Geoff Holden

I don’t think anyone will argue against the point that a lot of applications that were traditionally desktop-based are now moving on to the web. Google has proved that you can make very rich, very responsive, and very good web applications; GMail, Google Maps, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, Reader, etc. are all applications I use regularly. While some of them may not have all the features of their fat counterparts, the fact they they work anywhere with a ‘net […]

I know my posting frequency has dropped off a lot recently. (You can stop reminding me)

I’m going to make an attempt to change that, and get back to my original goal for this year of writing approximately one post per week. So, I’m taking a page from Angus’s book and have put my posting statistics on the sidebar. I did this with a custom Wordpress plugin, that I will post publicly as soon as I clean it up […]

Unless you’re reading this with a feed reader, or are a first time visitor, you’ve probably noticed that I changed the site design (again). This is the third major design since I launched GeoffHolden.com back in October 2004; three designs in two and a half years isn’t too bad.

I’m pretty happy with this one (for now anyways). It has several new features that the old design didn’t have:

It actually expands to use the whole browser width.
It adds the categories/tags features […]

If you’re into fancy web tricks/layouts/etc. and you haven’t already, check out Lightbox JS v2.0. It’s a neat little script that lets you link to images and have them display on top of your current page, without having to navigate away.

I’ve been meaning to try to integrate it into my photo gallery for some time now, and finally sat down and did it this evening. So, if you try to browse through my gallery now, and click on […]

I just read yet another article about how extra white space in HTML code is wasting bandwidth. I have several issues with these articles, the first of which is that people actually believe them.

Here are what I think are the main issues:

Most large sites use HTTP Compression. This means that for all text files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) the server is compressing the file before sending it “down the wire”, where your browser will decompress it. GZip is […]

As you or may not notice as you’re reading this, I’ve made a few minor updates to the style of this site. I wanted to give the site a little more style, pizzazz, panache, and might I even dare to suggest cachet? (Oh, it’s got cachet, baby! It’s got cachet up the yin-yang!)

Now, as a warning, if you happen to be using IE the page might look slightly worse than before–the round corners will be far less smooth than they […]

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m now using Google Reader as my RSS aggregator. I thought it might be interesting to list off the feeds I currently subscribe to, for anybody to see.

43 Folders
A List Apart
Angus Woodman
Brian’s Cube
The Dilbert Blog
I, Cringely @ PBS
Joel On Software
John C. Dvorak @ PC Magazine
Kevin Rose
Lori Hogan
Naeim Semsarilar
Official […]

Internet Dependence (not to be confused with Internet Addiction) is something I’ve seen growing over the last few years, and I’m somewhat unsure what I think about it.

When I look back to my days in high school and early into university, getting onto the internet was a big deal. You had to make sure nobody was on the phone (or was expecting a call) and go through the whole dial-in, busy signal, retry, etc. until you finally got […]

OK, so I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I’m about to rant on something that’s been getting on my nerves. (Prompted by a Digg link today)

First off, for anybody who doesn’t know, Slashdot and Digg are both (supposably) technology news sites. Also, for the record, I currently read both at least daily. Where Slashdot is the old dog here (started in 1997), Digg is new kid on the block (November 2004).

The thing […]

This weekend, I finished my redesign of the SLUG site. It now has (what I think to be) a cleaner design, and no longer uses tables for layout (with the possible exception of the NewsPortal pages).
I’ve also added a iCalendar version of our announcements that can be used with Mozilla Sunbird (or any other calendaring program that supports the protocol… KOrganizer can read the file, but I’m not sure if it’ll auto-update from the […]