Archive for the ‘Internet Stuff’ Category

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New sites developed!!

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Citrus Cube CarsI have been working on a couple web sites in my spare time. The idea is to show people how various types of web sites can work and how it would look.

The first site is Citrus Cube Cars. This is a demo car dealer web site I set up with a stocklist of cars and a built-in search. There is a simple admin section which allows anyone with permission to add, update and delete cars and enter the features of each cars along with images.

Citrus JobsearchThe second site I have been working on is an out-sourcing marketplace web site called Citrus Jobsearch. The idea is for tradespeople e.g. electricians, builders to find work (projects) which have been posted on the site by “buyers”. When projects are posted on the site by buyers, tradespeople (professionals) can register and login to the web site and then place bids. The buyer can then view all the bids (the proposal) and then decide who “wins” the job.

Please note that these are just demo sites and are still not 100% “complete”.

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Another browser to test on….. Google Chrome!

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

GoogleAs a web designer one of the things you have to do is test your web site on different browsers to make sure it looks Ok and works in the main browsers. The main ones are Firefox and Internet Explorer. There are others including Safari (popular on the Mac) and Opera which have a relatively small following on the PC. Now there is another one and because of who has made it its likely to be popular.

There have been rumours for ages but Google have released there own new browser. You can now download a BETA version of the browser – which is called Google Chrome. Since its BETA it may still have bugs.

Chrome is based on Webkit, which is an open source browser engine. It is the engine that powers Apple’s Safari for Mac and PC. However, Chrome currently runs only in Windows. A bit odd…

You can read all about the features of it on the Google web site. They also have a “comic book” which goes through and talks about the technology behind the browser. You can also see a video on the BBC News web site with someone from Google going through some of the features of Google Chrome.

I have downloaded Chrome and just had a play with it. Seems nice and fast. My web site and blog look fine in it. Here are a few of the reasons to try Google Chrome:

  • Searching, history, address, suggestions – its all in one box
  • When a new tab is opened, it shows graphically the most visited sites, recently bookmarked pages, closed tabs and most used search engines
  • Every tab is independent from other tabs so if a tab crashes it wont kill the whole browser and you dont have to start again
  • You can use web apps like GMail without having to open the browser

There are many others features, these are just a few. Download it now!

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Japanese gameshows …. aren’t they great!!

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

I am sure many of you will have heard about Japanese gameshows and how made they are. I remember when growing up watching some program – I think it was Tarrent on TV – and it showed a Japanese gameshow which had contestants with raw meat on there chest and then on a conveyer belt type thing being pulled under cages with lions etc in. (Or was I dreaming this???) Hmmm. There are many clips on the Internet for example Youtube with clips

Someone has got together the “Top 10″ – there are some great ones. Check the gameshows out.

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Its not that “cuil” … yet????

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

CuilThere is a new search engine around which claims to be better and do a more comprehensive searching job than Google. Cuil, pronounced “cool”, was created by a few people who used to work for Google.

I have tried it out and at the moment it doesnt seem that good. There are nice touches such as the tabs at the top to narrow down your search. However its search results are not as good as Google and the associated image just doesnt work too well.

For example I searched for “manchester united“. The results this time are OK (its no. 1 result was the official Manchester United web site) but the associated image for the Manchester United Wikipedia entry is of some old bloke. The image isnt even in the Wikipedia page?!?!?!

I also tried searching for my company Citrus Cube Design to see what it came up with and searched “citrus cube design“. Its first result was something from professionalontheweb.com. Out of the top 8 results, 6 of them are from professionalontheweb.com. Only one of the links, went to my profile on the site. The others were to other companies which apparently had citrus cube design in the text somewhere – it didnt! Also the little description for was completely unrelated and the associated image was of some office furniture?!?!

I found a few new search engines recently which try to do things abit different and more than just “search”. My favourite is one called Searchme. Not really tested its results properly but allows you to narrow your search down and then visually see the pages scrolling through – like you do in iTunes looking through the album covers. Very nice!!

I am sticking with Google for now!!

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Firefox 3 is a record breaker!

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Firefox 3Firefox 3 was recently released on the 17th June. Mozilla decided to name to the “Download day” and try to break the download record – the number of downloads in one 24 hour period.

Today the figures were released and it broke the record with 8,002,530 downloads in the 24 hours between 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008. As I write this there has been more than 29m

Its a nice improvement over Firefox 2 – which was already good – and things seem a lot faster. For example using Gmail is tons faster!! With Firefox 2 it used to crash on me, now its almost instant when opening messages and going to different folders. Also previous versions of Firefox have used tons of memory the longer you use it with the various number of tabs etc. This seems a lot better.

Download it now!!

On the subject of Firefox and browser news, apparently 637 million users of the Internet are at risk because they are using outdated versions of their browser. Whether you use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera you should keep it updated! Using data collected from Google Web searches and security firm Secunia, they found that about 40% of users were using insecure versions of web browsers. Not suprisingly users of Internet Explorer being the least complient.

“The data was collected in mid-June 2008. The users were scattered among 78 percent Internet Explorer users, 16 percent Firefox, 3 percent Safari, and 0.8 percent for Opera. Of these, 52 percent were running the latest version of Internet Explorer, 92 percent for Firefox, 70 percent for Apple, and 90 percent for Opera.”

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