Safari 3 for windows

http://www.apple.com/safari/

Although only beta it’s a start. I remember this time last year looking for a windows KHTML or WebKit browser and could only find the swift browser which at the time was very buggy. Since then I think it’s changed hand and probably still worth a look.

http://try.swift.ws/

For me this is great news, no longer do I have to keep on checking browsershots or browsercamp even time I make a slight change to my css or html. I know it probably wont render exactly as it does on the mac but still it’s a great start.

I would like to share a new great service that I’ve stumbled across, reCAPTCHA. Most people will know what CAPTCHA is, a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms.

Recaptcha is a clever way to get humans to read and input scanned text that computers (OCR) program struggle with. Basically instead of just one word that the user will type there are two; the first being a CAPTCHA image and the second an imaged which has been scanned in which is unreadable by OCR. The assumption is that if the first word is typed in correctly than the second word will probably correct.

reCAPTCHA reckon that “About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day”.

Registration and use of the service is free of charge and you receive an API key for each domain you want to use it on.

Personally I think this is an absolutely great idea and as soon as i can i’ll be incorporating it into my ext project.

I’ve never really been into feeds in a big way, i know the benefits of them it’s just I’ve never had the time to really set things up to make my life easier. In total I’ve got over 1200 bookmarks, the majority of which I don’t visit regally but a lot of the sites I wish I could, if only I could be arsed.

So Google Reader, i’ve known about this service for ages but last time i tried it I was very disappointed; I found it hard to navigated and not very intuitive. For those of you who don’t know, Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds. It was released by Google on October 7, 2005 through Google Labs (source wikipedia). Basically Google wanted to design a system very much like you email inbox for new content from your favourite feeds. Personally i think the first version was a bit of a mess although they did try and incorporate a few new gimiks in my eyes they whole system didn’t work.

However (apparently, according to wikipedia) in September 2006 they released a completely new version, and it is brilliant. I spent about 4/5 hours planning around with Google reader on Sunday afternoon, adding all my bookmark feeds, favourite websites and most visited websites. Instantly I could pretty much see all the articles published on each site in one place, and yes the interface is much more like a email inbox.

Features include:

1. An inbox type approach to new content to your favourite sites
2. Choice between list view or expanded view
3. As you would expect an ajax approach to reading the contents
4. A star system allowing me to save my favourite articles, just like gmail.
5. Once selected a read it will disappear from your inbox.
6. Multiply folders for each feed, i.e. tags.
7. Share feeds (haven’t tested this out yet)
8. A huge amount of keyboard short cuts
9. and so on.

Basically Google reader has allowed me to view all my favourite sites in one place, it has ensured that I will never miss an article on a website I wanted to read because I haven’t visited it in a couple of week and most importantly it has saved me about 30mins a day. The only downside I can find is that you can’t rename folders once you’ve created them, unless im wrong but please let me know. Also why the hell don’t websites that publish feeds, publish at least the summary of the article not just the title.

In conclusion, if you are not using a feed aggregator, like Google Reader, start now it will make your life easier. I know that there are other aggregators out there, like the one built into firefox, but I just don’t have the time to try them and I’ve committed a whole Sunday afternoon to the Google Reader, but if you use another aggregator which you think is much better please let me know and i might just try it out.

Bellow is a list of all the web design galleries I could find. Each gallery has different requirement to enter a design from CSS, tabless W3C compliant to having to be green. This is suppose to be a reasonably comprehensive list in alphabetical order, if I have missed any out please comment (with the URL) at the bottom and I will add it asap.

When I get round to it i’ll make my favorite list with reviews and something or other. Please enjoy.

1. Artnetz
2. Alvit
3. Best Web Gallery
4. BRDCAST
5. CeeSeS
6. Cool Home Pages
7. Cool Site Collection
8. Creative Pakistan
9. CSS Website
10. CSS 11
11. CSS Based
12. CSS Blast
13. CSS Bloom
14. CSS Brain
15. CSS Beauty
16. CSS Clip
17. CSS Collection
18. CSS Container
19. CSS Coo Site
20. CSS Cool
21. CSS Demo
22. CSS Design
23. CSS Design Yorkshire
24. CSS Drive
25. CSS Elite
26. CSS Flavor
27. CSS Galaxy
28. CSS Galeri
29. CSS Galerie
30. CSS Galerie
31. CSS Galerie
32. CSS Gallery
33. CSS Globe
34. CSS Green
35. CSS hardcore
36. CSS Hazard
37. CSS Heaven
38. CSS Import
39. CSS Impress
40. CSS Inspirace
41. CSS Love
42. CSS Mania
43. CSS Mess
44. CSS Princess
45. CSS Reboot
46. CSS Remix
47. CSS Showcase
48. CSS Smooth Operator
49. CSS Thesis
50. CSS Tux
51. CSS Vault
52. CSS Web Designers
53. CSS Zen Garden
54. CSS-Galleries
55. CSS Genius
56. Dark Eye
57. Dekiteharu
58. De Web Times
59. Design Link Database
60. Design Meltdown
61. Design Shack
62. Design Snack
63. Design Beauty
64. Dev Home
65. E-Motional Design
66. Easy Share CSS Beauty
67. Edu Style
68. Frog Family Standards
69. Full Single
70. Inspiration King
71. Light on Dark
72. Liquid Designs
73. Lovely Blogs
74. Menthe Fresh
75. Moderni Web
76. Morpheed CSS
77. Most Inspired
78. najDizajn
79. Nearly Nice
80. Netcocktail
81. Netzfruehling
82. One Pixel Army
83. Perfection
84. Piep Matzel
85. Pixelgangster
86. ProWebArt
87. Screen Fluent
88. Screenalicio.us
89. Screenspire
90. Showcase
91. Standards Reboot
92. Style Crunch
93. Style Grind
94. Style The Web
95. Styleboost
96. Stylegala
97. Submit CSS
98. The Best Designs
99. The Daily Slurp
100. The Horizontal Way
101. Unmatched Style
102. W3 Compliant Sites
103. W3C Compliance
104. Wake up Gallery
105. We Creative
106. Web Design Book
107. Web Design Galleries
108. Web Design Inspiration
109. Web Gallery
110. Web Standards Awards
111. Web Standards in Germany
112. Web Test
113. Webdesign Awards
114. Webdesign Inspiration
115. Webdigity Design Gallery
116. Well Designed CSS Sites
117. Well Done Sites
118. Well-Designed Weblogs
119. With style
120. Wow Factor

If you found this article useful please feel free to Digg it.

The backup file could not be saved. Please check the permissions for writing to your backup directory and try again

Right here was my problem:

“I am also having the issue with the wp-db-backup plugin. I’m running version Wordpress v2.1.3 and wp-db-backup v2.0.5, i have ensured that wp-contents folder is chmod 777 but still get the javascript error “The backup file could not be saved. Please check the permissions for writing to your backup directory and try again“.”

If you have done everything correctly, ie change file permissions and checked there is no conflicting plugins then the reason is likely to be the same as mine.

Check you php.ini file - If php safe mode is on turn it off.

If you can’t access your php.ini file, you might be able to create one in your directory or alternatively ask your web hosting company. You may only be able to edit it through SSH in which case read my article on SSH commands and VI commands.

If you have access to your domain through a plesk control panel sometimes you can turn it off in the domain setup page. When you add a new domain to the server and tick the php box, the php safe mode box is automatically turn on.