We’re quickly approaching Google+‘s first birthday, and the search giant’s social media platform has found a core audience, but it has never caught on to the extent that Google hoped or the tech media hyped early on. That core group of tech enthusiasts has certainly put it to good use, with voices like Tim O’Reilly finding an even broader audience and a medium that suits him well.

For most of the population, though, Google+ was a novelty that never went anywhere. Read on, intrepid explorer →

One of the joys of corporate IT policies is seeing how things break when you’re in an unusual configuration on the web. Like, say, running Firefox behind a corporate proxy that tells every site out there that you’re actually running IE7. This morning, I paused from other tasks to read an article on a well-known religious commentary website, and saw a message at the top alerting me that I’m using an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer (which I would be if I were running IE… but this is on a relatively up-to-date version of Firefox).

Bad enough that for whatever reason our corporate IT has taken to spoofing outgoing traffic this way when routing through their proxies. (One wonders just how much of the reported IE6 or IE7 traffic on the web comes from this sort of thing.) But the real problem is that the site I visited was broken. Horribly, horribly broken.

That message – “You’re using an outdated version of Internet Explorer” – told me why. Read on, intrepid explorer →

A couple days ago, Jason Gigsby (@grigs) highlighted this post by Dave Olsen on responsive design from the server-side. The biggest thing that caught my attention was his focus on user-agent detection for altering the delivery of content.

There is some sensible stuff in there; it’s worth your time. In particular, I can see the value in delivering different kinds of resources to different targets, especially in the case of video or images, where resolution and bandwidth may be constrained. Read on, intrepid explorer →

(A note to would-be designers and developers, and to myself.)

You don’t really know a language till you know the library and the tools. Syntax is easy.

Read on, intrepid explorer →