I literally laughed out loud when I read this ArsTechnica.com article:

Most browser implementors are quick to adopt emerging Internet technologies, but Microsoft can’t or won’t make Internet Explorer a modern web browser. Despite some positive steps in the right direction, Internet Explorer still lacks many important features. Its mediocrity has arguably hampered the evolution of the web and forced many site designers to depend on suboptimal proprietary solutions.

IE’s shortcomings won’t hold back the Internet for much longer, however, because Mozilla plans to drag IE into the next generation of open web technologies without Microsoft’s help. One of the first steps towards achieving this goal is a new experimental plugin that adapts Mozilla’s implementation of the HTML5 Canvas element so that it can be used in Internet Explorer.

That’s certainly one way to bring standards to IE, but it’s not perfect by a long stretch as Microsoft seems determined to make it as hard as possible:

Vukićević is confident that a lot of the holes can be filled without substantial effort, but his primary concern is with the challenges posed by deployment. The plugin is designed to snap into IE as a binary rendering behavior, but the browser’s defensive security mechanisms insist on prompting the user before every time it is used. This detracts from the seamlessness of the plugin and makes it difficult to use for conventional web applications.

“Currently, the experience is pretty crappy: you have to click through an infobar to allow installation of this component, then you have to click ‘Yes’ to say that you really want to run the native content, and then you have to click ‘Yes’ again to allow the component to interact with content on the page,“ he wrote in a blog entry. “In theory, with the right signatures, the right security class implementations, some eye of newt, and a pinch of garlic, it’s possible to get things down to a one-time install which would make the component available everywhere.“

Let’s hope the Mozilla folks are composed of some skilled witches then. Having a few plugins to help make IE standards compliant would be a welcome development for anyone who codes in HTML.

It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas around here because I felt like it. Slightly different from last year, but same basic color scheme. Was going to try and get a pic of me in my new Santa hat, but haven’t found a good background for it yet. If I get around to it soon I may set it up as a rotating image similar to what I did with the Halloween pics.

We’re slowly decorating the house as well. The tree is up and we’ve got a string of LED lights (a 33% energy savings over standard lights!) across the fireplace mantel. I need to get the outside lights strung up and the animated deer set up as well. Oh, and I finally broke down and bought myself a USB powered Christmas Tree that blinks between several different colors. It was $3.99 at the local Micro Center so I figured what the hell.

How about you guys? You got your Christmas decorations up yet? Are you an early starter like me or do you wait till the last minute?

Every now and then I come across a really useful collection of links on web development. This has to be one of the biggest I’ve found so far. Ultimate Web Developer Lists: 4000 Web Development Links in 200 Topics.

Everything from Ajax, CSS, HTML, XML and more to sites with free fonts, cheat sheets, color pickers, graphics, RSS, site tools, and so on. If you’re always on the lookout for learning more about how to do this stuff yourself then this is a great resource to add to your bookmarks.

And I’m not just talking about my picture either. Yes, my sense of color schemes is comically inept and I admit to that. Truth is I’ve been trying to come up with a new layout and graphics for Yuletide and just haven’t been able to pull of any of the things my imagination has cooked up lately. Seeing as this is about all the Christmas decorating I’m going to do this year I wanted to get something up before too much more time passed. I’ll probably still try to come up with something less garish later in between getting ready to move out of the apartment and finding a job, but with as crappy as the last dozen designs I tried to do have turned out I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it if I were you. If nothing else I’ll keep playing with the color scheme to see if I can’t tone it down a bit…

I’ve updated the SEB Halloween theme with a new pic of me created by Beau Tochs who is much more skilled with Photoshop then I could ever hope to be. I had attempted something similar myself and it looked damned silly so I’m very grateful for Beau Tochs taking the time to realize my vision for me and allowing me to make use of it on the site. Besides, it’s probably how more than a few folks see me even when it’s not Halloween. If you’re still seeing the zombie pic just do a page refresh and the new logo should show up.

Thanks again, BT.

If you’ve been using the preview function in the comments here at SEB you may have noticed that after hitting preview the first time any subsequent previews didn’t update the display properly even though the changes would take effect if you posted the comment. Well, it’s working as it should now with each click of the preview button updating the page.

Turns out it was a problem of my own making. I have most of the templates set to cache for a period of time to help reduce server load and the comment preview template was one of them. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that this would be a bad idea. Anyway, caching is turned off for the comment preview template so you can preview as many times as you’d like before submitting now.

Those of you who make use of the SEB Forums know that I’ve been meaning to replace the current package in use (IPB 2.0) with something else due to the changes in the licensing for what we were using. I’ve got a test install of the SMF offering in place to see how it stands up and I’ve managed to convert all of the current messages/forums/users from IPB to SMF so you won’t have to re-register to try it out. You can try out the new forums by clicking here and signing in with the same username and password you used on our previous forums. The old forums are still in place until we decide on what we want to switch to so feel free to play with the new ones quite a bit to see how you like it.

For me to bust out the holiday layout? I’ve been itching to make something a little more festive and this wouldn’t require the living room to be cleaned up first.

Well, it’s not close to what I had wanted to do nor is it all that different layout-wise like I’d hoped, but I wanted something a little more Halloweeny… Halloween-ish… something that felt more like Halloween in place even if it’s only for a day or so. I’ll have to save all the big changes for the Christmas skin. For being only a couple hours worth of work, most of it spent editing my picture, it’s not too bad.

