Good news, as w3counter shows that Firefox has reached 25% market share.
Breakdown:

IE6 – 59%
Firefox 1.5 – 17%
IE7 – 6%
Firefox 2.0 – 6%
Firefox 1.0 – 2%

So combined versions of Firefox come to 25%, and combined IE6 and IE7 come to 65%. Not bad!

I find it interesting that IE6 vs IE7 has such a large difference still, given that Microsoft is pushing IE7 out to customers via Windows XP automatic updates. I would have expected an overnight explosion of adoption, something like 50% of IE users having IE7 by now. I guess not!

Wonder why that is – too many people with pirated XP copies (You have to run the ‘genuine’ tool to install IE7), or just people not updating windows?

One of the sites owned by my employer (Tailored Consulting) is called Brand Boots.com. Today, Brendon tells me that BrandBoots is ranked #5 in Yahoo for the phrase “ugg boots” – and thats great news.

BrandBoots was a venture by Brendon and Mel to sell Ugg Boots (Ugh boots, Ugg boots, Ug Boots – however you want to spell it!) from an online shop. Over Christmas etc, they would sell LOTS of boots overseas. (Don’t forget, its hot here in Australia – but other countries can get snow, and warm sheepskin boots are great in cold weather).

But they had a lot of trials and tribulations, including:

• Dispute over the phrase ‘ugg boot’,
• Lots of returns when the material turned out to not be high quality
• Mel sacrificing her Garage to serve as a ugg boots warehouse!

And now they’ve stopped. Nobody was really putting any effort into growing and marketing the website, because there were just too many hassles. So now its over – but they haven’t closed it down.

See, BrandBoots.com is a quality ugg boot domain name. Its been around a long time, and its got a lot of content, and lots of sites linking to it. So what they’ve done, is put up a notice on the homepage:

Over the past couple of years here at Brandboots.com we have sold 3 different brands of Ugg Boots.

To the right is a photo of our packed boots awaiting pick up one day – that’s in excess of 80 pairs of ugg boots sold per day. But no more!

And whilst these ugg boots have been fine, we’ve stopped selling them completely.

No more will be sold of these other brands. The reason why is simple.
Because they are nowhere near as good as UGG Australia boots. Simple.

There ya go. They’ve decided, “if you can’t beat em – join em” and have signed on as an affiliate for Ugg Australia.

So now Brandboots.com can make money as an affiliate without anybody having to spend time on it!

In fact, Brendon tells me that it cleared several hundred dollars last month – and the only time invested was to remove the store a few months ago, and add affiliate links in. Very minimal stuff.

Perhaps you should consider affiliate systems instead of adsense/PPC ads on your website?

This is a blog, and its got an RSS feed. It feels like RSS feeds are becoming more and more common every day. Part of this is due to the growing popularity of blogs, and partly because web users are becoming a little more savvy.

Once upon a time there was a web user. We’ll call her Betty. Betty found a blog she liked to read, and she checked back daily for new posts. Then Betty found out about some more blogs she liked, so she started checking those daily too. It wasn’t look before Betty was checking 30 blogs every day – and wow, it was starting to take a while!

This is where RSS feeds come in. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way for a blog to make its content available in an easily transportable format. So Betty signed up to Google Reader (or any of a million other aggregators (RSS Readers), where she could read all 30 of her blogs in one place, without wasting time visiting all of these other sites. And she lived happily ever after.

Its very common now to visit a blog and see a button linking to the RSS feed for that blog. But in most cases, when you click the icon, you saw raw code.

You see, RSS feeds are constructed from XML code. Its kind of ugly to the untrained eye! But have you ever heard of XLST? It is to XML what CSS is to HTML – only a little cooler. Take a look at the fergusweb RSS feed. Thats not unstyled content! (Its not all that pretty either, but hey – thats feedburner for you!)

