I personally find MyBrand service very useful: I’ve always had doubts using Feedburner as relying on an external service for your feeds means depending on someone who is not you: one day Feedburner could decide, for example, to insert advertisements in your feed without leaving you the choice to display them or not. Can u imagine your subscribers receiving ads you don’t wish to show them…? With MyBrand - now free - you can use your own domain name along with Feedburner services… This allows you to enjoy the very useful stats provided by feedburner service, while giving you the freedom to leave these services when you wish, without the need to change your RSS feed URL

P.S. In case you need a more flexible, easy-to-use, secure, fast, reliable, free browser, I suggest you to try Mozilla Firefox.

The new cross-platform release of Filezilla (Version 3) will be available officially in a few weeks; in the meanwhile you can already download the Beta version from Sourceforge.

During the last two weeks the company had experienced very serious issues on one node that led to several server crashes and to a temporary unavailability of the hosted websites.
Some Italian bloggers blamed about these disruptions on their blogs writing hot posts referring to the company.

A small debate started: Tophost’s answer to these provocations consisted in sending a newsletter to all customers on the 21st august 2007. In this open-letter, entitled literarily “It’s nice to feel loved” (see the original text in Italian), the company announced the resolution of the problems on the node 03 but also criticized blatantly those customers who wrote hostile articles on their own blogs. Furthermore Tophost asked their satisfied customers to participate in the discussion and to express publicly on the net their satisfaction.

This newsletter caused a new wave of criticizing posts accusing TopHost to adopt the worst communication policies and to be a presumptuous company.

I personally find this way to address customers very peculiar, yet positive: Tophost is simply adopting the same instruments available to the bloggers to reply the accuses and receive feedbacks from the Internet community.

I have been using Tophost services with 4 small websites for 3 years, and I had a very good experience so far.
Technical issues are quite common among cheap hosting companies and I have encountered server disruptions (also for prolonged periods of time) even with far more expensive hosting providers.

In my opinion 10 euros/year is definitely a fair price: this allows almost everyone to buy a domain name and build a basic dynamic website (e.g. a Blog, a simple CMS…) spending an affordable amount of money and avoiding free services that usually add annoying advertisements and provide with a 3rd level domain.

A beta version is already available here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/

According to Apple, Safari is 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Mozilla Firefox.

I downloaded the beta version of Safari and installed it on Windows XP: the installation went smoothly but the browser gave a non critical error on starting. It’s really fast but I experienced some characters and pages rendering issues.
It’s still a beta version of course, but in my opinion the premises are good: waiting for a stable Windows release.

PHP and CSS allow you to create a customized box which appears in a defined place of your webpages and gives help to visitors who satisfy predetermined conditions: the PHP variable $_SERVER consists in an array containing several information. The variable $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’] contains the referer URL (i.e. the website or webpage where the visitor comes from).

You can use this variable to offer a referer-based content to your visitors: for example when some visitors come from a particular URL, you can show them a box containing tips that help finding quickly what they are looking for.

Let’s go deeper into the matter and see a practical use of this technique…

First, create a css class:

.helper {
position:absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
background-color: #CC3300;
color:#FFFFFF;
}


I called the CSS class “.helper” and defined an element with absolute position (top-left), a red background and white text.

Now, you can use the following PHP code to display the “.helper” element defined in CSS on determined conditions. Using the PHP command eregi on the variable $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’], the server can look for the presence of certain terms in the referer URL:

<?php
if (eregi("font“,$_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’])) {
echo “<div class=\"helper\">Looking for YellowJug font?<br />
<a href=\”projects/yellowjug_true_type_font/\”>Click here…</a>
</div>”;
}
?>


The human “translation” of the code above is:
if the visitor’s origin is a URL which contains the term “font”, then display red a box on the top left of the webpage (the box position and colors are obviously defined in the CSS class .helper) which suggests the visitor to visit a certain link or page.

If the term-matching condition is not satisfied, the box simply won’t appear and won’t annoy your visitors.

To see this soluction in action just visit yellowjug.com homepage and check the top left corner: no help box should appear; then go to YellowJug font page on dafont.com and click on the link “Site” next to the author’s name (it’s me ). You’ll be redirected again to yellowjug.com home page but now you’ll be able to see the red box!

Please consider that this technical solution can be adopted on different approaches in more elaborate contexts. These “boxes” could offer hints, tips or suggestions and can be displayed ad hoc, for example, when a visitor comes from a certain page or comes from a page which contains a certain term (including search engines pages).

When a CSS propriety is specified twice, the browser will commonly use the last one. Let’s see an example:

#main {
width:600px;
width:800px;
}

In this example the browser will assign width 800 pixels to the #main element.

The declaration !important can be used in cascading style sheets to give priority to some parameters.

#main {
width:600px !important;
width:800px;
}

In the example above the browser will give priority to the first declaration and the #main element will be 600 pixels width.

So, what’s the point?
Internet Explorer 6 and previous versions simply ignore the declaration !important (while IE 7 supports them) therefore we can take advance of this issue to design a “browser-based” CSS.

Let’s consider, for example, the CSS proprieties max-width and min-width: these parameters specify a maximum and minimum width of a web element (such as a table or a DIV container). This is a useful feature which allows to create fluid and dynamic layouts that can be displayed correctly both in low resolutions (e.g. 640×480) and in very high resolutions.
Unfortunately IE 6, among other things, doesn’t even support the max/min width declaration: in order to obtain the same effect under IE6 you can use a proprietary code:

#main {
max-width: 900px;
width:expression(document.body.clientWidth > 900? “900px”: “auto” ); /* IE proprietary code */
}

In this example the #main element will be rendered with a maximum width of 900px both in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer.
Please note that the proprietary code width:expression is not a valid CSS declaration, so if you decide to adopt it, your stylesheet won’t respect web standards and won’t be validated.

However, we can use the !important declaration to avoid non-standard CSS expressions. Here is a “workaround” which allows to use max/min width with smart browsers and specify a fixed width for IE 6 users:

#main {
margin: 0 auto 0;
max-width: 900px;
min-width: 770px;
width:auto !important;
width:800px;
}

In the above example (you can see it in action on this website) the declaration !important is used to specify dynamic width attributes to browsers that support them (e.g. Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Safari and IE 7) while the width is fixed to an average value (800 pixels) for IE 6.
This doesn’t solve completely the matter, but can be considered as a workaround to improve your fluid layout appearance avoiding non-standard code.