It’s not much, but it pays for the hosting plan of this website – which means that this site is self-sustained.

I’ve grown to about 12.000 visitors with around 30.000 page views a month.

And this, for a blog with less than 30 posts. This is a wake up call for me: I will put more time in this site, from the little I have left, after my day job and my freelance projects.

I have so many ideas, like, for instance, the long awaited MOOdalBox 2 (lots of people have asked me when it would come out, I’ve made and broken so many promises on this subject ).

To sum it up, I feel the need to thank all my visitors for spending a moment here and for supporting me on every occasion. Thanks guys

This was due to a server change I requested because of frequent downtimes on the previous one. However, the new server my site was moved to had certain features differently configured – that rendered my site inaccessible.

First was the php version, that made my WordPress installation go AWOL (had to switch from php 5 to 4 to have it work). That also lead to errors on my forum pages, but those were corrected using some tips from the bbPress forums.

The cause of 404’s on my playground folders was that my .htaccess for that folder used the directive SecFilterEngine Off, in order to disable mod_security (which, when activated, interfered with my Ajax calls). But on this particular folder, mod_security wasn’t configured and thus the .htaccess generated an error and wasn’t correctly interpreted (I used it to disable mod_rewrite in the playground folder too, in order to prevent WordPress’ rewrite rules – but since it had an error in it, the default WP rules were applied and no such page was found).

On a happier note, I just launched the “splash page” of an upcoming community website I’m working on, the one that pushed me to write the code for the vertical kwicks.

In recent development of MooTools, we’ve incorporated into the core a plugin that was once pushed under the table and neglected. The Hash is a powerful new way to extend objects just like you’ve always wanted…

Read the original post on the MooTools blog.

To download a dev verision and explore the new possibilities, you must use the SVN download builder.

Do keep in mind the fact that this is a dev version – it shouldn’t be used in production.

A hint, which some of you know, but lots don’t – is that you can select all components at once by typing javascript:Download.all(); in the address bar (yes, case matters).

After reading the excellent article on IBM.com, I did some more browsing around, and dugg up a few more links to information on this subject. I’ve also summarized some of the new features in this post.

First of all, here’s the WHATWG’s blog, with an extensive FAQ on HTML 5.
If you’re wondering what WHATWG is, well, it’s a consortium formed by Apple, Mozilla and Opera in 2004, in order to address the W3C’s indifference towards the evolution of HTML (they abandoned it in favor of XHTML).

However, the W3C turned their heads in this direction lately and they now show their support – for example on their blog. They also link to the WHATWG’s HTML 5 Working Draft.

Now, for the actual improvements.. (summarized from the article on IBM.com)

First of all and most important, IMHO, is the backwards compatibility, even with really old browsers, which will mean less “tricks” and a lot less time spent on browser compatibility checks.

Another new set of features is represented by the addition of structural semantic markup tags. Pages will have a well defined header (not the HTML head element), contents, footer and navigation. Furthermore, the existent semantic markup tags such as code, address, acronym, etc., will be joined new tags like mark, time, meter, progress.
This will result in better indexing of pages by search engines and consequentially, more relevant results for the general internet user.

Since broadband connections are now accessible to the common user, embedding of media will also be done much easier, with the aid of tags like video and audio.

As I stated before, HTML 5 is also known as Web Application 1.0, and it will benefit from lots more interactivity through elements like details, datagrid, menu, command.

As a conclusion, I can say that I only hope that browser developers will keep these specs in mind when building their new versions and that they’ll learn from their previous mistakes with proprietary implementations (or should I rather say “interpretations”). Apple, Mozilla and Opera most probably will. But will Microsoft follow ?

After some failed attempts to port Safari to Windows (e.g. the Swift! project), Apple decided to do it right themselves and released the new version of their flagship browser both on OS X and Windows !!

Of course I immediately grabbed it (Safari 3 Beta) and started playing around with it (and it was a bit of a first for me, as I don’t own a Mac and didn’t really get the chance to test it to the bone; I will get a Mac in the end, though ).

It installed flawlessly (the download was quick as well – 8 Mb for the browser only, no bundle) and started in a blink (it does indeed have an impressive startup time, outperforming Ff, MSIE and Opera, but I didn’t get the time to load it with plugins and such).

Text rendering takes a bit of getting used to, as it smoothes fonts and my LCD screen doesn’t take that mildly. However, after a short while, your eyes find the curvaceous shapes much more appealing than standard unsmoothed text in other browsers. On Macs, text looks even better, but on Windows, MSIE 7 with Clear Type activated, outdoes Safari, IMHO.

Page loading times were quite sweet and XHTML rendering was what you’d expect from a standards compliant web browser (results pretty similar, if not exactly the same, as Firefox, on this matter).

For some JavaScript testing, I loaded up the same (CPU intensive) page in several browsers and again, I was in awe of it’s sheer speed.

Although this is a beta release, it managed to remain stable after some serious tinkering. Can’t wait for the final version now

One improvement I really like is the new date range selection. Instead of choosing dates from two popups – the classic way, still available – you now have a visual selection tool – the timeline – that lets you slide over the range pretty much like an audio / video / animation editor lets you choose frames:

The way information is displayed when viewing a graph has also substantially improved, from the tiny numbers with no apparent affiliation to good looking tooltips containing just what you wanted to see:

When logging in, you are greeted by a dashboard that displays some common traffic information at the top of it, and is followed by two columns of different views. The twist is that you can reorder the views on the dashboard to your whim via drag and drop, remove them or add new ones. Basically, you can customize your “analytics homepage” to show what’s relevant to you, instead of having to navigate through the interface to get to the actual reports.

Another nifty new feature is the ability to export reports to PDF, in addition to the already existing TSV, CSV and XML formats. This means that you can get a cool looking PDF file ready to be sent out or displayed to your audience of choice.

Anther one of their flagship new features is the ability to email reports, be it to yourself or collaborators, thus increasing interactivity. You may also schedule a date range for sending emails with your chosen reports, or even merge several reports in one e-mail.

The map overview now allows one to zoom down to country level, with graphic detail on cities, instead of having to hover closely packed bubbles as in the previous version:

I’m sure there’s more to discover and if you’re feeling lost, the old interface will still be available for about a month or so, although I’d suggest you browse around the new one, because you’ll certainly find everything is right there.

For further reading, you might want to go through their FAQ, the visual presentation of the new interface, and the blog post announcing it.