Will Chatham

Today I shall endeavor to post a long update. I have been col­lect­ing a lot of good things to say here but haven’t had time to elab­o­rate until now.

First, if you are one of the hun­dreds of peo­ple who leave com­ments on my posts each day, you will notice a new “captcha” that you must get by in order to sub­mit a post. This I imple­mented using Gudlyf’s AuthIm­age plu­gin for Word­Press. The spam bots finally got to be too much to han­dle, so this was necessary.

On to the world of Mozilla, the excel­lent email client Thun­der­bird was offi­cially released this week. I have been using the Beta ver­sion for about a year, and am highly impressed with all the cool stuff ver­sion 1.0 offers. If you want to reduce spam and have a much safer email expe­ri­ence, down­load it now.

Since I know you are already using Fire­fox, I will throw out a handy link for the free MozBackup tool that will back up all of your Thun­der­bird mail and set­tings, as well as Fire­fox set­tings, and save them as a self-executable file for easy restora­tion. I use this tool weekly in case of a dis­as­trous cat­a­stro­phy. Addi­tion­ally, I found the Fire­fox Deploy tool a great way to install Fire­fox on mul­ti­ple machines with the exact same set­tings, exten­sions, and bookmarks.

Folks, free, reli­able stuff like this is why Mozilla and the whole open source move­ment rule. Of course, this guy seems to have been in the bath­room when they passed out the brains.

I found an inter­est­ing arti­cle at 43 Fold­ers called 5 Mis­takes Band & Label Sites Make that lists some very com­mon web design no-no’s. I couldn’t agree more. I learned a few things from the arti­cle that I will def­i­nitely resolve on the two band sites I have done so far, and will keep them in mind down the road.

Place The State is a fun game that tests your USA geog­ra­phy skills. Do you know where on the map to place the state of Delaware? I have to brag and say that the first try I got 90% with an aver­age error of 53 miles.

For you iPod own­ers out there, you can now down­load the United States Con­sti­tu­tion as an audio book for free. All it takes is an email address.

I was inter­ested to read Jakob Nielsen’s recent post regard­ing Most Hated Adver­tis­ing Tech­niques. I had a feel­ing about many of these, but now I can back up that feel­ing with facts when I try to con­vince a client that popup win­dows are just not cool.

While doing some research on Web Acces­si­bil­ity, I found HP’s site regard­ing the sub­ject. I was laugh­ing alound in my cubi­cle when I read their page about What to do if your screen reader says “horse­power”. Yes, it’s sad when one’s sense of humor slumps so low that jokes about screen read­ers are funny (but the higher geek fac­tor is cool).

And lastly, but not leastly, Mackie, the maker of excel­lent sound equip­ment, is giv­ing away a full-featured audio edit­ing appli­ca­tion called Track­tion. Again, all it takes is an email address. (link via my new favorite blog, Plas­tic Bugs).

whew!