Evolt.org, has announced a redesign contest. Quoting Martin Burns:

Hi folks
Ever looked at the evolt site and thought “I could do better than that”?
Ever thought “All very nice, but it’s a bit 1999”?
Ever thought “It’s not using half the potential that Drupal (plus
modules) gives it”?
Ever thought “Wish we could be as gorgeous as $insertsitehere”?
Well, now’s your chance. Evolt.org is proud to announce a grand
Design Contest, to
redesign www.evolt.org. If your entry wins, it becomes the new design – simple, eh?
Background, rules and so on at the 2006 WEO Design Contest
but the key things are:
1) The site’s staying in Drupal
2) Ease of implementation is as important as beauty of design
3) Entries in by end April

Give us a hand and have a go!

Glenn Jones of Mapsurface.com just sent me my login details for this cool tracking tool.

Try it now by pressing ALT+X on your keyboard (seems not to work in Opera though).

What I love about it:

• The slick interface
• The validity – it stays in the head of the document as two includes and doesn’t do any document.write nasties in the body
• The on-demand nature – you might not want to wait for my tracker to run

What I think needs to change:

• You should be able to password – protect the stats

If that were the case, I’d try and approach a lot of clients with this goody.

According to news.com, Microsoft will stop Active-X controls like embeded media or flash to start automatically in the next security upgrade.

This is very bad news for Flash designers (and may give DOM scripting another boost). Microsoft recommends as a workaround to Activate the control dynamically by writing it out via JavaScript. The examples given are rather messy, and I wonder if Bobby van der Sluis’ Unobtrusive Flash Object wouldn’t have been a better example to promote as a fix.

I always thought I am a bit crazy about my Firefox extensions, but over at Splasho.com they just tried out “what happens when you install all the available extensions (avoiding duplication of functionality) at once”:http://splasho.com/blog/2006/02/26/the-superbrowser/. They call it the superbrowser and it sure looks colourful.

As always, the comments are quite interesting, too. I skipped the one mooing about bovine porn, but got quite interested in the one pointing to 50 Best Firefox extensions for power surfing. Power surfing? Binford!

The idea of the experiment was not to get rid of screen estate, but to see how stable Firefox is even with that ridiculous amount of extensions. Of course the comment asking how stable the browser stays when you surf a lot with all of these enabled and how many security holes they open has a point, too.

My favourite comment however was one that is both biting sarcasm and rings a bit of giving in to what happens anyways:

Not impressive. IE runs with a 100 spyware extensions everywhere.

Skimming through my referrers and their blogs I just found the Live Thumbnails: Watch ‘em Grow article that explains how to make a non-boring image gallery.

I thought at first it’ll be something like my Image previews with DOM JavaScript but it turns out to be a script that automatically resizes images with a timeout when you click them. Apart from the HTML resizing still looking ugly as hell and slow on a busy machine, something in the back of my head rang: I had seen webmonkey publish something like that before, and I used all my google-fu skills to find it: It was an article published in 1997, called something like making stuff zoom .

Good to see that we have come a long way with JavaScript. Now we don’t use code forking and exclusively catering to MSIE, but instead we use invalid attributes. While PPK’s JavaScript triggers article rightfully explains that you should use an own DTD if you come up with own attributes, the Webmonkey one sadly forgets about this and instead relies on you also reading and understanding the JavaScript triggers one.

How about we just make sure we publish interesting photos?

By the way: I would have loved to comment at webmonkey, but I cannot be bothered to send an email.