Kim Siever’s Blog

Looks like Firefox is getting some much needed support in their fight against Internet Explorer.

IBM is encouraging its employees to use Firefox, aiding the open-source Web browser’s quest to chip away at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox is already used by about 10 percent of IBM’s staff, or about 30,000 people. Starting Friday, IBM workers can download the browser from internal servers and get support from the company’s help desk staff.

And that doesn’t count all the employees who will install it on their laptops and home computers or those who will install it on the computers of friends and family.

I am developing a new design for the Faculty of Management website. The front page is a portal type design with three columns. I am trying to use elastic design in development of the page, but I am left to wonder if this is the best option for a three-column layout.

Here’s my question.

Is it better to have three columns with percentage-based widths that became very narrow as the browser window is reduced, or to have three columns with pixel-based widths that drop below each other as the browser window is reduced? Is the content more usable in narrow columns that are next to each other or in consistent width columns that are below each other?

Thoughts?

I love using GMail. It’s easy to use and is accessible from home and work. Plus it has more disk space than Hotmail and doesn’t use up room on my computer. I moved all of my mailing lists over to GMail.

One thing I noticed after moving all the mailing lists over was the absence of folders in GMail. I have become very attached to mail folders to organise my email in Outlook, and I was disappointed that this functionality was not available in GMail. That is until I found a workaround. Here’s the process I use.

1. Create a new label (i.e. CSS-D) by clicking on “Edit labels” in the Labels panel or going to “Settings”
2. In Settings, click on “Filters”
3. Click on “Create a new filter”
4. Type in mailing list prefix (i.e. [css-d]) in subject field and press “Next step”
5. Make sure “Skip the Inbox” is checked and select the new label from the “Apply the label” dropdown
6. Select “Create Filter”

Your Labels panel will now act as a folder list. This filter will prevent mailing list messages from showing up in the GMail Notifier. This would be a benefit to some and a detriment to others.

I’ve since become attached to labels and now prefer them to folders. One of the benefits is being able to store messages under multiple labels rather than being stuck with a single folder.

Either way, there you go. I hope you find this useful.

UPDATE (03 Jan 2006): This post was listed on digg.com. Digg it.

I was contemplating the phone numbers I’ve had since I was five, and wondered how they would look conceptually. I found a photo of a phone pad, imported it into a bottom layer in Illustrator, and drew a line on a separate layer from one number to the next for each of the seven digits in each phone number. The images that follow are the results.

The current web stats software our system administrator has implemented leaves much to be desired. As a result, I am looking for something else.

Here are what the software should include:

• Third party hosting
• IP exclusion
• No image displayed on our website
• No stat limits (we receive hundreds of visitors a day; I need to be able to view archived stats)

I would also love it if I could make some stats public or be able to fetch them with ColdFusion.

Here’s the kicker. It has to be free. If it’s not free, we’ll just end up staying with the crap we have now.