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.

I recently installed a bundle of Firefox status bar utilities. The problem is the installed on but moved my Echofon (Twitter client) into the middle of the status bar. This felt a little odd so I wanted to move it, but couldn’t see how.

Eventually I found out this is how to do it, so I thought I would share:

To change the order of the status icons you need to edit the file

“extensions.ini”

located in your personal profile “Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{whatever}”

Change the position of the entries for the section ExtensionDirs and the order of the symbols in your status bar will change according to that sorting.

Simple as that

This is a subject that doesn’t often get discussed, but is an important consideration, especially for web designers who are providing (often reselling) web space for their clients.

Both managed and unmanaged hosting have good and bad points but it is important to differentiate between the two and choose the option that is right for you.

The following list is typically what you should expect from the different types of hosts. Not all hosts are alike though so please be sure to check before signing up.

Managed hosting

The good points

• You have a point of contact on the end of the phone
• If there is a problem with the server they will fix it
• They will take nightly backups
• If you accidentally overwrite your files they will restore from the backups
• If you get stuck configuring your site they will assist you
• If you need products setting up they can advise and assist

The bad points

• They are sometimes a little more expensive than unmanaged hosts
• The level of service is dependent on the particular host

Unmanaged hosting

The good points

• You usually have a control panel so you can configure your site yourself
• Sometimes cheaper than managed hosting
• Setup time is quick

The bad points

• If you need help you usually have to work it out yourself or log a support call and wait
• If things go terribly wrong the fix time can be slow
• You sometimes have to tell your client “I am waiting for them to answer my call”
• Backups are sometimes taken but access to restores is usually not available unless you have total failure

Which is the right hosting for you?

That entirely depends on the individual. If you like to get your hands dirty with configuring sites then unmanaged is the way forward. However, when things go wrong having someone managing things for you can be invaluable.

A case in point is reseller packages. In this case you have all your eggs in one basket. If something goes wrong you need to know you have the technical skill to restore backups (if you have access to them), configure email and web access and get things working again, fast! In this situation having someone at the server end working for you to restore normality can be a life saver (and a client saver!).

Generally my recommendation would be to use an unmanaged solution if it for a personal site, it is a great way to learn, but think twice about it if you are hosting a business site. The few pennies you save by not getting a managed solution could one day lose you a client.

Last month I posted about my first impressions of the iPhone. Having owned  it for nearly 2 weeks I thought I would post my thoughts on what it is like to live with day to day.

Don’t drop the phone!

My first impression of the phone is it feels very very slippery. The smooth screen and the smooth plastic back make it feel like it is going to jump out of your hands. This is not just my opinion, everyone I have passed it to has handled it like it is made of crystal.

With this in mind my first purchase was a leather slip case from Ikonicedge. Without going into details, fantastic product!

Usability

I must say the new 3.0 features are really rather good. Push notification is coming to a lot of my day-to-day apps and it really is welcome. I can have IM+ active and will receive an alert when a new message arrives. I have seen a noticeable decrease in incoming SMS since that has been active, in favour of shooting over an IM instead.

The wifi works REALLY well! When I walk into the house it auto-connects to the wifi network, which is great for receiving calls on skype etc, and great if your house isn’t in a 3G area.

Features and Apps

Just like the adverts suggest, for most things you would need to do day to day there really is “an app for that”. Not all of them are free, but most of them are quite cheap and generally very good quality.

I like the way the app store auto checks for updates, and when I wake up in the morning I click update and several of my apps update to the latest version… slick!

One thing to beware of it I have found myself loading the phone with small cheap apps for 59p, then finding that 59p + 59p + 59p + 59p etc does add up! (yes, to £2.36!)

Addictive!

Oh… my… word… If you want your productivity levels to remain what they were before you bought the iPhone do NOT install games, specifically Flight Control. This is positively the most addictive game I have ever played and I just can’t put it down! You have been warned! BTW, if you buy it (just 59p at the moment) my high score is 74 on the default map.

Phone + email

As a phone it works great. The contacts list is slick, the interface is great and the call quality is fantastic. I can’t fault it one bit. If it had a blacklist feature (you can get this only by jailbreaking it) then it would be perfect.

Email works really well too. I don’t use push email so I have yet to experience that, but the standard 15 minute check works for me. If an email reply cant wait 15 mins then the sender really should have called me! The interface to mail is very nice. There are a few features I would like to have seen like the ability to “select all” or select a group of messages without having to click them individually, but for a mobile app it does the job and does it well.