Its got an info-box at the top showing ways to subscribe, and it lays out the raw data in an acceptable manner. This is done with the help of XLST. Because XLST doesn’t just dictate style rules but it also allows you to add other content in – content only visible to the web browser, not shown by the reader. Which is great for that “here’s an RSS feed, and here’s what you can do with it” message that should be at the top of an RSS feed.

You see, me – I find an RSS feed, I copy/paste the url into Google Reader. But someone who hasn’t experienced RSS before really needs an introductory note.

So, if you publish an RSS feed, visit it in your web-browser to see what your visitors will see. Does yours look as pretty as mine?

I’m going to be modifying some scripts I wrote for other projects to publish RSS feeds, and I’m going to be integrating XLST in there. Now, I’ve never done this before, so I have a bit of research/learning to do first. I’ll post again with a tutorial on the basics of XLST when I’ve done this.

Well, thats just dandy. Internet Explorer 7 was released for download today, from the sound of things.

They haven’t pushed it out to all Windows XP machines via windows update yet, but I can’t imagine thats very far away. I did hear it would happen on November 1, but that wasn’t an official source, so I’m not sure.

What this means to me: Next week could be a busy one, what with ensuring all our old websites display properly in the new browser.

If you haven’t heard anything about Internet Explorer 7, then I think you should use the alternative download site: http://www.ie7.com

Its always a hassle, isn’t it. You code up your webapp and store timestamps from events – then later you have to do the conversion in your head because the server your site sits on is on the other side of the world.

Michael Phipps touches on the subject, mentioning an issue with attempting local timezones in multi-user systems.

Last week Pete was trying to solve a problem, and ran into the issue of not being able to change the timezone on his server, even though he needed all times stored in Australian Eastern Standard. As one does, he didn’t find a decent solution until he’d already implemented a hack.

{code type=php}
<?php
echo date(‘r’);
// Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:38:30 +0000
?>
If you do not have access to editing the server time, here’s a quick fix:
<?php
// For example, to output Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5:00)
putenv(“TZ=EST”);
echo date(‘r’);
// Fri, 17 Mar 2006 07:38:30 -0500
?>
{/code}
How easy is that!

Blogs:

• Sitepoint Blogs – great resource
• MattCutts.com – one of google’s engineers speaks!

Articles:

• Sitepoint – How to sell web accessibility
  Interesting Stats:

  * There are 8.6 million registered disabled people in the UK, totaling 14% of the population (source: DRC)
  * One in 12 men, and one in 200 women, has some form of colour blindness, totaling 9% of the UK population (source: Institution of Electrical Engineers)
  * Two million UK residents have a sight problem — that’s 4% of the population (source: RNIB)
  * There are 12 million people aged 60 or over — some 21% of the UK population (source: UK government)

• Sitepoint – Top Ten CSS Tricks
  Has some decent tricks and tips in there

here’s a few more resources:

• SP – Coding Standards
  Good article on Coding Standards – basically, how to write code that is easy to add to, maintain, and debug. Always good!
• PHP Code Beautifier
  Reformats PHP code based on your preferences, to make things easier to read etc.
• Security Guide for PHP
  Excellent guide to security. Includes code snippets, examples, and cases. Easy to read, and some excellent tips. Useful as a reference guide.

Here are a few Javascript resources for you!

• Unobtrusive Javascript
  Unobtrusive Javascript – basically, you don’t put javascript in your html code. Instead, you use an external .js file, and use event-handlers to trigger the code where neccessary. Good one to take on-board!
• Preview Your Links
  Use unobtrusive javascript to put an icon beside your links. Show PDF, Word, HTMl, Text, etc etc. Good add to usability of a site, not to mention a warning in linking to PDF etc files.
• Good mouse-over alternatives
  Move your mouse over a feature link on this page. See what happens? I like it! View source to see how its done.

And for my own personal reference, I also have the sitepoint book DHTML Utopia – which has some excellent JS resources.