Firefox 3 will be released to public in a few weeks. For geek users the release candidate version is out there, ready to be downloaded. Firefox 3 will feature user interface integration, which means that Firefox theme will match your operating system theme. Below you can see some screenshots for mozilla development blog that show that integration. Does this integration though worth that buzz?

First of all user interface is not a measurement for rating an application. Although it is the first thing that the end user sees. Personally I like the idea of making Firefox look like a native application on each operating system. The user interface varies even between windows vista and windows xp. Mac users will feel like home too as Firefox 3 will look similar to safari with the well known minimal mac feel.

I have tested Firefox 3 on a vista system. Bad news is that the web developer plugin did not work. Probably that will be fixed with a newer version of the plugin when Firefox 3 final version is out. Good news is that the browser renders pages much faster and most of the memory leaks that were a pain when using Firefox 2 have been fixed. Web standards are supported as usual with Firefox. Download manager has been upgraded too. A “search” field is there helping you navigate through your downloads. You can pause, resume, cancel or open multiple file locations at any time.

The feature I enjoy most on firefox 3 is the new security features. When visiting a web site, you can click the icon next to the address bar which will provide you information about the identity of the site you are visiting. Also if you want to see as more contest as you can at once, there is a full screen option which eliminates the user interface buttons and fills your screen with web content. Useful improvement, especially for notebook users.

In general web standatds support, native user interface which makes the browser easy-to-use even for users that have used only IE and security improvements make firefox 3 the best browser out there (and IE look like the worst one…).

First of all, here is a fair warning: If you start playing Packrat you will probably get addicted. If you do not have a problem with that, keep reading.

I have to say that I do not like facebook apps. I do not like them, because most of them offer nothing but loading my profile page with useless info and icons, making it to need too much time to load. Here comes Packrat. Packrat is a facebook application, created by Alamofire (same guys that created and run Iconbuffet) which first of all does not put any data on your profile page except if you want to. As you may have understood, Packrat is a game. It is a game for people who love pixel art. Purpose of this game is to collect cards (if you have baseball cards in your mind, you are on the right way, but imagine them digital and with various concepts). There are around 15 sets with around 18 cards each in Packrat. Each set has a different concept, for example there is the Ninja Dawn set with ninjas, Ratpack set which is casino inspired, Quest of Monzetuma with Incas and Aztec icons etc.

Each time you collect some cards from a set, you can put them in your “vault” to keep them safe permanently. Why keep them safe? Because cards that are not in your vault can be stolen from other players! Of you course you can steal cards from others too. Some cards are easy to obtain, some others not. Navigating through other players’ pages gives you credits, which are the digital currency of Packrat. You can use your credits, to buy cards (called items) from the markets. Some cards are available for buying, some can be made by combining three other cards and some are given as bonus (pop-ups) when you invite friends to play the game or accidentally when navigating through Packrat users’ pages. Vaulting all the cards from a set gives you a “Feat of Wonder”, a gift card for completing a set, which is placed on top of your vault.

The cards available in Packrat are designed by the guys from Iconbuffet, except two sets designed by a guy from Iconfactory. The screenshot above is from a set called Sleep Tight (the sleeping monster that gives 18300 points when vaulted was a really difficult card to make )!

Every blog uses rss syndication, which means that it publishes a feed that can be “grubbed” by everyone (human or aggregator). In simple words, the feed is your blog’s content, without the CSS and the style. Readers can read your posts without visiting your blog, by using feed readers (like Google Reader) or by visiting websites that aggregate blog content (like technorati). whether we need blog search engines like technorati is another issue, that will be discussed in another post.

Most blog platforms (like WordPress or Blogger) publish feed for your blog by default. Although the built-in solutions work fine, they do not offer many options for customising your feed. There free solutions though, that publish a feed for your blog and offer many customising options. The most used one is Feedburner. After being bought by Google, Feedburner offers all services for free. You can add your logo on your feed, add links to social sites like digg, add a creative commons license or even advertisement.

Many users prefer to read blog content via feed readers, so it is better to publish full articles to your feed and not just the excerpts. Putting your logo on your feed makes it more professional looking. Remember to double-check your posts before clicking the “publish” button, because most times feeds are being updated really fast and you do not want your post to appear to all those aggregators with mistakes or wrong images!

Solutions like Feedburner, ping automatically the most common used blog indexes. Publishing a feed though, does not mean that you ping search engines too. Using xml sitemaps is the best way for doing so. Add your feed to as many blog indexes as you can (many indexes like technorati find blogs with their own crawler).

Last but not least is the way you offer your feed through your blog. Up-to-date browsers like Firefox 2, Safari 3 and IE7 show the feed icon when a site uses syndication. Putting a feed icon somewhere in your blog is a nice way though to inform readers about your feed. For compatibility with older browsers and text-only browsers (yeah there are some text-only browsers for Linux) put also a “Subscribe to my Feed” link. Using Feedburner for feed publishing will give you a feed-url like http://feeds.feedburner.com/name-you-choose, but if you have access to your server’s DNS settings, you can publish your feed via Feedburner, using a url in this form: http://yourdomain.com/feed.

It has been about two weeks since I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. The new version (which was delayed for about one week) brings many changes, most of them in the backend (administration panel). These changes, which change the blogger’s experience when he admins his blog, offer a faster, and more organized admin panel. WordPress 2.5 could have been released as version 3.0 for sure.

The new admin panel is more friendly than the old one (as soon as you get used to it). Anything that is about the frontend of your blog (write, manage, comments, design) is on the upper left corner, and anything that has to do with the backend (settings, plugins, users) is on the upper right.

The new dashboard is well organised. Page elements are divided into small “widgets”, which inform you about incoming links, recent comments, WordPress news feed and recommended plugins. AJAX is used in every edge of the new dashboard, making comments’ moderation, editing and saving faster and more entertaining.

The WYSIWYG editor, Tiny MCE 3.0 offers permalink editing option and autosave seems to work nicer. There is no “Save & continue” editing button in the new editor. This button is divided to: “Save” button and “Publish” button, which makes the operation cleaner. Last but not least is the “Toggle Full Screen” button of the new editor, which lets you write your post in full screen mode, like editing a document in MS Word. Photo and media can be added easier and photo galleries can now be created without using external plugins.

The biggest surprise though comes when you access the plugins page in the new WordPress 2.5. Plugins can now be automatically updated with a single click, without using FTP access to your server. You just provide the FTP access information (username, password) to your WordPress installation and if a plugin is outdated, you click “Upgrade automatically” and WordPress automatically replaces the older version with the newer one.

WP 2.5 offers also many security enhancements (Technorati will stop crawling WP blogs that use WP 2.3.2 or older). If you want to further secure your blog, you can edit your wp-confing.php file and add one more constant called SECRET_KEY and use the unique key that Wordress.org will provide to you. More info on that here. It is also recommended to upgrade to version 2.5.1 as it fixes a critical security issue, especially if you use the open registration mode in your blog.

In general WordPress 2.5 is a milestone, a great upgrade, which makes blog’s administration much easier and faster as long as you get used to it. Remember to check plugins and themes compatibility before upgrading! Simpla widgetized theme works great with WP 2.5

Mozilla Prism is a project created by the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox and Thunderbird creators). Prism is dedicated to bridge Web apps with desktop apps. The project is based on Webrunner which moved to Mozilla code repository and took the name Prism.

The first thing you may think is that “We have already Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR for that kind of stuff”. Thats true, but first of all Prism is open-source, which means that developers around the world can add features or help to the development and fix security issues. Secondly Prism is not aimed to replace the Web. Its just acts like a bridge (like a mirror) between web apps and your desktop. Lets use an an example to understand how Prism works. Assuming that Gmail is your favorite web app. Prism lets you split Gmail out of your browser window and run it directly from your desktop on its own window.

Prism is built on Firefox, so it supports rich internet technologies like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The Mozilla team works on adding more features to Prism, like support for 3D graphic cards and offline data storage. Up to now though Prism is available only for Windows as it is in beta mode.

When the final version will be released, Prism will probably be integrated with Firefox and you will not even have to download and install it. A button in Firefox that will let you with one-click to add the web app you like on your desktop is also in plans. You can download the current beta version of Prism (Microsoft Windows version only) from here.

If that project succeeds, it will be a great step on improving the web experience and bring the web “everywhere”. Its big advantage agains Silverlight and Adobe AIR is that it can bring any web app in your desktop and not only the apps that are created using specific frameworks. As the project is open-source, you can participate in the development. Most info on that, here.

All of us nowadays visit and participate in social sites and networks. Practically a social network is a web site where users take action and not just read content. Digg.com and Facebook are perfect examples of such sites.

