As the title reads – this is a link to a list of useful CSS hacks for various topics.  It’s nice to see them all gathered in one place together.

25 Incredibly Useful CSS Snippets for Developers

I previously ran a post about the keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio 2008, which turned out to be one of the more popular posts on this blog.  So, I dug out the beta two build of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and grabbed the same data from it.  VS2010 is due to be released soon and when it is I’ll update this if there are any changes.

Updated: I just found out that Visual Studio 2010 is due to be released on April 12th, but I’m still going to post this now.  However, if anything changes in the RTM build I’ll simply change this post to reflect that.

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I’ve updated my GUID Generator based on some user feedback.  Thanks to Joel for pointing out that it would be great to be able to download the results. Joel, your wish is my command.  Now there are two buttons on the bottom of the page – one to generate the text, and one to generate a file with the results.  I have also limited the amount of results to 1000, simply because much more than that would kill the server. Also, if you need that many GUIDs, then you can get them in chunks.

GUID Generator

I often have to generate GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers) for applications, and I’m sick of the process of googling “guid generator”, and then going there.  So, instead of simply adding a favourite, I built my own.  Its here.  Knock yourself out.

Smashing Magazine has just published an awesome list of CSS tools on that you can use in your projects.  It was so awesome that I just did something I’ve never done before: I copied the entire post and pasted it here for reference.  So, without further ado and with enormous gratitude to Smashing Magazine, I give you the list.

CSS and Typography

• Hyphenator
  Hyphenator.js brings client-side hyphenation of HTML documents to every browser by inserting soft hyphens using hyphenation patterns and Frank M. Liang’s hyphenation algorithm commonly known from LaTeX and OpenOffice. The goal is to provide hyphenation in all browsers that support JavaScript and the soft hyphen for at least English, German and French. Here is the server-side script that does the hyphenation.
• CSS Type Set
  CSS Type Set is a hands-on typography tool that allows designers and developers to interactively test and learn how to style their Web content.
• Typechart
  Typechart lets you flip through, preview and compare Web typography while retrieving the CSS.
• CSS-Typoset Matrix and code generator
  A matrix table that presents font sizes and (symmetrical and asymmetrical) margins for various base font sizes — in pixel and em units. It also generates the source code on the fly. Created by Jan Quickels.
• Em Calculator
  Em Calculator is a small JavaScript tool that helps you make scalable and accessible CSS design. It converts sizes in pixels to relative em units, which are based on a given text size.
• Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR)
  Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced “fleer”) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your Web page in fonts that might otherwise not be visible to your visitors. Written by Cory Mawhorter. How To Use Any Font With FLIR: Tutorial.
• Vertical rhythm calculator
  This tool converts pixel values to em values depending on the font size of the text. You can also set margins and paddings automatically, depending on the line height you’ve defined. Very useful.
• typeface.js
  Instead of just creating images or using Flash to show your website’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally.

