Year of the Code Monkey

The last few Firefox 3 nightly builds have changed the way SSL URI’s are displayed to the user. In Firefox 2, accessing a secure site results in a yellow background for the address bar (which I think is a particularly elegant solution). For reasons I don’t fully understand, Mozilla is getting rid of this implementation. In new Firefox 3 builds, the background of the ‘favicon’ will change depending on the security of the site. A blue background indicates an SSL secured site, while a green background indicates an EV SSL secured site. Moving the color to the favicon, in my opinion, makes things a little harder to understand. A heated debate about this inevitably appeared in the corresponding bug, and there will likely be more confusion over this in the future, as more public users begin to explore the Firefox 3 world. I fully expect an extension to ‘fix’ this feature, so all may not be lost. This is a very strange decision on Mozilla’s part, and it should be interesting to see what the end result is.

Maybe I missed the memo, but I just don’t understand everybody’s sudden infatuation with Twitter. It seems as if everywhere I look, people are ‘tweeting’ about the stupid, mundane, and sometimes horrifying events in their daily lives. Does anyone here use Twitter? And if you do, why?

I am now an official WordPress contributor! While converting Born Geek to WordPress, I noted that the Movable Type importer did not obey the WordPress database case constraints. Movable Type posts export themselves as “Published” while WordPress expects the value to be lower case (”published”). After finding and verifying this bug, I wrote it up and submitted a simple patch, which was then accepted. The fix will be included in 2.5.1!

There’s a great article over at ShackNews offering a preview of the new Team Fortress 2 updates coming in the next week or two. In addition to discussing the new Goldrush game type, they also take a look at the brand new unlockable weapons for the Medic class. Some of the new weapons really sound exciting, and I’m really looking forward to this update.

I have squashed a few ugly CSS bugs here at this site:

• Internet Explorer 7 should no longer show a horizontal scroll bar on every page
• The italicized text in the header should no longer be clipped on the right
• Font sizing rules in the comment form have been improved

I am aware of several serious IE-specific bugs over at Born Geek, and I’ll work to fix those ASAP.

I have finished migrating Born Geek to WordPress 2.5. Read more about it over at the corresponding news post.

This weekend, I hope to migrate Born Geek to WordPress 2.5. I’ve gotten tired of having to deal with the quirks of Movable Type, and I think WordPress has evolved enough to support what I want it to do. Performance issues should be interesting to watch, though I intend on employing the handy WP-Cache plugin to help out. Hopefully the transition will be a smooth one, but expect some down time at one point or another. All my Firefox extensions, along with the update manifest, will remain up so that updates remain available.