SMS

The sms functionality is nice too. I used an N95 before which was nothing short of embarrassing… really!!! To have an SMS app that didn’t display the time the message was received, well, enough said about that!

The iPhone deals with SMS’s as conversation threads. When a message is received and you open it you also see the previous messages sent too and from the individual. I tend to send my SMS via JellySMS and clickatell (Internet SMS provider) as international SMS messages are much cheaper that way, consequently I only see half the conversation. For general use though, it works well.

Conclusion

I love the iPhone! Not in a physical way, that would be wrong(!), but as a phone/gadget it really is great. The camera in the 3GS is great (no flash, but you can’t have everything) and there are very few frustrations with it. Battery life would be one I suppose, but the N95 had the worst battery in the world, so even that seems good to me. With normal use it could last a couple of days.

I am still in the honeymoon period with this phone, where I am taking great care of it and making sure it does not get scratched/bashed etc. I imagine this will last a bit longer than it usually does with my phones, especially considering how much I paid for it.

I will no doubt post more updates as I go, but for now I am very happy with my purchase. As a phone is it value for money… hell no… not as a geek gadget does it make me smile when I use it, absofreakenlutely!

Part of Google’s terms and conditions is that each with with Adsense on it MUST have a privacy policy. This is all well and good, but most of them are pretty generic, and unless you are a lawyer you may want to use a standard one that is floating about on the Internet.

The problem is, Google has told us time and time again that you should do everything in your power to avoid duplicate content. We also know that if you have part of your site that must have duplicate content the easiest way to avoid it is to add a do not follow line to the robots.txt file.

This is great, and it works, but then how will Google know if you have a privacy policy or not, if you don’t allow it’s robots in there? Is there a guy employed on minimum wage to trawl through manually and make a note of it?

For now I have left it as it is, but I do wonder if Google will see it as duplicate content, along with half the Internet? Or is it clever enough to pick up on the keywords and turn a blind eye?

I have just made a little World Cup 2010 countdown widget for one of my sites, and though I would share it in case anyone would like to use it. The thermometer goals chart I made a while back gets lots of use, so hopefully this will be useful for someone.

If you want to use this image on your site, simply add it to your page as follows:

<img src=”http://www.thinksynergy.co.uk/scripts/worldcupcountdown.php” alt=”World Cup Countdown”/>

Note: If you cut/paste the above, please make sure the “” are pasted correctly, and dont end up curly quotes!

Despite seeming like a very basic procedure, this evening I found I had wasted half an hour, split between Googling for the answer and trying to work it out for myself.

I have a number that needs to be stored in a string format in PHP. However, I need to use this value at some point to run a calculation, for which I need the true value as opposed to the string. If I had just wanted a whole number the answer is very simple, use the PHP (int) method to convert it.

It is not that easy when you are working with decimals. Unless I am missing something (in which case feel free to embarass me in the comments below!) there is no easy way to do this. Here is what I came up with:

$string = "3.142";        // The source number, as a string
$a = explode(".",$string);            // Split the string, using the decimal point as separator
$int = $a[0];                        // The section before the decimal point
$dec = $a[1];                        // The section after the decimal point
$lengthofnum=strlen($dec);            // Get the num of characters after the decimal point
$divider="1";                        // This sets the divider at 1
$i=0;
while($i < ($lengthofnum)) {
$divider.="0";                    // Adds a zero to the divider for every char after the decimal point
$i++;
}
$divider=(int)$divider;                // Converts the divider (currently a string) to an integer
$total=$int+($dec/$divider);        // compiles the total back as a numeric value

If anyone knows of a quicker / cleaner / better / more funky way of doing this simple task please do let me know… if not then I hope this little snippet at least lets you avoid losing the half our of your life that I lost this evening!

UPDATE: Thanks to Xobman, who Twittered me this little gem:

Try $foo = “3.123″; $bar = (float) $foo;

LOL… low and behold, it works! That’ll teach me to post my (oh so clever!) code on the Interweb for all to see

Thanks Xobman!

Please bear with me on this one, I know they are very different beasts but I have been experimenting with a new concept (to me) over the weekend and would like to invite comments.

I have a site I have been running for a while which I would like to turn from a blog where comments are invited to a community. As much as I like forums in certain circumstances they can be a little bland when compared to a blog. This made me wonder what the potential is to combine the two.

