income I would recommend hosting with someone who does answer the phone and has people in place to fix faults fast.

Oh… one last thing… when was the last time you (or your host) did a backup of your sites and email?

I found this today on Stumbleupon. Am sure most people in business can relate to it!

Source: FLIRTing with the crowds

After the farce trying to purchase an xtreamer this week I decided last night (at 7pm) to purchase one of these:

I am going to run XBMC on it, which I have never used but looks very cool! The reviews of this kit look pretty good, although it is £40 more expensive than the xtreamer. From what I read it will stream 1080p content without too much trouble, although will struggle with flash content and iPlayer stuff. This worries me a little, not really because I want to do that, I doubt I would, but more that the bottleneck might make manifest itself in other areas at some point.

I placed my order at 8pm last night and (supposedly) I should take delivery today… we’ll see, I guess!

UPDATE: I ordered the Revo 8pm last night, and it was here by 10am this morning… now THAT’S service!

Link to Acer Aspire Revo -[Link]

Info about XBMC -[Link]

The other day I wrote about my plans to provide media streaming in the house. I said I had placed an order for the Xtreamer.

Well maybe I am expecting too much now that Internet companies have mostly got their arses into gear and tend to ship same day if you order early enough (except Amazon, but that’s for another rant!), but I placed my order Sunday night (8th) and it is still not here.

Of course, maybe my standards are too high but if a company is going to not post your product out immediately there should be notification, order tracking, or something. How do I know if it is due tomorrow or 3 weeks on Friday?

I emailed their contact address and was told (by automated reply) that they are posting the products out same day, and that I would not receive any more emails from them. Really? Then where is it? Is this an acceptable response?

I am starting to get a little irked, again maybe because most ebayers I deal with post out same day, as do most online retailers.  Is it too much to ask to dispatch within 48h, and if not to simply let me know?

Oh well, it will arrive when it will arrive I guess, but in the mean time I can’t help but have a deflated opinion of them as a company.

UPDATE: I just chased them up and they are out of stock til the 17th and will process the order then. I have asked for a refund and they said accounts will have to get back to me! For crying out loud I have rarely seen this level of incompetence before (or maybe I am just spoiled).

I will be looking for another alternative now, maybe a small PC to run XBMC on?

I was recently looking for a favicon of a flag to use in a project I am working on. During my search I came across favicon.cc, a cool little site that lets you design your favicon online, share your creations, and use favicons others have created.

It really is a simple tool, but a genius concept. Sometimes I am looking to incorporate a logo into a favicon, but other times I am just wanting a favicon that reflects the site, and for this purpose this is great! There is quite a growing selection of favicons on there and it will only grow over time.

I have recommended the Dynamic Drive favicon generator in the past for converting images into favicons, but for creating from scratch or picking from a library this site is great!

Ok, this is not really my usual blogging subject (and it is for UK folks only, sorry!) but I thought it was worth a mention considering I have spoken to a few people about it over the past few months and lots of people still have not heard of it.

Quidco is an online cashback site, simple as that. If you purchase things from Play.com for example, if you login to quidco first, then click their Play.com link, then purchase your item, Quidco will pay you a percentage of your sale in cash.

Sometimes you only get pennies but sometimes you can get some great deals. I have had £120 cash back off £150 worth of home and contents insurance, and $45 of my car insurance…. all for clicking a link.

The only catch is they charge £5 per year for this, but if you don’t make £5 savings then you don’t get charged, so there really is no risk at all, it comes straight out of your profit.

Check it out for yourself at www.quidco.com

With the World Cup coming up in 2010 South Africa has been getting quite a lot of press. Some people see South Africa as being behind the rest of the world in terms of infrastructure, technology, business etc. In some ways this is true, you only need to look at their roads to see there is much room for improvement. However, when it comes to business, in particular online business, my word does the rest of the world need to stand up and take note.

South Africa seems to have embraced the Internet culture and used it to great effect. You only need to follow South Africans on Twitter to see how excited people are about being a part of it all. There are constantly meet-ups (tweet-ups, as they are called) and dinner parties arranged for people who have formed a community from knowing each other online. This happens in other parts of the world too, but I am in the UK and I have not seen half as many over here.

If I look at products I use every day I find a lot are made in South Africa. I send SMS via the internet using BulkSMS… made in South Africa. My SearchStatus Firefox plugin which I have been using for years comes from Quirk eMarketing, a South African firm. There are a growing number of successful Internet sites that you may not know that come from South Africa. South Africa online presence seems to be growing faster than I can ever remember it doing so in the UK.

Almost every week people are tweeting that they are in seminars about media, marketing, the Internet in general. The shear number of these events just shown how positive they are about progress. South Africa has a TEDx function coming up. TEDx is a kind of miniature TED conference where very clever people speak about their specialised subject. These things are great and I really wish I could attend this one!

I have been following the changes online for a while now and all I can say is the enthusiasm is infectious! They have their own social network called Afrigator too. To look at it really is a polished production, but more than that if you look at 95% of all African blogs they have the Afrigator link stating “I am an African Blogger”. This is the crux of it to my mind, these people are PROUD to be a part of it all and they are excited for the future.

I can’t help feeling that certainly in the UK people feel the Internet has come as far as it can and has leveled out a bit. The excitement has died down and people have found other things to be enthusiastic about. If you can relate to that I implore you to start to follow a few South Africans on Twitter and see what they are up to. The enthusiasm displayed is something I just can’t help wanting to be involved with, and something that the UK for one could really learn from!

I have had in mind for a while now that I would like to centralise the media in the house. I would like to digitise all my DVD’s onto a huge hard drive and have them available from both the TV downstairs and the TV in the bedroom.

I have been weighing up the options over the past week or so, ahead of the 50Mb broadband being installed. I have also run CAT6 cable from the attic (where the media server will be) down to the living room.

Looking at the options it seems there are a few issues to consider:

1. The living room TV currently is CRT and doesn’t have HDMI input
2. Do I want a central media centre that outputs to two TV’s, or two media centres?
3. Do I use a PC with a media centre OS or a dedicated solution?

With these issues in mind I have decided to take the somewhat baby step of buying an xtreamer system. This little box will sit near to the bedroom TV and connect via HDMI to the TV and by ethernet cable (down through the ceiling) or by wireless to the media server.

The cost of the unit is £107 delivered so I think it is a relatively cheap way of serving media to the bedroom TV, although the interface does not look as snazzy as the XBMC or Windows 7 MC systems. When it comes to upgrading the TV downstairs I think we may go for a bit more of a “grown-up” solution.

So, hopefully it will be delivered this week and I can get it in place. I don’t have massively high hopes of an all singing all dancing solution in the xtreamer, but as far as this piece of kit goes all it needs to do is stream hi-def video smoothly and consistently and I will be happy.

It also has a cute little iPhone interface for controlling it. I may try converting it into a proper app, as at the moment it is just a web page, but it does look cool.