Firefox 3.1 morphs into Firefox 3.5

Mozilla have announced that the forth beta version (due for release 14th April) of the next instalment of popular browser Firefox will skip a few versions from 3.1 to 3.5.

Firefox director Mike Beltzner announced on the developer news blog that due to the inclusion of many new features (TraceMonkey, Private Browsing , etc not to mention the number of bug fixes already added to Firefox 3.1 ment that an increase in version number to reflect the changes was required.

Further updates for us Add-On developers is to be announced in due course via the wiki, and probably the mailing list too.

for more information, visit these sites:

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Posted in Tools of the Trade, Website Design | 1 Comment »

Sitemap Updates

Ensuring the information a search engine has on your site is of critical importance.  We need to ensure that new content is added into the search engines as quickly as possible, web crawlers visit your site at various intervals, some search engines will allow you to set the rate at which they visit your site, google and ask.com are the two that come to mind, but this still doesnt ensure your new page is added into the index as soon as possible.

The best way I have found is to alert the search engine to an update, you can do this by sending a ping request to the search engine via an api. This api alerts the index that new content is available and to instruct the crawler to visit the site,  below are the uri’s of the top search engines sitemap ping api’s

  • Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=
  • Yahoo – http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=
  • Live.com – http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=
  • Ask.com – http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=

Just append the url with your sitemap location and off you go. I have modified my sites cms to send a request via cURL to the api’s when ever a new page is added or deleted from my site. This ensures search engines are alerted to any changes in my sitemap.

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Posted in SEO, Website Design | No Comments »

Fonts….coming to a site near you

Just thought i would make a note to say Fonts are finally here….no more putting up with arial, being funky with verdana or stuck with times new roman…. as Firefox 3.1 continues to be flooded with features we have been waiting an age for, P0RN mode, faster javascript, html 5.
We are finally getting the ability to use what ever font we wish, as part of our website designs, as long as its a public font of course.

Firefox 3.1 allows us to use the CSS3 rule @font-face, allowing us to specify a font not necessarily installed on a visitors system. The rule alerts the visiting browser a non-standard font is required and is given a location it can download the font into the temp files to display the website as intended.

Syntax

@font-face {
  font-family: <a-remote-font-name>;
  src: <uri>;
}

Example

  <style type="text/css" media="screen, print">
    @font-face {
      font-family: "Bitstream Vera Serif Bold";
      src: url("http://developer.mozilla.org/@api/deki/files/2934/=VeraSeBd.ttf");
    }

    body { font-family: "Bitstream Vera Serif Bold", serif }
  </style>

More details on this can be found over at the Mozilla Dev site , they have also publised a list for developers with all the features being added to 3.1

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Posted in CSS, Website Design | 1 Comment »

Hello world!

Well I finally decided to take that next step and write a blog.

Mainly so I can keep people updated as to whats happening in gavs world and also so i can keep a note of thats happening….( im starting to forget things in my old age…)

Its probably not going to be updated a lot as i dont really have time to sit here and write a diary so im going to aim for an update once a week, highlighting the main things that have happened or i found interesting.

As with any blog, i must add a few shameless plugs

That will do for now, I could add a huge list but i cant be bothered.

I have just added a default template for now, i will add a site design to the list of things to do, but for now this one will suffice. As you can see its a blank canvas, I will be updating and adding content when I get time, there’s no rush as your probably the first person to read this and the next reader wont be for another week and then again it will propably be you leah… :-)

Well its just gone 7am so that means its time to stop playing on the pc and get ready for work.

UKFast…. here I come…….     damn another shameless plug…. ;-)

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Posted in Family Life, Other, Site Updates, T'Internet News, Website Design, Work | No Comments »

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