After a long (and very successful) period of self-hosting, I have decided to move the website to a professional host. I’m just too damned busy with work and life in general to properly maintain the server. So last weekend I closed port 80 on our home router, thus shutting off all incoming web traffic. Then I began the the migration process.

Our copy of WordPress was a few versions behind and we had tried quite a few plugins, most of which we “uninstalled”. I say that in quotes because many plugins left behind a lot of cruft in the form of files and database records. That, coupled with all of the new changes to WordPress v2.5, led me to decide that it would be best to just start fresh with a brand new installation.

I only have a few hours each night to work on the site, so this process will definitely take some time, but I plan to migrate most (if not all) of our old posts, comments, and links. The biggest issue right now is my plethora of custom...

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Just a quick update to let you know that along with updating WordPress, I have also replaced the old Flickr plugin with a new one that proved to be easier to customize. Some quick copy & paste action and I had widgets made up for the sidebar to show recent and random photos. I also added a translator plugin, which I also quickly turned into a sidebar widget. I haven’t really tested it fully, but it appears to work as expected.

I’ve been using Firefox for well over two years now and I can honestly say that it is the best browser I have ever used. One of the best features of Firefox is the ability to add extensions. Call them mods, plugins, widgets, whatever you want, they simply rock and make your web experience that much sweeter. There are literlly hundreds of extensions for Firefox. Whether it be an email notifier, weather reports, or bookmark managers, you name it and odds are that there is a Firefox extension for it.

I’ve decided to list my favorites here mostly as a quick reference for myself, but also to share them with others who haven’t tried them yet or may be new to Firefox.

Reveal

From...

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More Dots!!! More Dots!!!

Apparently IE has no implementation for the dotted border style declaration. Instead, it decides to show a dashed border. Well, if I wanted a dashed border I would have specified border: 1px dashed #000;, but I didn’t. I specified border: 1px dotted #000; damnit!! Now where’s my damned dotted border?! Well thanks to Adam Kalsey, I found a workaround that uses a 2px background image to achieve the same effect. But again, why the hell should I have to go out of my way to create an extra image and write extra code to accomplish something in IE that other browsers already support?!

What’s a Cell without Walls?

Oh come on! What the hell Microsoft?! If a table cell is empty, then IE does not show the cell’s borders. That is just lame. So now when I dynamically create a table, I have to test every cell’s content to see if it is empty and, if it is, I have to insert a non-breaking space...

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After several years of web development, I am finally fed up with that sorry excuse for a browser known as IE. Is it really so hard to develop a web browser that follows the standards set by the W3C?! Where everyone else gets it right (or at least 99% of the time), Microsoft gets it wrong almost every single time. Why? WHYYYY!?! Well, like I said, at this point I am fed up and don’t really care anymore. I will no longer go out of my way to redesign an entire web site just to make it look as good in IE as it does in every other browser known to man.

For those of you that don’t know why IE is so bad, allow me to give you a little education.

One window to rule them all

IE has no TABS!!! (OK, this has nothing to do with web development, but I’m going to talk about it now anyways). Many popular web browsers today support tabbed-browsing, meaning that the web browser consists of one window with one or more tabs inside of it. Each tab acts like a window...

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