Internet
Boo to the “Amazon Tax”
New York recently enacted a new tax law that requires Internet-based retailers to collect sales tax from customers based in New York. The tax has been informally dubbed the “Amazon Tax”. If you do any kind of online shopping you know that most of the time you don’t get charged sales tax on your purchases. The times that you do, it’s because the retailer has a physical location in New York. While the retailers don’t charge you sales tax, we’re actually supposed to report purchases made online on our state tax returns and pay sales tax. But no one ever does this and it’s hard to enforce.
Digg Looking for Buyers
So TechCrunch recently reported that Digg is looking to be acquired. Note that this is not official and is an unconfirmed report. Among the parties bidding on Digg are Microsoft and Google. I think it’s about time and if Digg doesn’t sell soon, it’s going to have to lower its expectations more and more. Honestly, apart from their “algorithm” which can easily be reproduced or emulated, there’s nothing special about Digg other than its large user base. That in itself is not a unique advantage. Yahoo just released a similar site called Buzz and I think Yahoo can find ways to leverage its massive user base and channel traffic through Buzz.
IE8 Passes Acid2 Test
Many of us web designers/developers never thought we’d witness Internet Explorer pass the Acid2 rendering test but Microsoft announced yesterday via IEBlog that their internal version of IE8 has done just that. Now if they could push this browser out sooner, it’d be great because the sooner IE6 gets ditched, the better.
Safari on Windows
Apple released a new beta version of their Safari web browser yesterday. Normally this news wouldn’t be that important to me but this new version now works on Windows! As a web developer this is great news because now I don’t need to use/borrow/buy a Mac just to test my work in Safari. As I deal with larger projects it has increasingly become more important to test in Safari.
MovableType Going Open Source
This is kind of a follow up to the Wordpress post I made a couple of days ago. Well recently, MovableType (MT), another blogging/CMS application in direct competition with Wordpress, announced a major new version (4.0) that would be completely open source. Note that Wordpress is already open source as well. This is a departure in that previously MT was only free for personal use and was limited in terms of number of users per installation. They also had paid commercial licenses and what not. A lot of people are talking about this and MT themselves spew a lot of marketing speak about how they’re doing this to empower bloggers, etc. But I really don’t think that’s the real reason.
I Wish Other Web Apps Were Built Like Wordpress
Wordpress really is a very well built piece of software. Wordpress is what I use for this blog. I’m working a new version of this site that will be completely managed using Wordpress as a CMS. Same thing for my business site. That’s how powerful Wordpress is. Development is very active and I love the theme system and the modular system of plugins. Everything just works and it works well. I often find myself wishing other open source projects were built the same way like ecommerce shopping carts or client billing software. Basically something that’s standards-based and is very extensible.
Broadband Competition is Good!
Okay so where I live, I basically only have 2 options for broadband Internet service - Verizon DSL or Road Runner cable. I’ve obviously opted for the higher speeds and better reliability and switched to RR (resold through Earthlink, slightly cheaper and doesn’t require cable TV service). Verizon FiOS is being deployed in Queens slowly and it’s not available at my home yet (they literally connect fiber to each home). I’ve been itching to switch to FiOS because they give you tremendous bandwidth for around the same price (a bit more). So I was looking up information on when FiOS might be available in my area and was browsing the forums over at broadbandreports.com. That’s where I came upon some interesting news regarding Road Runner.
Internet Explorer 7
So I’ve been holding off installing IE7 mainly because with my work, I still need to do a lot of compatibility testing in IE6 and there really wasn’t any elegant solutions for running IE6 and IE7 side by side, at least not until recently. Microsoft made their Virtual PC 2004 software free which allows you to run other operating systems simultaneously. They also released a free image of Windows XP SP2 with IE6 that will last until April 2007. This allows web developers to run both IE6 and IE7 simultaneously and since I’ve slowly started receiving client requests for IE7 compatibility, I thought might as well take the plunge.
Google Documents Not Too Shabby
I’ve been working with a client in Australia and the way we’ve been communicating is through a shared document on Google Docs. I’ve checked it out before but never really used it. Well now that we’ve been communicating ideas and project tasks extensively through the document I’ve found it a very useful app for collaborative efforts.