Found this weird bit on Macromedia.com about something they're calling Halo:

"Inspired by the properties of light, Halo components feature a glowing ring (halo) that attracts the eye and encourages interaction (the amount of glow represents that particular control's "desire" for interaction). We think it will make the digital world a brighter, friendlier place—and, as always, we expect our users to take it even further."

That sounds like a kooky way of saying "we have interface bits that change colors when you hover over them". Not all that new and exciting or original like they make it sound.

Anyhow, the topic is of little importance, just felt like I couldn't get by without mentioning it.

Want to make two or three column website templates without tables, and without having to do the work? Let Firdamatic generate the CSS for you.

Incidentally, for a long time I was a huge proponent of tableless designs, using pure CSS to get the job of displaying everything in a nice columnar format. I thought it was the way of the future, the Right Thing to Do, and was good for accesibility and all that junk.

Today, I'm just tired of it. Using table tags is just so much easier, and I've since just decided to not be bothered. I spent more time tweaking CSS and strange browser quirks than I did creating a useful web application. My new rule: if it's in the W3C spec, I'll use it, despite what all the CSS fanatics suggest.

I ran across a description of how Joel Spolsky set up his company's new offices. Private offices, plasma screen TV, no L shaped desks. Seems like a bunch of crazy talk considering today's economic climate.

But Joel builds a good case - good office design can produce good software. Making the office a more attractive place to hang out can increase productivity. I tend to agree, to a degree. In order to have a nice swanky office, you better be making enough money to support it, and you better hope that clients don't see it as the reason your prices are so high.

I'm interested in seeing a report a few months or even a year from now after his team has been up and running in them to see if what he designed actually works. My guess is that it will work well, but it's hard to say for sure.

Community MX is a new "all things MX" site run by some pretty talented people. The site looks good, and looks like it has quite a bit of good content.

I only have one issue with the entire premise though - it costs $25.00 to subscribe to premium content. To me, that's a lot of money for information about MX stuff, even if the content is good. They promise two articles a day at least, which is nice, but there is so much free content on MX stuff all over the web. Will their articles be worth it? Another selling point is "guaranteed support", which I'm a bit unclear on. Does this mean if my server is blowing chunks that I'll get someone walking me through how to get it back in shape via email? I wouldn't mind that for the price, but I'm not sure how quickly a solution could be employed.

It's worth keeping an eye on the site to see if it does well. There's no argument that the contributors know their stuff. I was a tech editor on Paul Newman's Joy of Dreamweaver MX, and it is a very good book, and I had a very easy job because he'd made sure the technical stuff worked flawlessly before it ever got to me. The other contributors have equally impressive experience.

I'm just not so sure the price is right. Perhaps they should try a micropayment approach. Two articles a day works out to cost about $0.43 per article. The problem is, out of 60 articles in a month, I may only want/need half or less of them. I'd be much more willing to see a teaser to an article, something I thought might address my particular problem or interest, and then pay $2.00 for it.

Perhaps if my own experience level were a lot less it would be well worth it, but as an experienced user of MX related products, it's hard for me to justify.

So, my suggestion to the team there - consider a pay per article model and you'll capture some extra business. In any case, I wish you the best of luck, although you probably don't need it. All that talent in one spot can't go too wrong.

Yahoo! News is now making RSS feeds available on major news topics. I think this is pretty cool because lately I've begun to discover the joy of using ColdFusion to aggregate RSS feeds for my own use. Pretty soon, I'll have thousands of weblogs and newsfeeds at my finger tips. I tingle with the prospects of my prospecting.