I always thought it was funny to see websites that are regularly updated that have an outdated copyright notice in the footer. It’s even funnier when the page in question is serverside. Now, I’m not the most programming savvy person in the world, but when you’re writing the footer include for your next project, do yourself a favor and insert an automagically updating year next to that © symbol.

PHP:

<?= date(Y) ?>

ASP:

<%response.write Year(Now())%>

JS:

<script language = 'JavaScript'>
var today = new Date();
document.write(today.getFullYear());
</script>

In other news, Ames and I are still down in Vero enjoying the time with our families and the warm weather. We had a great Christmas, and even though I’ve been working for these last 3 days, I’ve had 3 great lunch breaks. On Monday, BReese stopped off of I-95 to meet Amy and I at Big Apple Pizza on his way back to Orlando from his hometown of West Palm. On Tuesday, I grabbed Firehouse subs and met with my dad for lunch at his Cabinet shop, and today Ames and I went out to Panera and ran into Chrissy Giddens of all people…and of course, I was wearing my nerdy XHTML fist shirt from A List Apart.

As native Floridians, Amy and I aren’t used to all this cold weather. We were planning on driving down to our hometown of Vero Beach, Florida today, but when we woke up yesterday and it was 21° outside and looked like this…

…we knew we had to get outta there. We packed up as soon as I got off of work and hit the road by 4:30pm on Thursday. There was quite a bit of traffic on the roads till about 9:30, and then a 3-to-1 construction lane closure around Daytona slowed us down a bit on I-95, but we rolled into town at about midnight.

We’ll be in Vero through New Years, so I brought my workstation with me. I thought I’d post a picture of my temporary office. Yes, there’s actually palm trees, ferns, and green grass outside - quite a contrast from the Icy Tundra in South Carolina. Maybe I should post a picture of the pool too! :) Merry Christmas.

I saw your commercial the other night on HGTV. First off, I don’t usually get all that excited about any website I discover on television. I guess that’s a little unfair to say when you were just bought by Scripps Networks (owner of Home & Garden Television, Food Network, DIY Network and FINE LIVING) for $525 million. It wasn’t really the TV medium that bothered me this time anyway. It was your choice of browser. Yes, your browser. Confused? Allow me to remind you:

I know how it goes. The boss said, “Give me a commercial, and I mean YESTERDAY, for our HGTV spot with a mouse pointer flying around a tilted translucent browser window clicking and zooming and spinning and whooshing and whirring”. You were on a tight deadline and found a pre-dotcom-bust screenshot from pets.com and decided to use the browser graphics for your commercial. Talk about your Web 2.0 party fouls… and don’t even try to convince me that you actually opened up IE 5.2 for Mac. It doesn’t even come with the Apple OS anymore. If you downloaded it fresh from Microsoft, and opened it up with the default MSN.com homepage, you would see this paragraph at the top of the page:

Why does MSN look like this? Your browser cannot find our style and presentation information and as a result may not display the page properly. You are welcome to use the page as is, or upgrade your browser to its latest version which may address the problem. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the Microsoft Internet Explorer website to install the latest version. If you are using another browser, see the provider’s website for more information. If you are using Internet Explorer for Mac, we recommend that you use another browser to have an optimal experience on MSN.

Circular logic huh? You download IE, start it up, and it tells you to download IE again. Way to go Micro$oft! Well my friend, there are other options - options that don’t make me reminisce about the early 90s. You want it to look “hip” and Apple-like? Well, Apple iMacs don’t come in Tangerine, Grape, Lime, Blueberry, or Strawberry anymore…and fortunately they come with a new default browser - Safari.

Safari

See, it’s looking better already! No more turquoise to distract you from the page content, and in the un-reality of TV world, you can still have the tilted look, 90% opacity and outer-glow.

“What? There’s More!?” - That’s right folks, if you act within the next 10 minutes, we’ll throw in 2 OTHER great browser options! (Sorry, you’re doing TV commercials now, so I figured a little infomercial-speak might get your attention.)

Opera

Looking for a funky-fresh option for your commercial browser graphics? How about Opera? It’s available for almost every operating system and touts itself as the Fastest Browser on Earth™ - which really helps with all that clicking and zooming and spinning and whooshing and whirring you’re doing. They recently removed the ads, making it completely free to download and use. I’m not sure that all of the HGTV watchers will recognize it, but it’s sure to get that browser idea across.

Firefox

I personally think, with a name like Shopzilla, you should be using the Mozilla Firefox browser. Not only is it the fastest spreading browser, but it’s free, has tons of themes and extension to make it better, and conforms to web standards (which basically means it won’t make shopzilla look like crapzilla).

Sure, there are other browser options out there, but Safari, Opera, and Firefox are the only options in my opinion. IE5 for Mac…I still can’t believe it. Good luck breaking the news to the boss.

Sincerely,
Jason

As a webdesigner, or I guess as anyone who spends a lot of time working online, it’s easy to get a condescending view of tools that help people who know very little about the web create an online presence. It’s a childish and discriminative tendency, but time after time I fall into that trap and boycot tools like these for no good reason. The fact is, way back in the days when I knew very little about building websites, I used WYSIWYG editors and sliced-image table layouts. I used geocities, xoom, and angelfire to build my first pages. When I was first learning about content management, I even made use of blogger for a while. For some reason though, I had this disdain for LiveJournal. It was as if I thought I was technologically above it…until I found a friends LiveJournal page that I hadn’t seen since middle school. I realized then that it wasn’t just some toy for elementary school students, but rather a valuable tool for keeping up with friends.

For the longest time, I’ve had the same opinions about Myspace. I knew that some of my friends used it, but I refused to setup an account and insisted that they email or IM me. Well, after finally signing up a couple weeks ago, I again feel like I’ve been snob. There are a lot of people on Myspace that I know from my hometown, from high school, and from college. To make me feel even worse, the biggest group of friends (by far), are all the people from my Digital Media classes at UCF. These are people who now have cool jobs like designing rides at Disney, building 3d animation for gaming companies, and (like me) developing websites. So much for my theory. I’m just going to shut my mouth now and post my Myspace url: http://www.myspace.com/jasongraphix

For those of you reading out there with Myspace accounts, sorry for not doing this sooner. Go ahead and add me to your friend list if you haven’t already. If you don’t already have a Myspace account, here’s my shameless plug:

• It’s free.
• It’s easy to setup.
• There are probably dozens of people on it that you already know (including myself).
• You can use it as a blog if you don’t already have one.
• You can customize the snot out of it. Honestly though, the only good example I’ve seen of this would be Chrissy’s profile.