December 2007 Archives

Perfect blend of technology, user interface design, imagery, culture, and journalism.

Mozilla just released Firefox version 3 beta 2. So far, so good. It seems to perform a tad faster than Firefox 2, and opens about as fast as Safari on OS X. For a good review of the latest browser, see John Resig’s blog, which includes instructions on how to run two versions of Firefox simultaneously.

If you’re at all familiar with Shopify, you know that the one of it’s most inescapable flaws is that lack of ability to customize the check out pages. The lively discussion on the Shopify forum illustrates a lot of the opinions, and Shopify creator Tobias Lutke explains in a forum posting why the decision was made to limit the designers’ control of the checkout pages:

As the shopify veterans will be able to tell you we work on the checkout procedure constantly. Recently we eliminated an entire step from the process and added discount codes. We will move the checkout system into the themeable domain but not just yet. Once it is released as editable though we will not be able to change the checkout in any meaningful way.

Tobi later posted a compromising solution to allow Shopify designers to style the check out with CSS while not giving up control over structure or content. By allowing users to upload a customized checkout.css to the Shopify assets folder, designers now have complete control over the look and feel. Point Clinic, one of Bust Out Solutions’s first Shopify customers, got the checkout style treatment.

Before

After

One of the most important parts of web development is platform testing. I develop using the latest Firefox on Mac OS X Leopard, but I obviously need to make sure everything is okee-dokee on all browsers. What most lay people don’t realize is that a website that looks beautiful on one platform can look like crap on another. Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? I found the answer here.

If you are getting this error on your local WordPress installation using Mac OS X Leopard, there is a simple fix. You might be seeing this error even though PHP is working fine, and MySQL is working fine. In order to get WordPress to work create a php.ini file.

sudo cp /private/etc/php.ini.default /private/etc/php.ini

Change permissions and edit the file

sudo chmod 777 /private/etc/php.ini
vi /private/etc/php.ini

Change mysql.default_socket = [blank] to

mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

Restart Apache and you should be good to go!

sudo apachectl restart

Via Josh Lee’s twitter feed I was introduced to dopplr.com, a social networking site that allows to track your friends as the hop around the country. I travel quite often for work (and pleasure, when I can) so this seemed very appropriate for me. I entered my current travel schedule into my new account, and out popped this map.

Senior Analyst at Forrester Research Jeremiah Owyang created a flurry of activity in the Twittersphere with this blog posting. Twitter is fast becoming a important method for communicating, connecting, and finding people, news, and information. Call it social networking with an attention deficit disorder. And if you want to follow me, you can do so at http://twitter.com/jefflin. Happy tweeting!

With all the social networking sites out there it’s nice to see some sort of effort to move towards standardization. Google’s OpenSocial is a set of standard APIs for social websites. The list of sites implementing it is impressive, including Orkut, LinkedIn, and MySpace.

According to a study by PCWorld, the fastest Windows Vista laptop is the MacBook Pro. That’s not a misprint, but it is pretty damn funny. I may be biased since I use a MacBook Pro for all my needs, including running Windows applications via Parallels. I’m a big fan of using the right machine/technology/platform/etc. for the right job. For me, it happens to be a Mac, but if someday I find myself more productive on Windows I’ll make the switch.

Nice article from New York Times Technology News regarding small merchants gaining a larger presence online. Bust Out currently does quite a bit of work in this area, most recently with several Shopify implementations. Drop us a line if you need any help doing anything similar.

Cheers!