I had a recent problem with InternetNews.com: its adverts were causing Firefox to lock up my CPU. While I do put my CPU through its paces, I'd rather that others didn't decide to do the same and with things that do not add a great deal of value. So it was time to set ZoneAlarm loose by cranking up its ad blocking to the max. There are occasions where exceptions are needed, and right-clicking on a domain name in the site list in the Privacy area allows you to relax things on a site by site basis. Obviously, you need to know the website well, but I don't ever remember having this sort of control with Norton Personal Firewall when I had it on my main PC.
No sooner have we passed the CS3 circus than Adobe and Corel start bringing out new releases of their consumer digital imaging software. This autumn has brought us Paint Shop Pro X2 and Photoshop Elements 6. I'll wait for the reviews, but I can't say that very much about the new Elements strikes me as making it a compelling upgrade and I definitely have left the PSP fold, even if the latest release seems to have some interesting features on offer. In any case, I am not sure who is going to upgrade their software on an annual basis. With so many other calls on my cash, I definitely am not of that ilk.
While I don't spend too much time looking at that statistics in Google Analytics, but I do find it useful to see what people come to see. Another thing that I keep on radar is the browser technologies that visitors are using. Screen resolution is a particular interest of mine. However, browsers and their versions are watched too, and I have spotted the ascent of IE7 from where it was; there appears to be a surge in recent times. While I am unsure as to the cause for this, it's definitely happening and Vista take up seems to have noting to do with it.
After sticking with Andreas09 for so long, I have been lured into using Prosumer instead. A spot of tweaking has turned it from a fixed width layout into something a spot more fluid. While it's more edgy than its predecessor, I intend to make things appear a touch more harmonious, to my eyes anyway, over time. The level of personalisation might be even greater, too, never a bad thing when it comes to standing out from the crowd. While on WordPress.com, I did try with Andreas09, but the greyness that I added got to me in the end and I stuck with a brighter scheme after moving the blog. We'll see how it all goes on from here...
I have taken what some might consider a retrograde step: I added code to insert my blogroll directly below the widgets section of my left-hand sidebar. The reason for this is reuse of the same ID; it causes my Firefox HTML Validation add-on to issue warnings, and so can hardly be standards-compliant. Ironically, in its native state, the blogroll functions take panes to ensure that each category has its own ID, only for the widgets functions to go and disregard all of this and assign the same ID for each category. To change this in the widgets code involves ploughing through loads of arrays (and functions) and is not something for which I have time when an easier solution is very much possible.
Recently, I posted about using mod_rewrite to block access to your images from all but the websites to which you want access to be available. Following so doing, I discovered that my FAVICON had disappeared from Firefox's address. As it turned out, it was easy to fix and that is covered in another recent post.
Here's something that I found while looking into something else: Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. My first impression is that it looks like IE's answer to Firefox's Web Developer add-on, and they do share a lot of functionality. While I am going to stay with Firefox as my main browser, IE's Developer Toolbar will prove invaluable for those occasions where web page rendering is not the same for both Firefox and IE.
Without the means to stop them, I have had to stop using the Accuweather.com website because of annoying pop-up advertisements, the origins of some of which are branded hacking websites by the firewall at work. Even with Firefox, the whole approach is painful, with windows popping up asking to install some utility software onto my home PC. That is certainly something that I am not going to do, since the whole in-your-face approach seems disreputable in any case. It is all very much over the top and I intensely dislike the hard sell mentality and will not be returning: it's an effective way to drive away visitors.
After being away in Ireland last weekend, a pleasant surprise greeted me on my return when I checked up on the welfare of my blogs: my Firefox Google toolbar was telling me of a jump from 0 to 4 for this website, good news indeed. My hillwalking blog also benefited from such good karma; its PageRank has increased by 1. This is where I like to see things going...
This is an observation that surprised me: a title on one of my blog posts was helping to drive my Akismet counter a bit wild as the thing was busying itself detecting and quarantining the rubbish. Since changing the offending title, things have calmed down a bit. For me, that's food for thought...