Do Not Fold

These Days is looking for new web-talents. We thought it would be fun to make a mini-site where you can show your true web-ninja skills. You got to hack your way into our minisite and prove you’re a true ninja! Good luck!

Everyone has been there: there is a question that’s bothering you but you can’t find the answer. You could Google for the answer, but this question is so specific that it would take ages to find it. It would be awesome if you could ask someone who knows, someone who’s specialized in the matter. Well, wait no more! Because there is a neat web2.0 service that solves your problem.

The concept is simple, you add an extra friend to your IM service and fire away. Aardvark works on MSN Messenger, Gmail chat, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, Hotmail, Windows Live and since recently on the iPhone as well! So how does it work? Once you added Aardvark to your contacts-list in your IM service, you just ask it a question. Aardvark will try to find the subject of the question and sends the question trough to people. Within minutes, you get an answer by some who knows about the matter. Super simple and brilliant!

When you register for the service you’ve got to enter a couple tags/topics on what you wish to answer questions about if they are asked to you. Here are a couple of mine: CSS, internet, iPhone, Javascript, photography, PHP and web development. I’ve used Aardvark dozens of times, yesterday I asked a question about where I should book my hotel in Berlin, Germany.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to go to the Google Amsterdam office to meet Thomas Steiner, a Google Sales Engineer. It’s because These Days has an NDA with Google that we could go there and talk with Thomas about technical issues with several Google products, like analytics, API’s, etc.

Last Friday Tomas posted this on his blog, a couple fun facts about Google search that I didn’t knew about:

Sometimes it’s the small things that let you feel the difference. In cooking it’s just this little bit of thyme that makes a piece of meat a real steak, in technology it’s easter eggs. Search Google for recursion, and Google will ask you if you rather meant “recursion”. Search Google for ASCII art, then this is what you get for the Google logo:

  ___                _
 / __|___  ___  __ _| |___
| (_ / _ \/ _ \/ _` |   -_)
 \___\___/\___/\__, |_\___|
               |___/

An awesome reply by Jonathan Snook on the article on css-tricks.com about displaying a Date on a specific method. The CSS-tricks site uses an image and CSS to position it (which is oldskool these days), but it can be much easier, as Jonathan explains. Btw… it’s not cool to put your date like that, in fact, it’s but-ugly in my opinion!

© John Martz

I have the feeling that everyone agrees, Internet Explorer 6 should disappear! This browser was very good… in 2001. Today it’s not only old, slow and insecure, it’s a pain in the ass for web designers and developers because they can’t use modern techniques without hacking, bug fixing, etc. This affects us all because loads of web designers and developers are discouraged to create stunning websites, and that’s a pity!

Is there a way to find out who still uses IE6? I always hear: it’s because of those large companies where IT doesn’t want to upgrade. But I find that hard to believe, because any decent IT guy wants his network to be secure and trouble-free, no? If you’d ask me… I think most people that still use IE6 are those families where the dad bought the cheapest computer in the local supermarket. They probably think: “that computer is slow already, it will be even slower if I install more stuff on it”.

I really think IE6 users are computer newbies, dumb or just slow in general :) So what can we —web designers and developers— do about this? We force them to download a modern browser by spamming them with popups, blockers or fake IE messages. Please people… do it now!

It’s back in town! Erm… London that is. The annual Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference by Carsonified. Book your tickets now, because last year was really good. I booked my tickets from the moment there where any available. Yes, I’ve got me one of those early-bird tickets… yay!

The conference is held on 1 and 2 oktober and the speakers include Aza Raskin (Mozilla), Dustin Diaz (Twtter), Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Kevin Rose (digg), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), etc. If you are going too and you want to meet-up, let me know!