Dan Price’s blog
Weblog of a cyber-geek

If you aren’t using Firefox, a free open source browser, you should be! Why? I’ll explain below:

1) Customizability. Firefox, unlike Internet Explorer, has a bewildering number of addons and plugins that are available to customize the browsing experience - from themes to security additions to media enhancements, it has it all. On my Windows PC, I’ve got add ons including FasterFox; designed to speed up the browser (even more than usual), Greasemonkey; allowing even further customization by enabling script installs for the browser and Flashblock; which as the name suggests blocks flash on web pages, only being enabled when you click to enable it. I’ve got several more, but these 3 are some of the best.

2) Security. You might think that an open source browser would be more susceptible to hacking since everyone can see exactly how it runs, but this strictly isn’t true. Firefox may or may not be a more secure browser if it had the same market share as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but at the moment, it doesn’t so is generally far less targeted by hackers. When Firefox vulnerabilities are found, they are usually patched quite quickly, denying hackers the chance to exploit these. (more…)

24ways.org makes for an interesting read for web designers and developers. The site has, as the site name suggests, 24 ways to impress your friends (or visitors in this case) with different techniques, and has articles including CSS, Javascript and image editing. It’s definitely worth a look.

Incidentally, I am working on a redesign of my web hosting site, Whym Web Hosting, because I feel the use of a WYSIWYG editor makes the site less unique, not to mention the unnecessary markup that it chucks out.

If you are interested, you can see the ongoing redesign here. Please bear in mind that my CSS skills aren’t far from non-existent and that I’m still learning XHTML!

Dan

After finding out that my cPanel mail ports are blocked at college, I decided to set up a proxy to work around this (I can use both sides of my brain you know! :D)

This however proved harder than I thought it would be. I started off with cPanel proxy, and uploadable file that uses subdomains to hide the port numbers. However, after installing and testing, I found all this actually did was redirect to the port after login, which is basically what I’ve already done - therefore, I doubt this will work at college (haven’t yet tested).

I therefore decided to go for another proxy option - using CGI scripts. I chose CGIProxy as it says you can also login to other sites without restriction (other GCI/PHP scripts probably do this too, but oh well…) So it’s all installe, and I’ve set up a the address as a password protected directory from inside cPanel, but once I actually get down to what I want to do, check email through the proxy, I find it is incredibly slow at loading the inbox so this probably isn’t such a fantastic idea as it seemed.
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