CSS Online Tools

• PSD2CSS Online
  A free online service that generates Web pages from Photoshop designs. By following the guidelines and naming conventions, you can precisely choose how the transformation from PSD to (X)HTML and CSS is done.
• Conditional-CSS
  Conditional-CSS allows you to write maintainable CSS with conditional logic to target specific CSS statements for both individual browsers and groups of browsers.
• MoreCSS
  MoreCSS is a design-oriented JavaScript library that allows you to write code for applying automatic hyphenation and creating pop-ups, tool tips, tab menus, zebra tables, advanced list styling and cross-browser opacity style. But the really special thing is that you can do these things as you would with regular CSS.
• px to em
  This tool is what its developers call “px to em conversion made simple”. Type a base font size in pixels, and the tool will produce a complete pixel to em conversion table, making elastic Web design much easier to produce.
• CSS Frame Generator
  This tool returns corresponding CSS in a line-by-line way indented with spaces to reflect XHTML structure - each selector and all of its properties and values in one line. This may be a bit strange for you at the beginning, but if you get used to it you’ll find it much better.
• CSS Redundancy Checker
  You can use this tool to find CSS selectors that aren’t used by any of your HTML files and that may be redundant.
• CleverCSS
  CleverCSS is a small markup language for CSS, and inspired by Python, that can be used to build a style sheet in a clean and structured way. In many ways, it’s cleaner and more powerful than CSS2. You can also work with variables.
• WordOff
  WordOff applies some rules to strip the cruft that is pasted into WYSIWYG editors from Word. For example, attributes are removed for all elements except <a>, <span> and <div>, empty elements are removed and consecutive line breaks are reduced to two. It also contains an API.
• Postable
  “I absolutely hate having to switch all the ‘< ‘ and ‘>’ signs in my code to ‘<’ and ‘>,’ respectively. I also hate having to write “&” any time I want to include an ampersand. It makes including code snippets on my blog and whatnot extremely annoying, and today I finally got fed up.” This handy tool is a little app that will do all that for you. Created by Elliot Swan.
• Kotatsu
  Kotatsu is a simple HTML table generator. The tool lets you attach classes to cells in the same column easily.
• htmldevelopertools
  This tool allows you to update your CSS files on the server in a browser window. Currently works only under IIS + .NET 3.5. An interesting idea. Could someone create a similar script for Apache? Let us know, and we’ll support your both financially and with the broad coverage of our magazine.
• Deploy
  Deploy is a free open-source Web application that allows you to choose the name of a project, the Doctype, whether you want a CSS reset or jQuery integration, and it creates a zipped, ready-to-use package with all specified files and folders. The tool has been optimized for Fluid, the Mac application that creates SSBs (site-specific browsers) for websites.
• CSS Evolve
  CSSEvolve lets you play with many properties of a website, including the website’s color scheme, fonts, borders and more. CSSEvolve works through a process of simulated evolution in which you select website features that you like and refine them through multiple generations.”It uses a traditional blind watchmaker, user-driven genetic algorithm to drive CSS changes on a website of the user’s choosing. Basically, a set of mutated CSS variants are produced, the user selects changes that he or she likes, the algorithm randomly combines those changes through crossover and mutation and the process continues.” [ via ]
• Lorem 2
  This tool provides you with an “all around better Lorem experience.” It contains short paragraphs, long paragraphs, short list items and long list items to use in your wireframes.
• SelectORacle
  A small script that explains CSS selectors in plain English or Spanish. Particularly useful for CSS3 selectors.
• JS Bin
  A Web app specifically designed to help JavaScript and CSS folk test snippets of code in a particular context and debug the code collaboratively. It allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML (reloading the URL also maintains the state of your code: new tabs don’t). Once you’re happy, you can save and send the URL to a peer for review or help. They can then make further changes, saving anew if required. Alternative: CodePaste or EtherPad.
• CSS Text Wrapper
  The CSS Text Wrapper allows you to easily make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle. You can make text wrap around curves, zig-zags, or whatever you want.
• Writing Tests Against CSS
  CSS is hard to test automatically. Do font sizes meet expectations? Does the layout width correspond to the initial mockup? This tool helps you spot changes in unexpected areas of a website’s layout and design. It can also extract rendered DOM values, such as text size, from a given Web page and compare them against expected values. This could be useful for both regression testing and assertion-based, test-driven development. Written in Python by Gareth Rushgrove.
• CSS Sprite Generator
  With this tool, you can upload all of your images (you have to place them in a .zip file first) and it will combine the uploaded images into a single sprite and generate the CSS for you.
• Sky CSS Tool
  An online CSS authoring tool, Sky CSS allows you to create CSS classes almost without using handwritten code. A JavaScript-compatible browser is needed for proper functioning.
• CSS Tidy Online
  An online version of CSS Tidy, a tool that allows you to keep your code clean by compressing the code.
• Web-Based Tools for Optimizing, Formatting and Checking CSS
  A huge compilation of some of the best free Web-based CSS optimizers/compressors, code formatters and validation services. By Jacob Gube.
• Grid Designer 2.4
  This tool enables you to create a grid by specifying the number of columns and the widths of the columns, gutters and margins. You can also specify typography in the same tool and export the final CSS and (X)HTML markup. You can also bookmark your grid and typography settings and create designs with spanning columns. Created by Rasmus Schultz.
• Yahoo’s Secret Text-Sprite Generator
  Basically this is a URL you can hit that creates a perfect sprite-ready PNG graphic of text you add to the URL.
• Replace CSS Colors - Editor
  This tool enables you to change the entire color scheme of your website without going through the CSS code. You choose your local CSS file, replace colors and then download the new CSS file.
• The Box Office
  The Box Office lets you wrap, float or contour text around free-form images using CSS for (X)HTML pages.
• MinifyMe
  A small AIR application that can compress multiple CSS and JavaScript files into one and runs on your desktop.
• cssdoc
  CSSDOC is a convention for commenting in CSS to help individuals and teams to improve writing, coding, styling and managing CSS files. It is an adoption of the well known JavaDoc/DocBlock-based way of commenting in source code by putting style, DocBlocks and tags together.
• CSS Menu Generator
  This tool generates vertical, horizontal and drop-down menus online. Various color schemes are available, and you can also customize the menus online.
• sheetUp - DOM Stylesheet Library
  Simplify the tedious task of manipulating style sheets contained in document.styleSheets. You can use the sheetup bookmarklet to integrate a built-in CSS/HTML-editor in your browser.
• CSS SuperScrub
  This tool claims to significantly reduce the size and complexity of your CSS by programmatically stripping unneeded content, stripping redundant calls and intelligently grouping the remaining element names.
• DrawAble Markup Language
  Drawter Beta 2 gives you the possibility of literally drawing your website’s code. It runs on every single Web browser, which makes it really useful and helpful. Each tag is presented as a layer you have drawn.

