Leslie Franke

I have launched a new look for the lesliefranke.com. I have been working on this for the past few weeks, and it is still a work in progress, as changes will continue to roll out across the site in the coming days and weeks.

I was happy with the general feel of the previous design I used but it has been several years since any changes have been made. I focused on a few things I wanted to change, hopefully bring increased legibility and usability to the site while opening up the design and letting more space in. In addition, as rest of the cool kids are doing I have added my latest thoughts from twitter to the site as well.

The latest look for lesliefranke.com

The third major release of Mozilla’s open-source web browser, Firefox, is now available for download on Mozilla’s website. The new version of Firefox is a major improvement over previous versions of the browser. Significant improvements have been made in performance & security and several useful features have been added in many key parts of the browser including the address bar, bookmark manager, and download manager.

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Recently Palm debuted the Palm Centro smartphone, their first new handheld line in some time. The Centro is being positioned as a cellphone for those who are looking to upgrade from a basic phone to one with a more functionality such as email, instant messaging, and web browsing and has generally been receiving good reviews. The Centro comes with a full QWERTY thumbboard, a 320 x 320 touchscreen, and a camera that can shoot photos and video. For the first ninety days, it is available only through Sprint and will cost $99.99 with a new contract.

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A few months after being introduced, Palm has made the decision to kill its first generation Palm Foleo. The idea behind the Foleo was that it would connect wirelessly to your mobile device, thus allowing large screen viewing and typing as needed. Many analysts have derided the product as disappointing, though, and with a large amount of software related bug fixes threating to delay the launch of the Foleo, Palm CEO Ed Colligan has decided to cancel the entire project instead.

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Shades of Gray is not a theme for WordPress itself, but a skin for the WordPress Sandbox theme. Shades of Gray is a minimalist, two column fluid-width theme. It is primarily a grayscale skin but could easily be modified to use whatever colors you desired. If you would like to play around with the skin in the wild feel free to download it and give it a try.

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One of the most interesting themes for WordPress is the Sandbox theme. Sandbox is different than most WordPress themes due to its semantic markup and dynamic class-generating functions. The authors of the theme have leveraged Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to allow for the styling of almost anything on the page without having to touch any PHP code. Nearly every HTML element has an assigned class. For example, multiple classes are assigned to the body and to every post. This allows designers to change the look and feel of Sandbox by creating different skins (CSS files) which are then applied to the theme.

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Today Flock released version 0.9 of their social web browser. Flock was first released with a enormous media hype in 2005 and since then has met with mixed reviews. Since it is based on the Mozilla Firefox codebase many have considered Flock just a Firefox clone that could be duplicated in Firefox by using the right extensions. With this latest version, Flock has finally begun to differentiate itself as a browser. Flock 0.9 includes significant updates to the user interface, better integration with numerous social services, a personalized start page, and an overhaul of the Flock bookmarking system. In addition to its own unique features, Flock also has added a few features that have already appeared in Firefox 2 such as anti-phishing features, inline spell checking, and session restore.
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