A site I use on a daily basis is hotukdeals.com. This site uses a highly customised vBulletin installation to present the information in a blog-esque format. It works well, people can vote items hot and cold, but they have to register to comment.

Looking into it in a bit more detail it seems there are positives and negatives to using a forum vs using WordPress.

As much as people love WordPress (I do!), it seems to me to be a platform designed to publish information and then get comments on it. If you want a community then everyone needs the ability to publish. This is possible with WordPress but it’s a bit messy and still involved the back end. With a forum people can hit new post and post within the site itself.

The disadvantage of the forum is users generally have to register in order to comment. You can turn this off but forums don’t cope with this quite as well as WordPress does. This may deter the passing comment and rely on people buying in to the site.

My theory is to run a forum on the site but use the RSS feed to link the information to the front page, run by WordPress, replacing the usual blog posts. This way I have WordPress running the page areas of the site but the front page content is dragged in via an RSS widget. I don’t yet know how well this will work or whether a forum portal would be a better solution, but I guess I will find out once I have it up and running.

So…

Am I being crazy?

Are there benefits I am missing to using one over the other?

Does using both make sense?

This all came to me on a whim, so I apologise for the lack of in-depth research, I just thought at this point it may be a good idea to poll the readership.

This is an age old debate, trying to strike a balance of usability between the users with older setups and smaller screen resolutions and those with modern wide-screen (or just plain hi-res) displays.

I have followed this debate for many years and the argument seems to always cater for “what the site looks like full-screen”. I don’t know how you work, but personally I have lots of things happening on my desktop and many windows open. I cannot remember the last time I opened a browser window full-screen.

That said, if I was running in 1024 x 768 resolution then maybe I would work differently, I don’t know because I have not used that resolution in 10 years.

The thing I love about hi-res displays is they allow me to have a browser windop open, still see parts of my desktop, have email visible (albeit not the whole window), but running full-screen just feels claustrophobic to me.

That said, I am less bothered about the upper end of the scale, they don’t HAVE to run full-screen, and providing the site isn’t too narrow then I’m sure they will manage.

This leads us to the question of “how narrow do we have to go?”. I am seeing more and more sites with quite large widths. A few years back 750px used to be the norm, then 850px. Nowadays a lot of sites are over 1000px wide. Is this too wide?

There is no answer to this, hence it has been an ongoing debate for years. How wide is too wide?

The other question to bear in mind is whether the content on the right makes a difference to how wide you are willing to go. If everything to the right of the 850px mark is adverts for example, does that mean that the fact that the users on lower resolutions (the minority) can see the navigation and the main body content make it an acceptable width?

My gut feeling was crossing the 1000px mark was a little bit much, but with a little bit of investigation I have found that some of the most widely used blog templates actually cross this boundary.

Has the width-creep occurred while I have been asleep?

In my mind these themes look fine. I even opened them on my secondary monitor (1280×1024) and it looks fine. I can’t say I would want it to be any wider, but still it looks fine to me.

What do you think? How wide is too wide?

Lyndi posted about displaying an image at random the other day. Her solution was to use javascript as it enabled the page to do this even if the server had caching on. It was a good solution, but it got me thinking about going in a slightly different direction…

The solution relied on the image names being hard coded into the script. I thought it would be quite cool to come up with a solution that simply looked in a directory for all the JPG’s or GIF’s, and plucked one at random.

This is what I came up with:

<?php
$dir = “images”; // The directory where your images are
$filetypes = (“jpg”||”gif”); // Whatever images are valid. You could add “png” etc

srand((double)microtime()*123456789); // Generates a random number seed
$count = 0; // Initialises the counter

$dirOpen = opendir($dir); // Opens the image directory

while(($im = readdir($dirOpen)))
{
if($im != “..” && $im != “.” && substr($im,-3)==$filetypes) // Disregards “..” and “.” (direcrory structure)
{
$image[$count] = $im; // Reads an image
$count++; // Increments the counter
}
}

closedir($dirOpen); // Closes the directory

$randname = rand(0,(count($image)-1)); // Generates the random number
echo ‘<img src=”‘.$dir.’/’.$image[$randname].’” alt=”Random Image” />’; // Publishes the image

?>

I have commented the code, so it should be fairly self-explanatory how it works.

It is a bit rough and ready, but it does the job. To implement this on a website, simply use:

<? include(‘randimg.php’)?>

The beauty of this solution is you can add as many images as you like to the images (or whatever you call it) folder. Add and remove them at will and the script just picks from the images that are there at the time.

Let me know what you think.