Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

I thought I’d write a random post with some of what’s on my mind this weekend.

• I’m now running Firefox 3 betas thanks to MultiFireFox.
• MidnightFox was updated the other day with incorrect buttons.  Oops.  That has been re-uploaded and should be made public soon.
• yExplore and GA? have been updated for Firefox 3. Actually, for the beats not the official release.  That’ll happen when the final release comes out.
• Now that I am running Firefox 3, I can start theming it.
• Just started to watch Entourage.  It seems like a pretty cool show.

I’m a big fan of open source, or alternative, software. I’m not a fan of paying hundreds of dollars for an application. Needless to say I’m not a big fan of Microsoft or Adobe.

So what’s a good open source graphic design application? I’ve tried a lot of programs and now I’m looking at GIMP. GIMP is the free alternative to Photoshop. But how well does it work?

A friend said that it’s hard to convert from Photoshop to GIMP. Since I’m a Fireworks fan, I guess I don’t have to worry about that one.

Link building is hard work. I know, I’ve done it. However, it’s the quality of the message and targeting the individual that matters the most.

Now, lets forget the basics of personalization here and just focus on the message I received:

At what point would you pitch a blogger who has got a design background when you can’t even get your fonts to match?! There are bold, italic, all caps, and more than one font in use in this email. My first impression of comes from your email and that’s definitely not a good one.

I’m always looking for cool applications and ways to make my life easier. I’m a big fan of Fireworks, but launching the application every time I want to make a quick image edit seems to be too much work sometimes. That’s why I found Chocoflop.

Chocoflop is a free image editor for the Mac. It loads quickly, has all the basic bitmap editing tools and doesn’t seem to take up many system resources.

I love CSS, but yet I hate it to. For some reason, the same code can’t work in all browsers. And I’m not just complaining about the non-standards compliant Internet Explorer (all versions) but I’m finding minor differences in different versions of Firefox. How is that possible?!! Getting everything to line up just seems to be way to much work.

The reason I write this is I’ve added a new header to Blog on a Stick. I really liked the design, but programming it in hasn’t been great. I have a search box that didn’t line up right with imagery so I had to ax that.  It also didn’t line up well in IE so they get served up a search link instead. Heck, even the search results are showing up way to far left. Go figure.

To get the best results out of Google Analytics, you need to ensure it’s installed on each page of a website. To automatically check for you, I’ve created a Firefox extension to do all the work.

GA? will put a little icon in the status bar of your Firefox web browser. It will then check each page you load to to see if it has Google Analytics installed. If so, it’ll show a colored bar chart. If Google Analytics doesn’t appear to be installed, it’ll show a gray bar chart.

I’ve been testing and testing site stats ever since Mint 2 came out. I didn’t really want to pay for the upgrade so I ran though a few different services and put them though the tests. I was looking for a quick way to access my visitor stats and in the end, Mint is the best stats program I can find.

DownloadSquad told us about a great new tool yesterday called CSSFly. It’s not a Firefox addon, or additional software, it’s an XHTML based tool that allows you to see and edit the source code of any website at a push of a bookmarklet.

CSSFly creates a frame at the top of your browser where you can see the source HTML or source CSS file and you are allowed to make edits. The edits then update in real time. Great for troubleshooting web design issues or digging though someone else’s source to figure out how they archived a certain technique.

Well here it is, the all new TwisterMc.com design for 2007. The last major design update was back in April 21st, 2005 and so it’s more than time for an update!

This design offers more color, more personality and better sidebar organization. I’ve been working on it for about the past two months and I’m very excited to show it off.

If you come across any issues, please let me now. It’s hard to catch all the bugs before going live. I do however know that there are quite a few ‘retro’ pages. I’m working at getting them all over time.