BigBlueHat

Yesterday, we pledged our support for saving developers over at SaveTheDevelopers.org. If you’re a fellow web designer or developer, you’ve likely lost hours of sleep, gained or dropped several pounds, and may have even damaged furniture because of an all too commonly used piece of software known as Internet Explorer 6.

SaveTheDevelopers.org has put together a site and a widget for promoting the planet’s migration from this wayward browser. We’ve added the widget to our front site, so if you’re using IE 6, you may have noticed it.

Thanks for doing what you can to keep your local development community alive, well, and sane.

dotProject is an open source project management system that we’ve been using, hosting, and customizing for the last 3 years. Over the last month, we’ve been working to get automated purchase, installation, and setup of dotProject available online. Today, we’d like to announce immediate availability of dotProject hosting via our sign-up site: getdotproject.com (it may look familiar to some).

In addition to much faster setup time (thanks to the little robots we’ve built), you can get dotProject without needing your own domain name. Your new options include:

1. your own domain name (ex: myreallycoolprojects.com)
2. a sub-domain of your sites domain (ex: projects.yourdomain.com)
3. and as of today, a sub-domain of gotdotproject.com (ex: yourcompany.gotdotproject.com)

The first two require you to own or purchase a domain name. The last one, though, is free as the wind. The only caveat is you have the be the first one to get your dotProject site. So don’t waste time reading any more. Don’t even comment, just run over to our purchase site and get some dotProject.

We hope you’ll enjoy the speedy setup. We look forward to adding more and more new features to our hosted installation. We’ll also be happy to manage and host your customized dotProject installation. Just let us know how we can help.

Firefox 3.0 is the upcoming version (currently in beta) of the most flexible browser on earth (very little bias, promise ). I recently installed the latest version available to Ubuntu 7.10 users (Firefox 3.0 beta 3, I believe), and so far it’s been a joy.

Overall Firefox 3.0 beta 3 seems faster and looks better with the rest of my operating system. In the past, Firefox had its own set of user interface (UI) widgets (the buttons, menus, tabs, checkboxes, etc). While perfectly usable and even attractive, they were inconsistent with the surrounding interface.The Firefox team has done a great job of using the native widgets that your operating
system uses. This means that when I restyle my desktop theme (which you can do easily in Ubuntu by the way), I’ll see those changes reflected in my browser.

Beyond just a more consistent UI, Firefox 3.0 now passes the infamous Acid 2 Test. Acid 2 tests how well your browser implemented standard web technologies. The Internet Explorers have been notoriously bad at getting Acid 2 to work. IE 8 will, but only if you “opt-in” to use the standards. A List Apart, Issue 253, has more on that coming apocalypse.

As Firefox 3.0 continues to work through the beta process, many extensions are getting an upgrade. Many of mine worked when I installed Firefox 3.0 late last week. Others, like Firebug, didn’t initially, but it turns out there’s a beta for that as well (1.1) that gets things running again. Firebug really deserves its own post, but if you’re a web developer and you’ve not snagged a copy of this free (BSD-licensed) powerhouse, you should. It’ll change the way you build sites and web-based applications. If you use AJAX or other “Web 2.0″ technologies, the JavaScript and DOM inspector will remove much of your need for coffee, but I’ll save the specifics for another day.

In any case, if you’re into what’s next for the web, get a copy of Firefox 3.0. Do be warned, though, that just like other cutting edge technology, your mileage may vary.

IE 8 was made available as a preview download earlier this week. In it is a concept called Activities. Getting this functionality into your daily browsing now isn’t hard if you’re using Firefox. As the kind folk over at Lifehacker put it:

Activities isn’t new to Firefox at all, since to a large extent it’s just contextual search fancied up a little.

Contextual search in Firefox provides the ability (out of the box) to select text, right click, and click “Search Google for…” Activities in IE 8 takes that farther and adds several services to the list, so you’re not limited to Google. But a new Firefox add-on mimics this behavior as well, so there’s no need to wait. And, like the large majority of Firefox add-ons (perhaps all), it’s freely available. It even works with the Microsoft created Activity Providers page.

If you’re not using Firefox, perhaps this can be added to your list of incentives. If not, perhaps one of these extensions could be:

• ColorZilla - pick a color from any web page.
• DownThemAll - a brilliant download manager that’s much better than the Firefox default.
• Adblock Plus - stop the ad madness and get some productive browsing done.
• IE Tab - stay in Firefox on those sad occasions when a site’s behind the times.