I recently discovered HTML Validator for Firefox and Mozilla. I try to make all the pages on my sites validate correctly, and I have been testing them using a local install of the W3C Markup Validation Service. That works well, but I do have to manually submit each page for validation.

The HTML Validator extension is different, as it runs in the background, and checks pages as you’re browsing. This makes it much easier to spot any errors.

I’ve recently been watching a few of Google’s TechTalks and other related content. They haven’t been widely promoted, but there’s some great free content on there. Basically they’re roughly one hour long presentations on a wide range of subjects. The ones I’ve watched so far have been well worth my time. Particular favourites are:

• Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL
• “All Marketers are Liars” – Seth Godin speaks at Google
• Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life

Full marks to Google for making these freely available.

Colors on the Web (via) is great site for working out what colours work well together. There are tools to check generate colour combinations, and also explanations of what different types of combinations should be used for.

I just discovered this article via Waxy.org: Links, which does a great job of explaining why so many new sites look rather similar.

I’m not planning to throw away any of my existing designs, but more use of softer colours and whitespace is something that I’m going to have to give some serious thought to.

I’ve been doing most most of my daily computing on an iMac G5 since Spring 2005. One of the features of Mac OS X that I can’t do without is Exposé. It makes Alt-Tab and the Windows task bar seem like a waste of time.

There’s already been an effort to reproduce this functionality for Firefox tabs (foXpose) , but when I tried it, it just seemed a bit too different from Mac Exposé for me to be comfy with it.

There’s now a competitor in the shape of Reveal, which maps itself to the F2 key (Exposé uses F9), and it seems to be far more similar to Mac Exposé. I’m impressed so far, and it might make me finally start to use tabs (instead of multiple windows – much better for Exposé switching) and Firefox on the Mac (while Firefox was in the 1.0 versions, I switched to Camino and haven’t gone back.

I’ve just read through Paul Graham’s latest essay, and as usual, I agree with 95% of it. Subconciously I think knew most of what he says already, but he does a great job of distilling the essential nature of the world into an easily digested form.

If you’ve never read any of his other essays, check them out. Particular favourites of mine are: How to Make Wealth, How to Start a Startup, What Business Can Learn from Open Source (this one had significant influence on me leaving corporate employment – there were of course, several other factors involved), and What Languages Fix (interesting and funny).