PHPizabi is an open-source script written in PHP (like the name shows) which is aimed to help developers create their own social site in fiew steps. As most of web apps (like WordPress), PHPizabi requires:

PHP 4.2.x or above
MySQL 3.23.x or above
Apache 1.13.19 or above OR IIS 5.1 or above
GD2 (Image Processor)

PHPizabi is built with security in mind: there are three administrative security layers and internal structure management, coupled with bruteforce protection. The app seems to be fast (though I have not tested it under heavy load). Modules (add ons) are supported, so developers can expand functionality and features with few clicks.

The end user experience seems to be complete, compared to famous social networks: customizable profiles, internal message sending (PMs), online-offline status, friend invitations, private photo gallery, smilies, comments and all the cool stuff used around. You can see a complete list of the features in the official PHPizabi web site. A demo installation can be found here.

In general PHPizabi seems to be a usefull platform for building social sites and is supported by an ongrowing community. If anyone uses PHPizabi and has tested it under heavy load, feel free to leave a comment and share your experience with us !

Justsayhi is for many users a dating site. But if you visit justsayhi.com/bb you will find a great and funny resource for blog widgets and quizzes for geeks. You can try out to see how many html elements can you type in five minutes or how many css properties you can type in 7 minutes. If you do not like web development you can test how much do you know about the internet or find out how much electricity does yout body produce.

Apart from the quizzes there are several quality badges to stick on your blog (most of them funny, like “the blogger is coffee addicted”) or find out how many germs live in your keyboard or whether you are an apple addicted or not! Geek quiz is nice too! There is also some crazy stuff there, like “take this quiz to find out your possibilities of surviving in a zombie apocalypse”!
The design of the site and its chicklets is cool and thats makes it different from such sites for me. I tend not to review web sites except when they are special or original and justsayhi is! Quizzes use AJAX which makes the pages fast-responding and professional-looking.

The badges you get after completing a quiz looks like this one below (and yeah the code given for sticking them on your blog validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional).

Many users have been using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin in their WordPress installation to have tag management in WordPress versions before the latest release 2.3. The problem is that version 2.3 does not support the UTW tags. There is an option though to import UTW tags in the built in tag system. Remember to import tags in parts of 1500 tags (if you have more than 5000 tags). After importing the tags you can add the tag cloud widget in your sidebar.

If you want to embed the tags in your theme, you need to modify index.php and single.php. Just copy the following code

<?php the_tags(‘title’, ‘separator’, ‘end’); ?>

and paste it under the <?php the_content(); ?>. Index.php is the main page of your blog. Modify single.php if you want tags to appear also when viewing single post pages. Where title, write what you want to appear before tags (in my blog that is Tags:), where separator write what you want between tags (here it is “,”) and where end write what you want to appear after tags (I’ve left it blank as I do not want a word after my tags).

In a previous post, I wrote a review about the social browser: Flock 0.9. Recently Flock reached version 1.0. The update to the final version is recommended for everyone who uses Flock. Many bugs are fixed, and many features are added:

• Flock 1.0 has added a “People” sidebar to support new service integration with Facebook and Twitter.
• Flickr and Youtube have been promoted to “People” services.
• Several performance and stability enhancements have been implemented and several memory leaks have been fixed.

Flock 1.0 has all Mozilla enhancements and security patches up to 2.0.0.8 (not 2.0.0.9 up to now, but a patch will be out soon I guess). You can read Shawn Hardin’s official announcement post here.

The interface is almost the same with version 0.9, except the splash screen which is changed as you see in the image and some addons on the navigation bar. Bug report button (which was placed on the upper right corner) is absent. Default search engine is again Yahoo, but that could be changed with a single click. The default “My World” page is also rebuilt and seems much more easy-to-read-and-manage now. If you would like to update your Flock installation or try Flock for the first time visit the official download page.

WordPress 2.3 is out for a while. For the past 4 months I have been using Wordpress 2.1.3 for Typpz Blog. After extended back-ups (database export, contenet files etc) and plug-in deactivation, I updated the blog to Wordpress 2.3.1! All plug-ins worked after reactivation, except the post listing plugin which is listed in the WordPress site as non-compatible with the latest version of the blogging platform and the ultimate tag warrior which in not needed as the new Wordpress comes with built-in tag support. Tags were not imported as they should from Ultimate tag warrior, so I have to tag my posts again.

I have to say that the blog now corresponds much faster. I also liked the update notifications for new versions of the installed plugins. I recommend to everyone to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3. Remember before upgrading: Backup, Backup, Backup (few clicks can save your blog in case something goes the wrong ).