Handy Kits For Designing With CSS

• Regex Patterns for Single Line CSS
  If you are formatting your CSS style sheets single-line, you may find Dan Rubin’s Textmate macro useful and helpful. “This macro retains a single blank line where your original contained two or more blank lines (helpful if you group your rules) and adds white space that matches my standard formatting preferences (which I find makes it easier to scan quickly).” And if you don’t use Textmate, you can use a regular expression instead; it is also provided in the post.
• 21 Excellent Dreamweaver Extensions for CSS Productivity and Standards
  An extensive overview of various Dreamweaver extensions, such as CSS Sculptor, CSS Menu Writer, Link Fader, CSS Layouts, Format Table, Style Switcher, etc.
• Graph Paper
  This graph paper is made for visual designers, interactive designers and information architects. You’ll find styles for wireframing user interfaces, storyboarding interaction and plotting values on a two-by-two grid. Plus, you’ll get a basic grid for drafting sitemaps or anything else that might come up.
• Starter Kit For Developers (PSD)
  This starter kit is a free Photoshop template that includes forms, grids, ad placeholders, dummy copy and other design elements (13 MB).
• CSSHttpRequest
  CSSHttpRequest (CHR) is a method for cross-domain AJAX, using CSS for transport. Similar to JavaScript, this works because CSS is not subject to the same-origin policy that affects XMLHttpRequest. Like JSONP, CSSHttpRequest is limited to making GET requests. Unlike JSONP, untrusted third-party JavaScript cannot execute in the context of the calling page.

In-Browser CSS Tools

• Collection of Web Developer Tools, by Browser
  Sometimes it is not easy to keep track which tools are at a developer’s disposal (and which ones are actually useful). This article lists the best tools available and quickly describes how to activate, install and use them.

In-Browser CSS Tools: Firefox Extensions

• Dust-Me Selectors
  A Firefox extension (for v1.5 or later) that finds unused CSS selectors. It extracts all of the selectors from all of the style sheets on the page you’re viewing, then analyzes that page to see which of those selectors are not used. The data is then stored so that when testing subsequent pages, selectors can be crossed off the list as they’re encountered.
• Aardvark Firefox Extension
  With Aardvark, you can: clean up unwanted banners and surrounding “fluff,” especially prior to printing a page; see how a page is created, block by block; and view the source code of one or more elements.
• CSSViewer
  A CSS property viewer that displays all information about a design element.
• Dummy Lipsum
  This Firefox extension dynamically fills a selected field with Lorem ipsum text; the function is called via the context menu.
• Firefox: Test- und Entwicklungstools für Webentwickler | Dr. Web Magazin
• GridFox
  GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize and allows you to create the exact grid you based your layout on.
• 20 Firefox Add-Ons To Enhance Your Web-Development
  Yet another overview of useful Firefox add-ons that can help developers create websites more efficiently. Among them are Codetch, Pixel Perfect, Link Checker and ColorZilla.

Coding and Programming With CSS

• CSS Extra Coda Plug-in
  CSS Extra is a plug-in for Coda that gives you access to some dynamic CSS. Although it is not truly dynamic in that it will not force Coda to process the variables and settings, it gives you the commands to process the CSS instead. What this means is that you can have constants, bases and a layout module within your CSS.
• Edit in Place with JavaScript and CSS
  This tool offers you more intuitive editing (in-place editing) of your documents and style sheets. The idea: in a selected area, the user can enter the markup or change the current value directly.
• Simple CSS
  Simple CSS is a free CSS editor that runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. It allows you to create CSS from scratch and modify existing sheets, using a familiar point-and-click interface. Freeware.
• AWK
  AWK is a very powerful programming language that you can use on the command line for advanced text processing.
• cssutils
  A Python package for parsing and building CSS.
• RESTful CSS
  A new method for organizing CSS that better maps on to the way that popular Web application frameworks are built. The examples are based on Ruby on Rails, but the concepts should be easily transferrable to other MVC frameworks. By Steve Heffernan.

New CSS Frameworks

• CSS Drop-Down Menu Framework
  A cross-browser, modular framework that contains 14 customizable templates for designing drop-down-menus.
• BlueTripCSS Framework
  A full featured and beautiful CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) framework which combined the best of Blueprint, Tripoli (hence the name), Hartija’s print stylesheet, 960.gs’s simplicity, and Elements’ icons, and has now found a life of its own. The framework contains 24-column grid, sensible typography styles, clean form styles, a print styleshet, an empty starter stylesheet, sexy buttons and status message styles.
• Hartija - CSS Print Framework
  Hartija is a CSS print framework that attempts to unite the best CSS printing practices into one single CSS file.
• AM framework
  This framework contains six basic templates: for fixed, fluid, one-column, two-column and three-column layouts, as well as a jQuery template.
• Introducing SenCSS
  A clean, minimal CSS template for new projects.
• Typogridphy
  Typogridphy is a CSS framework constructed to allow Web designers and front-end developers to quickly code typograhically pleasing grid layouts.
• formy-css-framework
  A CSS Framework for better form management.
• emastic
  Emastic is a CSS Framework. Its continuing mission: “to explore a strange new world, to seek out new life and new Web spaces, to boldly go where no CSS framework has gone before.”

CSS Bookmarklets

• Design Bookmarklet
  Design is a suite of Web design and development tools that can be used on any Web page. Encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement (rule) and alignment (unit, crosshair), Design is a powerful and useful JavaScript bookmarklet.
• ReCSS: Reload your CSS
  This little bookmarklet makes refreshing your CSS a breeze. It comes in quite handy when you’re developing dynamic applications. Tested in IE and Firefox.
• XRAY
  A bookmarklet for Internet Explorer 6+ and Webkit- and Mozilla-based browsers (including Safari, Firefox, Camino and Mozilla). You can use it to see the box model of any element on any Web page.
• MRI
  MRI is a bookmarklet for Internet Explorer 6+ and Webkit- and Mozilla-based browsers (including Safari, Firefox, Camino and Mozilla). You can use it to debug and test selectors.
• CSSFly
  A tool for editing websites easily, directly and in real-time in your browser.
• 15 Must-Have Bookmarklets For Web Designers And Developers
  An extensive list of 15 handy Web designer and developer bookmarklets. The whole pack can be downloaded and imported into Firefox.

Tools For Generating CSS Layouts

• Construct Your CSS
  A visual layout editor based on Blueprint and jQuery. A video tutorial is available as well. You can use the keyboard to create layouts on the fly. By Christian Montoya.
• XHTML/CSS Markup Generator
  Markup Generator is a simple tool created for XHTML and CSS coders who are tired of writing boring frame code as they just begin slicing work. Its main purpose is to speed up your work by generating (X)HTML markup and a CSS frame out of very intuitive, shortened syntax, so that you can jump directly to the styling of elements.
• Dynamic Layout Generator
  This tool generates cross-browser multi-column liquid designs and enables you to visually change the width and colors. You can drag the sliders to choose the width you want in your layout and preview the layout online. The CSS code is generated automatically.
• iStylr - Online CSS Template Generator
  An advanced WYSIWIG online CSS-editor with syntax highlighting, drag’n'drop-functionality, template import/export, image manager, stylsheet sharing option and a visual DOM tree. A registration is required (OpenID-login is supported).

Blank CSS Layouts

• The Only CSS Layout You Need
  A collection of basic cross-browser layouts.
• Faux-Column CSS Layouts
  There are a total of 42 faux-column CSS layouts for downloading. All markup has been validated against a strict Doctype.
• Fixed-Width CSS Layouts
  There are a total of 53 fixed-width CSS layouts for downloading. All markup has been validated against a strict Doctype.
• ___layouts
  The foundational ___layouts file offers five preset page widths, the option to have a fixed width or a text “zoom”-style scaling effect and two core templates that give you the ability to nest subdivided regions of one to four columns. The framework supports fluid-width layouts and fixed-width layouts.

CSS Layouts

• 100 Free High-Quality XHTML/CSS Templates
  In this post, we showcase 100 free high-quality templates. Hopefully, some of them will save you some time in your design and development. While they are generally free for personal or commercial use, always remember to check the license first for any restrictions or guidelines.
• 45 Excellent Free Web Templates

50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools | CSS | Smashing Magazine

This post on Silverlight vs. Flash was written by someone who is far more knowledgeable than I and presents an opposing view to James’ post entitled “Silverlight? Leave Flash to the experts…”.  Something that bothers me though, is that there are many posts about how this is a Flash vs Silverlight or Adobe vs Microsoft thing.  I don’t see it like that at all.  The fact that Adobe's only serious competitor in this space has come out with a product to do essentially the same thing just shows you how mature this industry is getting. Surely that can only be a good thing for Flash developers.

There have been flash apps on web sites for years, but nobody was really bothered by them.  More to the point, sites with heavy flash content were considered bloated and too slow in a world that predominately connected with modems.  Why should I use the “rich” content view when I’m restricted to a 56k modem, and just want to get to the pertinent information?  Things are changing though.  Connectivity speeds are now on average much higher than before, and we can (and do) look seriously at producing heavy content for pages. I recently started looking again into a more graphical interface for this site, mainly because I just don’t know anyone who uses a modem these days.  I’m not averse to actually having my site built in Flash either – I care more these days about how it looks than the technology behind the site, provided these is mass-adoption of that technology.

Flash is pretty much a standard these days.  Its the first plugin you get for your browser, and sometimes the last.  Everybody uses it. In the last 3,401 visits to my web site, only a maximum of 68 (2%) potentially didn’t have flash installed (meaning it wasn’t installed, or it wasn’t a recognised version).  Now, provided a fallback is provided, I see no reason why I shouldn’t provide a richer experience to my readers.  That in turn translates into potential business for a flash developer, should I chose to go down that route.  I can debug flash and actionscript , but I’m pretty crap at creating it from scratch.

Now, if there was an alternative wouldn’t that create more competition?  Wouldn’t it motivate Adobe to come out with something better than they have now, and wouldn’t the be a repeating cycle? To quote Jesse Ezell who really knows Flash : “So, Flash is great. Silverlight just solves a lot of the major problems that I've run into with Flash”.  Jesse created an open API called SwfSource, which was a huge bug-fixed, properly documented, working version of Flash 4.  After he released it, and Macromedia were seeing posts on their message boards about this SDK as opposed to their own.  They killed the project and dropped the openness of the product.  This time around however, they may have to react.  They won’t be able to bury their heads in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist.  Silverlight is a Microsoft product, and I would guess that Adobe are paying attention to that.  Even more so in consideration of Microsoft’s previous experiences in other markets.

So, Flash or Silverlight?  It really doesn’t matter, provided I get to have the best experience I can get on the web.

Jims Blog | Silverlight? Leave Flash to the Experts...

I was just thinking about the steps required to get this blog from one format to another over the years.  I started blogging in March of 1999, storing my data in the following ways:

• HTML pages, sequentially built and edited by hand.  IIRC these were done in something very basic like Notepad or UltraEdit.  There was no interface for adding / editing posts at that point.
• Access databases took over very quickly.  I was pumping the data into the database by hand first, and then with forms a little later.  Access was implemented here in late March, and took a couple of days to get sorted out. There were two main pages – one to display the first ten or twenty posts, and one to display the “Archive”.
• SQL Server 2000 was implemented on my web host in December 2000 and I immediately jumped at the opportunity to use it.  I had been programming with it in work for a few years at that point, but it was always a very expensive option for a host to supply. It was a pretty basic database server, but it managed pretty well under load.
• SQL Server 2005 was rolled out in February of 2006, around the time that I was starting to think about moving to a new hosting company.  I used this at work a lot more than on DaveWhite.Net.
• SQL Server 2008 has just been released, and is available as an option to me.  I’m not going to take it straight away though, as I didn’t take part in the beta test and don’t really know that much about it yet.

The data been been available on the web with probably not more than a week downtime since March ‘99.  That really isn’t too shabby for something that didn’t start with a design plan… it was more of an organic growth from page to a fully fledged database driven back end.  It is only this year that I have started letting “someone else” be responsible for how I handle the data.  Before this, I had complete control over the database structure.  Now, of course, I am using an open source blogging system, even though I own the data, I didn’t specify how it was setup.  It was a scary thing to do I can tell you… and I think I still have the original blog tables in my database, just in case!

I’ve just made a couple of minor changes to the design of this site.  There are more to come though… I’m bored with the stupid complexity of this design.  It was copied from a design called Mollio which was originally designed back in 2006 for a specific CMS (Content Management System) called Farcry.  Farcry seems to be defunct now, and Mollio isn’t supported any more.  Its also not the best of designs either, and isn’t completely compatible with BlogEngine.Net.  Maybe I should say that the other way around - BlogEngine.Net isn’t completely compatible with the Mollio framework. 

There are some issues with the way it displays controls, among them the major irritation of having two identically identified controls on the same page in certain cases.  That’s why you can sometimes see a horizontal scrollbar in your browser; the layout tells one of the elements to display a couple of hundred pixels to the right.  In that case it is displaying from the right of a point which is already on the right of the page. 

So, I was thinking about changing it all.  Its now a lot easier of course, as I can make changes without destroying the previous design; all I have to do is not use it.  When I had my own blog software it was far more difficult to do that as the design was intrinsic to the pages.  Yes, I know that isn’t the way to do it, but I had built this CMS over a period of many years and it had evolved into something that I wouldn’t write today.  So, keep an eye out for a new design…

Okay, so the change I made on Friday was completed easily enough, and very quickly.  This newer version was having problems with the older database on my dev server, so I decided to do a complete backup and then erase everything before upgrading. I thought it would actually take several hours, bit it was all done in about 40 minutes I think.

There were two causes of concern for me.  The first was that I needed to erase the tables in the database and start again.  There is an upgrade path, but it wasn’t working properly for me.  User Profiles and Extensions weren’t being handled properly and the relevant pages were causing errors.  The last time I handled this large a series of SQL transactions it took several hours as the database was in California.  This time however, the server is in London, so was much faster for me.  I probably spent no more than 15 minutes getting the SQL server stuff done.  Steps were as follows :  I had to backup the entire database and copy it to my development SQL Server here.  Then I had to drop the tables and recreate them using the “New Installation” script that comes with BlogEngine.Net.

While the above was going on, I had erased all the files from the server and started to upload the files from the new installation.  I had to be careful not to erase the photo gallery, so I moved that elsewhere while the upgrade was going on.  I had to edit only two files – the web.config and the sitemap.  Web.Config needed only two small changes – one to handle the database settings, and one to ensire strict XHTML conformance (which is slightly broken even now, will get that fixed soon). By the time the files were uploaded, I had taken the backed up SQL data and installed it as a new database on my development server.  That allowed me an easier migration path for the old data, as I could use the SQL Server Import Wizard to handle it all for me.  Once I had the tables done, I changed the settings to match what I had used before, and then tested everything. 

I have to say, this version of BlogEngine.Net is far better than the previous release.  Many of the bugs that were plaguing my installation have been fixed, and there is a noticeable speed increase too.  From my perspective (considering I use Windows Live Writer to write and edit blog posts), there only remains one bug, and that’s fairly minor.  So, hopefully this should all work better and easier for you.  Oh, if anyone is using the RSS feed to read my blog, could they let me know?  I’m going to be playing with that a little soon and I need to know how many of you ready it on a regular basis.  Feedburner says there were sixteen active subscribers… is that really the case? Let me know!

Hahahaha aHAHAhahahahaaa... apparently XP Service Pack 3 wasn't fully tested on Apple laptops and the installation fails without a little hacking.  That's one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.  Thanks Iain :-)

Windows SP3 on macbook with bootcamp | note to self