How cool am I?  Gone retro and posting in IE 6 on my iMac.  No, not with Parallels or any Windows OS installed at all.  It’s CrossOver and I’m checking out the latest release.

If it works well, I may consider buying it.  But then again I do own Parallels.  The advantage to CrossOver is you don’t need Windows.  The downside is that not all software is supported and it’s got a very retro/ugly feel to it.  Course that could be due to IE 6.  I’ll have to check out more programs. 

Have you used CrossOver?  Thoughts?

This week not one, but two big browsers made major upgrades. I’ve gotten a change to play with both and I think everyone is on the right track, some just a wee bit behind.

IE7 has been a long time coming. I think they said IE6 was released 5 years ago or so? Anyways, the new IE seems to be better. I’ve been running it on my Mac (via Parallels) and it seems to be on the right track. It’s got transparent PNG support (finally), RSS support, tabs and I think it seems to work with the CSS :hover property too! All steps in the right direction but it seems like it could make things worse before it makes them better.

Blog on a stick is now 14.7% friendlier to our IE visitors. I removed a script that allowed IE to actually render transparent PNG’s with transparent backgrounds. It seemed to be slowing down the blog for those users and I didn’t like that. So it’s gone. Instead, you get to see an ugly background on all transparent PNG files. It’s not my fault, blame Bill Gates.

Of course, if you are using Firefox, Opera, Flock, SeaMonkey, Safari or basically any non-IE browser, you have no idea what I’m talking about because your browser rocks.

I’ve been making some blog design modifications and I’d love to hear your feedback.

Updates include:

• New Chat/Comment bubble to the right of the post title.
• New Info bar under the post title including digg, del.icio.us and other social bookmarks
• Homepage has shortened posts.
• Live blog search on every page.

I have checked in most browsers and it appears to be working fine.  Some oddities in IE but then again I haven’t seen my blog on XP.  Blog on a Stick is optimized for browsers that work with the web standards.  That’s pretty much everything except IE.

I read an interesting article on SEOMoz today about how IE got sued and now all IE users must hop though a few hops before viewing any Flash or ActiveX content on the web.

…anyone using Internet Explorer now has to “activate” any flash or active-x element related to their website (EOLAS 521 millions lawsuit anyone?). This means that accessibility wise, our industry is now suffering greatly.

So if you are using IE and you find that Flash files no longer work and that ActiveX isn’t working either, it’s probably because you installed the patch (maybe automatically) and now you have to click on everything to activate it. Either you have to do extra work or the developers of each site need to implement a work-around.