Web Design and Development

Wow I logged into digg this morning and saw a whole different design and at first I wasn’t digging the change to the navigation design. I don’t think they spent much time in thinking of an attractive color for the sub navigation. The green bar isn’t really that appealing to me it looks puke green, although it does save a lot of space on the page. I just think they could of had a better color choice. The functionality of it is great. Thats besides the point because they have went above and beyond with the new features and changed their layout from fixed width to a fluid width design.

New Features

I think the biggest addition is the Podcasts section. You can now digg your favorite podcasts either by series or by episode. You can click on podcasts and then even choose which episode to listen to because they have it listed which ones are the most digged episodes of each podcast.

They have now added Videos to have its own Global navigation item and now there is a Top 10 stories/videos on the sidebar which is updated in real time. Of course in the profile they have separated it now into three sections for Video,News, and Podcasts.

I think the Podcasts is so great because now its going to be so much easier to find quality podcast and for people out there that have podcast shows that might not be able to get the traffic to their podcast that it deserves. I think those podcasters have a good chance in seeing a huge increase in traffic once they get heard on digg.

Google has already integrated Google Maps for Mobile for over 300 models of cell phones, where you get real-time traffic, detailed directions, integrated search results, easily movable maps, and satellite imagery. Now they are offering GPS enabled maps for the Helio Drift phone.

I can’t wait to see this on all the phones that have the Google Maps capabilities. I’ve always wanted a GPS unit for my car but never felt like giving up the cash for the extra little benefit. I’m sure all those companies are scared of what might happen to their market after everyone has GPS inside of their phone.

Well the other day IE 7 was finally released to the public and as everyone was going crazy because they don’t know how to code without hacks, and havn’t tested their sites throughout the year or so of Release Candidates. All my sites were just fine pretty much and I never had a version prior to the public release but did view them on BrowserCam so I wasn’t to worried. The only sites that were not fine that I have done (Including this one), were the ones that all use the great ClearFix hack, which clears the nested floats inside of a container div.

I just started using this during the summer, before then I either floated the container divs or used a clearing div, which of course to the coding snobs is bad because of extra markup.

Here is the updated hack for any of you that were unaware of this:

.clearfix:after {
content: "."
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}

.clearfix {display: inline-block;}

/* Hides from IE-mac */
* html .clearfix {height: 1%;}
.clearfix {display: block;}
/* End hide from IE-mac */

Place this in your CSS and then put the class “clearfix” on the container div that is holding the nested floats and there you go, no more clearing divs.

That was the only thing that was “Broken” on the sites that I have worked on. For all the people that are so scared of IE 7 and bashing how bad it is, all I have to say is that it is 10 times better then IE 6 and hopefully this means soon IE 5.5 will get out of the picture and we won’t have to use the box model hack anymore.Boy oh Boy I can’t wait till we can start using ” Attribute Selectors“, That is going to change CSS a lot, but I will get more into that in another article.

Well for all the people that used others layouts, and cluttered their code full of hacks I hope you knew to start testing and fixing a while back because soon Microsoft will be forcing its users with a critical update that will install IE 7.

Pretty crazy that I am just about to create a Blogger blog for a client coming up here, when I run into this article on PC World about how they got hacked. It also talks about large amounts of downtime it had this weekend for both Blogger.com and Blogspot hosting services. Apparently Google who owns Blogger said the down time was due to a “network malufunction”, isn’t it always LOL.

The hacker exploited of all blogs, the main official Google blog. I found this to be rather funny. The hacker (I would call this kid a script kiddie) posted a blog entry stating that Google had cancelled a joint click-to-call advertising project with eBAy. Between this and the downtime I would think many users are going to be thinking of switching services.

You would think since Google owns the company that they would be on top of things but like the author of the article states “Google has been criticized by some for being slow to enhance and upgrade the pioneering service.” I guess their to busy making all these new and cool things and not caring as much for something they invested in 3 years ago. Hopefully this shows them that they are slacking and maybe come up with some more innovative ideas for this bloggin service and not let it fall behind, I mean at least stay on top of security. The last blog that I would think would get exploited would be Googles. I guess they should of got Wordpress LOL.