As per the request of one of my readers, you can now subscribe to my feed via email. This way any new posts will be delivered straight to your inbox! Just subscribe in the box at the top of my righthand panel.

Enjoy!

This blog has been rather quiet the last week or so which is a pity but I have accomplished quite a bit in the last 2 weeks. Main reason behind me being so quiet is because I’ve been reading a book about finding and focusing on building ones strengths instead of focusing on weaknesses. exceptionally interesting stuff.

Over the next week or two I’ll once again be focusing on more .Net related subjects starting with Lamba expressions and where/how to use them.

My other excuse for being so quiet is I’ve been sucked into the world of EVE-Online. Most amazing MMORPG ever!

http://www.mywebshots.co.za has gone live and it seems to be working great! I have just installed the WordPress plugin that South African New Media Strategist Justin Hartman and http://www.codecentral.co.za/ developed for use with their new website. Its a great idea as well because I didn’t need to mess around for half an hour to get it working, 2 minutes and it was up and running!

MyWebShots is a service that you can enable on your blog, once you’ve registered FOR FREE, and whenever any reader hovers over a link on your blog it shows a screenshot of that external link. It took me less than 2minutes to setup and works really well so give it a try!

The next version of the browser we all love and cherish has been released. FireFox 3 (Beta 2) is currently available to download and testing. Features include:

• CSS improvements (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/CSS_improvements_in_Firefox_3)
• DOM improvements (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM_improvements_in_Firefox_3)
• Javascript 1.8 support (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/New_in_JavaScript_1.8)

You can download it at Download

Local web entrepreneur, social media strategist & blogger Tyler Reed is celebrating his 20th birthday today. For a guy so young he is already achieving a helluva lot!

So Tyler, here’s to an exciting year for you and your company Younique!

Happy Birthday Tyler 2.0

Continuing on with my foray into the world of CSS I have started scrutinizing every webpage I find. Using the web developer toolbar for FireFox I check almost every website I visit to see if they’ve implemented CSS. The results are quite interesting and here I have included some website images with and without their CSS styles applied.

First-off, download the web developer toolbar here for FireFox and see things like this for yourself: Download it Here

Once you have the toolbar installed you can see a website without its CSS by doing the following:

1) Navigate to the website you want to see
2) On the WebDev toolbar click CSS –> Disable Styles –> All Styles

www.Facebook.com

Naturally I wanted to show off a website that most of internet faring populace have visited at least once so I chose Facebook. The first image is the site with all its CSS styles enabled:

FB with Style:

Now heres what it looks like without style!:

Quite a difference! What makes this so amazing for me is the sheer power of CSS. Working with the HTML would be simple because it would be the straight forward content within HTML DIV elements which are easy to work with.

www.News24.com

The next target is South Africa’s most prominent news website. I was actually horrified when I saw this. I can’t even imagine what it must be like when someone asks their team to change something, it cannot be a pleasant experience!

Site with Styles enabled:

Now, for this next image I have disabled the styles and highlighted any table cell borders on the page using the WebDev tool. Imagine needing to work on the following HTML document:

There way too many nested tables there to work with. The reason I decided to highlight a news website was because of the disabled members of our community. If they have to try and use a screen reader on this website, the screenreader would be reading useless information to them and they would have no clue about what was going on in our country. Besides that fact, making just one small mistake in a nested table could the entire design of the website to fail!

If you now have the WebDev tool installed, go and test the following websites with AND without their CSS styles enabled.

1) twitter
2) jaiku
3) pownce
4) picknpay
5) BBC
6) CNN

My personal opinion is that the CNN website is probably the best CSS driven news website out their so kudos to them! If I had to choose betweening maintaing CNN.com or News24.com purely based on the HTML, I would choose CNN.com any day as my life would be so much easier!

For at least 4 weeks now I have not been able to log into digg.com! This is driving me insane, I enjoy my time on digg, especially a lot of the political links. Whats more frustrating is that I cannot digg anything! Everynow and then it gives me false hope and says that I’m logged in, until I try digg something or submit something!

I have tried multiple browsers even, nothing works! I am not the only person experiencing this though. Here’s a fellow South African blogger who’s not getting any digg love: Whussup with Digg?!

So Digg, sort your shit out please.

So 350 Credits are up for grabs and ofcourse I will oblige Not only is entry card an awesome idea but entrecard entrepreneurs are popping up all over. Check out the post here: HERE

Imod.co.za has become one of the highest rated blogs on our local www.amatomu.co.za feed aggregator and Christopher always has very interesting posts. Really worth the RSS feed subscribe!

Just a follow up on my previous post. here are some stats from http://www.amatomu.com/ to show Entrecards Influence on the traffic to my blog:

Since I still consider my blog to be a very new blog I generally try out any “free advertising” I can find. The 2 that I have found most beneficial are BlogRush and Entrecard. Here is the interesting fact, blogrush tracks some stats for you on a dashboard and have a look whats happened since I’ve signed up with Entrecard on January 13th:

That is quite a spike in traffic! Now I know many of you will say that its junk traffic, but is any form of publicity bad? Is that even possible? Thats a debate for another time I suppose. Suffice to say that I am exceptionally impressed with my results from Entrecard!