Leslie Franke

One of the primary reason why Mozilla Firefox has grown in popularity is the extensibility it provides through the means of add-ons (extensions). With Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Microsoft has provided the ability to create and use IE specific add-ons to enhance the browser’s functionality. Unlike almost all of Firefox’s add-ons, many IE7 add-ons, though, are not free. That being said, there are numerous free IE7 add-ons that can increase productivity and make the IE7 browsing experience more pleasurable. (more…)

Smart Box Design’s Triples 2.0 (formally known as Nine Men’s Morris) is one of the world’s oldest strategy games. Introduced during the time of Roman Empire, the game is a two player board game in the same vein of chess or checkers. Each player has nine pieces to move along the board’s twenty-four intersecting places. The object of the game is to place your pieces in ‘mills’ (three pieces in a row, horizontally or vertically) which then allow you to capture one of your opponent’s pieces. To win you must leave the opposing player with only two pieces or no legal moves.

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With the new design of this site I have gotten a few reports from Mozilla Firefox users of an annoying black or gray 1px thin horizontal line(s) that displays on the screen after the page has been scrolled up or down (Two examples of this behavior appear at the bottom of this post). These lines appear to occur where the bottom line of a div or iframe is. The problem is that they are not showing up for me and thus I am having a hard time figuring out what the issue is. I believe that this is a bug with Firefox that has been mentioned several times including here.
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The Firefox 3 status meeting minutes have an interesting note. One of the items discuses what extensions should be included in the final release of Firefox 3 as part of the core browser. The list includes numerous extensions such as Firebug, TableTools, and Searchbar Autosizer (note that the full list of nominated extensions is at the end of this post).

I am not a heavy add-on user as I believe that, by default, Firefox provides almost everything needed to browse the web with. Outside of a few extensions, such as the BlueOrganizer and Scrapbook extensions, most of the extensions I use are small add-ons that provide for an increase in browsing efficiency and speed. This is the type of extensions that should be folded into Firefox. Those extensions that have little impact on users who choose not to use them but which provide increased productivity for those who do.

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After finding some WordPress themes for inspiration I set about creating the look and feel of my new site. As different developers will take different approaches to designing a site layout there are several ways to go about doing this. I believe that a solid theme will always start with well coded HTML. As a result, the very first thing is to create a homepage with no dynamic data, just a plain HTML page with code for the layout and dummy text as content. Then the look and feel can be applied to the site with CSS files, colors, and images being plugged into the static page.

The rational behind completing the site design/coding and layout first is to make sure that all of the code blocks are in the right place and semantically laid out. In addition, this is a good time to validate the site, checking for errors like an improperly closed div tag that could mess up the site layout. Once the layout code has been added to the WordPress template, errors of this kind are much more difficult to diagnose and fix. This approach provides a chance to nail down the styles that will be used for layout and text without having to worry about any WordPress tags or PHP code getting it the way.

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