Over in the forums we’ve been discussing what to do with them after recently finding out that the script I use to run them will no longer be freely available. The forums have always been a secondary feature of SEB and a good number of folks who visit daily aren’t even aware that we have forums, but that hasn’t stopped a handful of regulars from putting them to good use. I’ve never managed to integrate them into SEB in the manner I had hoped and that’s probably part of why they’re not frequented as much as they might have been. Either way, the Invision Power Board script has gone commercial and the simple fact is that the forums aren’t popular enough to justify purchasing a license for the script yet I don’t want to stick with a package I can’t upgrade any further if major security bugs are discovered.

Which brings us to the question of: Should we even bother having forums at all?

Personally, I like the idea of having forums available—even though I was lousy about actually visiting them—if for no other reason than it provides someplace to redirect folks to when I close one of the bigger threads such as the Kent Hovind discussion that topped nearly 400 comments. It’s also nice to have a spot for folks to start their own threads if there’s something they’d like to talk about. While I still consider Stupid Evil Bastard to be my personal blog, I’m also very proud of the fact that it has evolved somewhat toward more of a community oriented site that encourages discussions on a wide range of issues and I think a forum being available would help contribute to that feeling a bit if I manage to work it into the site a little better.

The ideal solution would be the forthcoming forum module for ExpressionEngine, but that’s still in the early stages of development and won’t be available for some time to come so I’d rather not wait for it before making a decision. If we keep the forums then I’ll need to decide what to use as a replacement for IPB. Of course the first suggestion most folks think of is phpBB as it’s easily one of the most popular open source forum packages out there. It’s also probably overkill for our needs, though, so I’d like to hear about other possibilities from folks who might have come across something that would better fit the bill.

One such possibility I mentioned in the forum posting I made was making use of miniBB which can be called from within another template allowing it to be easily integrated into the rest of the site. It’s also small, fast, and expandable. I wish I were a better PHP programmer because looking at the code for miniBB it appears that it wouldn’t be too difficult to modify it to use the existing ExpressionEngine user database rather than it’s own which would eliminate one of the things that always annoyed me about running a separate forum in terms of having to ask folks to register twice.

Anyway, I wanted to hear from the rest of the folks who frequent SEB on this issue as well so speak up. Do we need forums? Do we want forums? Do you know of a package that you think would make a good fit with SEB? Let me know.

Not only is the main index rendering properly, but I’ve got the comments page (a.k.a. individual entry page) up and running now. You can check out the progress so far by clicking here. Won’t be too much longer and it’ll be ready for prime time.

There was a request in the ExpressionEngine forums for someone to convert a template called Kubrick 1.2.5 from Wordpress over to ExpressionEngine so I figured I’d take a whack at it. You can see what the original Word Press version looks like here and you can see my attempt at converting it to EE here. I’ve only done the main index so far, but I hope to have the whole thing completed by the end of this weekend, possibly sooner if my copy of The Sims 2 doesn’t arrive. SEB won’t be switching to that template anytime soon, but once it’s done I’ll make it available for download to anyone who wants it. I may leave it available as an alternate SEB template for those folks who like it. If there are any other templates out there that are free to modify for use in other systems you guys would like to see me convert then just drop me a line and let me know. Meanwhile, put this one through it’s paces and let me know what you think.

This just in: The official homepage for Mozilla.org has been redesigned with a spiffy new look. It’s so damned spiffy that I felt compelled to write a blog entry about it. It’s the sort of simple, clean, and pretty design that I wish I was smart enough to do. Dammit. Now I’m jealous. Go check it out.

Dave over at Dave’s Chalkboard has a whole category on referrer spamming and how to put an end to it using .htaccess. Dave uses ExpressionEngine, much as we do here, and EE has a built-in referrer spam blacklist so I was curious why he’d go through the trouble of using .htaccess instead. Turns out there’s a good reason: Bandwidth.

EE’s blacklist works pretty well at blocking sites from showing up in the referrer list that EE maintains itself, but it doesn’t stop it from showing up in any other tracking services you might use nor does it stop the bandwidth from being used when you’re hit constantly by these assholes. Dave estimates that the referrer spam attempts were eating up about around 3.6GB to 7GB of bandwidth a month, which isn’t a big deal when you have 50GB of bandwidth to play with, but for a site like SEB which has a mere 19GB a month that bandwidth lost to referrer spamming can quickly add up. So I’m thinking of following Dave’s lead and see if I can’t figure out how to massage my .htaccess file a bit and cut back on some of the wasted bandwidth. It’ll probably be a little trickier for me considering that I have two domains to protect, but I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update: After studying Dave’s .htaccess file and reading up on regular expressions I’ve gone ahead and implemented my own attempt at referrer spam blocking. Dave had a pretty good sized file full of URLs, but I wanted to make it as simple as possible. So rather than using full URLs I’ve put together one that makes use of pattern matching to filter out most of the crap that comes along. There’s a few sites that managed to keep their domain names free of the popular keywords so I had to add in lines just for them, but overall I think this is going to catch a lot of it with a minimal amount of work.

Testing things out with the helpful wannaBrowser appears to confirm that I’m in good shape. Still, there’s a chance my patterns are overly broad so if you find you’re getting a Forbidden error when trying to follow a link from someplace to SEB, please be sure to let me know about it.

Progress on the reviews sub-blog is coming along slowly but surely. It’s what I spent most of my weekend on when I wasn’t playing Medal of Honor. Here’s a sneak peak: