The latest post at SpeadFirefox.com says that the Firefox Preview Release hit 1,000,000 downloads in roughly 100 hours. This is fantastic news! I’ve been actively trying to get people I know and work with to switch over to Firefox for several months now. This is big news for the Mozilla team. Not only that, but it also means something for the world of web standards and the overall improvement of the quality of the web. The more people who are using a Better Browser™, the more possibilities we as web designers have available to our disposal.

Well, for those who seem to be intrigued by what goes on in my life, here’s a little update on what’s been going on. Dead Hard Drive My 160 GB drive bit the dust last weekend. I’m still at a loss for why. The upshot is that it only took about 15 minutes to get a new 200 GB drive up and running in my system. The downside is that I’ve lost everything besides my boot drive, installed applications, and my music collection (which are all on other drives).

SimplePie 0.93 is now available. This release adds support for RSS and Atom auto-discovery, converting relative-to-the-root URL’s into absolute URL’s (like web browsers do), an improved caching process, and a variety of fixes to aid compatibility with poorly written feeds. SimplePie takes a very Apple-esque approach to feed parsing. Coming from the use of MagpieRSS, I decided to create a “feed parser for the rest of us”. One that is easy, logical, and doesn’t require too much of a background in PHP to use it.

Sometime last night, while I was sleeping, my website reached the 500,000 visitor mark. This is very exciting for me. It’s good to know that I have a site that people would bother going to visit 500,000 times in a year-and-a-half. I’ve come quite a long ways since version 1.0 of this website was released back in October 1997. One thing that I’ve learned is that your site will be much more successful if it’s about something. I spent the first 5 years coming up with better and better designs and really working to sharpen my coding skills (“chicks like guys who have good skills” — Napoleon Dynamite), but I never had any real content.

I’ve been on a roll with SimplePie development lately (if you couldn’t already tell). Version 0.93 will probably be released in the next day or so, and at that point should be feature-complete. The remaining Pre–1.0 releases (0.94, 0.95, 0.96, etc.) will be dedicated to compatibility fixes. There are a lot of poorly coded feeds out there, and I need to know about them to that I can patch them up as best as possible. What I need from you are your reading lists.

In record time, SimplePie 0.92 is now available. This release adds all sorts of things such as better (and faster) caching, a user agent string, smarter handling of problematic characters and entities, and a fix for Mr. Dunstan’s feed. For those who are skeptical of “yet another feed parser”, or are hesitant to switch to (or begin using) SimplePie, let me explain it this way. Most RSS parsers go through this process of breaking a feed down into this big array, which may be fine for some, but can be impossible for beginners and newbies.

…well, their syndication feeds anyways. Here’s the problem: While working on SimplePie initially, I used copies of Dunstan’s Atom and RSS feeds because I felt that they’d be representative of most people’s decently well-formed feeds. I know that some people have worse feeds, and that Mark Pilgrim’s feeds are a bit too “academically” correct. Dunstan has a problem with his feed. He uses the numeric entity for a “smart-apostrophe” in his feed’s <title> tag. This happens to be a UTF–8 character.

SimplePie 0.91 is now available. This release adds support for URL’s with a relative path, better handling of some improperly written feeds, and fixes a problem where feeds weren’t getting loaded all the way before trying to parse them, causing SimplePie to choke.

I love going to the movies. Unfortunately, life is usually very busy, so I never really get a chance to go to the theatre as often as I’d like. That, and movies are $10 for general admission. Absolutely ridiculous. So every year, when my wife and I go on a week-long vacation, we usually end up seeing several movies. Last year I posted about the movies I saw, and I’m doing the same thing this year. Collateral This was a “formula” movie.

I got back from a week vacation (yes, I was on vacation) to see this quiz over at Twenty4.org: