There was an announcement yesterday about Google's new browser called Chrome.  I went through three different emotions upon hearing about this new browser.

1. I felt a quick kid like excitement.  I was rushing to download it and try it out.
2. Then I felt a feeling of worry when I thought that I now had yet another browser to test all my websites against.  So at that point I went to the Chrome site and started to read the little comic they have to explain their new browser.  As I read I found that there was a lot of good sound things about Google's new browser.
3. Lastly my feeling was amusement and curiosity as I started to realize just how good the browser was.  Here are some of the things I like about Chrome.

Things I like

• I was happy to see that it passed all the CSS3 tests on the CSS3.info site.  This is encouraging to me and it will be GREAT to test CSS3 stuff and know I have a playground that supports all of CSS3 and not just a little bit of it.
• I was happy that each tab is it's own process.  That way when a site goes mad and freezes, I don't loose what I was doing on another tab.
• It is very lite looking but pretty browser.  (ya I know I am a professional and that shouldn't matter.  But it does.)
• The search bar is the address bar.  I think that is how browsers should have all been made.
• Most visited sites page.  Kind of cool, but I want to see it in action a couple months from now.
• Load times are pretty darned fast.

Things I don't like

• When I was using Chrome on my Vista PC disc bullets were displayed with white corners which made the bullets look like stars at certain sizes.
• I don't like what it did to my favorites.  It imported my favorites from IE7 and then tried to logically sort them.  I can't find anything anymore.  I wish I hadn't imported them.  My advice is do NOT import favorites.
• The "Inspect Element" is a nice try but it isn't as good as IE8's Developer Toolbar or Firefox's Firebug extension.  I can't get to a mode where I can hover over the page and click an element I want to inspect.  I can go through the markup and eventually find my element by watching what lights up.  But it just isn't as good as I would like.

Well I think that is it for now.  I am going to use this browser a LOT in the next couple weeks to test things out.  I know I will be able to soon ad much more to both of the above lists.  I can't wait to find out what cool tools Google has added to the browser.  I also can't wait to see if I can take some things off my "Things I don't like" list when I get to know the browser a bit more.

Well thanks Google for giving me more work to do.  The good thing is that I really like my work.

~Mike

The normal way of preloading images is by using JavaScript to do the job.  In the lieu of Firefox and it's NoScript type extensions I have stopped relying so heavily on JavaScript in my pages.  So where does that leave us when it comes to preloading images?

In steps CSS.  Most of the time when I want to preload and image it is for hover menu's or rollover type images that I know the user most likely won't hover over right away.  In this case I want the rollover's to work right away.  My next example won't please some of the real hard core standards people because it adds a little markup to the page, but in my opinion it is better than and less markup than the common JavaScript usually used to preload images.

At the bottom of the page before the closing body tag I add a preload DIV.  I assign the class of preload to the div and then let CSS handle the rest.  (you will also have to add a DIV element inside the preload DIV for every image you want to preload.  Hopefully in CSS  3 we can assign multiple images to the background of one element (DIV) but for now this works.

The CSS for this is

.preload
{
    position: absolute;
    width: 0px;
    height: 0px;
    margin-left: -9999px;
    background: url(yourimagehere.jpg) no-repeat;
}

Now the DIV elements inside the preload DIV only have to have the background set because they are going to go to the left along with the preload div. 

The reason I didn't do a display: none or visibility: hidden was because Opera and Safari are smart enough not to waste resources loading your images because it can see by the way you did the CSS that you don't want it to display.

This has worked great for me in the past and I am continuing to use it in the future.  I am sure some of you have arguments against it, and I would love to hear your arguments.  Please feel free to post a comment here. 

I am going to start a page by page guide for these type of things in the future that will allow users to search and find help while they create their own web sites.  For now you will have to search the blog to find good information.

Thanks for your time
~Mike

I am extremely frustrated this morning.  I tried to move my home web site, which is in DotNetNuke to IXWebHosting and I keep getting the following error.

Installing Database - Version 4.4.0...FAILURE 400 - Thread was being aborted

I have done some research and have found that it is most likely happening due to timeout issues, and I found the following help.

1. Open IIS, and right click on the virtual directory you set up for running the dotnetnuke install.  Choose "Properties".

2. Open the "ASP.NET" application tab, press "Edit Configuration", and then select the "Application" tab.

3.  Change the "Request execution timeout (seconds)" value to be say 900 or more.

The only issue I have with the above is that I can't get into the IIS configurations at IXWebHosting.  I have placed a trouble ticket into the hosting company and I am hoping that they will fix this for me.  I would just go to another hosting provider, but man these guys are very cheap and so far the service has been pretty reliable.

I don't get a lot of visitors here, but if anyone else has come up with this issue please feel free to comment on it, or give a solution that applies to hosting externally. 

You could also give me an opinion on who the best DNN hosting is.  I wouldn't mind. 

~Mike

One of my other goals with the CornerPixel web site is that I want to work on helping designers and developers who use CMS's to produce better standards compliant web sites even while using a CMS.

I will be setting up a couple CMS's in the near future.  One DotNetNuke (DNN) and one Umbraco site.  I will post in a couple weeks with URL's when I have those installed and skinned. 

The other thing I will be doing is providing DNN admins with good standard compliant skins in the near future.  There has been many who say that this is impossible, but I have seen several out there that have been done very well, and I intend to provide a similar service.  I think for free at first but I won't commit to that yet.

Well just wanted to update you and tell you all to keep checking in to see those CMS sites in action. 

Also please notice the cool RSS link at the top of the page. 

Thanks for listening,

~Mike