Category: Site Updates

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This server weathered its first Slashdotting last Friday, or at least the first I’ve noticed. But then, it was a mild one compared to some reports I’ve seen.

While writing up my commentary on IE dropping WGA last Thursday, I realized that the original story was perfect for Slashdot. It had Microsoft, anti-piracy methods with privacy concerns, Internet Explorer and browser marketshare. So I looked to see if the IE team’s post was on the Firehose already, didn’t see it, and wrote up a quick submission. I also realized that I had an opportunity to plug the Alternative Browser Alliance in the text of the submission—something that I hadn’t been able to do on previous stories I’d submitted. (This is my 6th Slashdot submission to be accepted.)

So I submitted it Thursday evening, got a couple of dozen hits from the Firehose, and it got accepted around 11:30 pm, local time. I took precautions in case the traffic spilled over onto the blog, like turning on WP-Cache and disabling a few plugins, then went to bed. Continue reading →

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The FlashI just discovered that the domain name speedforce.org was available. I couldn’t pass it up. Now I have to figure out what to do with it.

I’ve toyed with the idea of separating out all the Flash stuff from this blog and creating a dedicated comics blog. I’ve also thought about renaming the site, Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning (it’s an awkward name*, no matter how you slice it), though it’s got enough mindshare that I’d rather just simplify it to “Ride the Lightning.”

Any suggestions?

*Come to think of it, I have a history of picking names that seem perfect at the time, only turn out to be awkward later on. The Alternative Browser Alliance seemed like the perfect name, but I got so sick and tired of typing www.alternativebrowseralliance.com that I registered altbrowser.net just so I could use it more easily.

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I just realized that as of last week, this blog has been online for 5 years.

Crazy, huh?

This is the 1,398th post. We’ve got 2,307 comments at the moment, including pingbacks. Typical traffic these days seems to run around 650-700 views on weekdays, 550-600 on weekends. Most of it seems to be people searching for images.

The top-viewed posts lately have been:

  1. Songs Not to Play at a Wedding (Normally #2, but it got something like 3000 hits from StumbleUpon last week.)
  2. Comic Con 2003
  3. Philosophy of Time Travel
  4. Creative Computer Names

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Wow! Songs Not to Play at a Wedding has been one of our more popular posts for a long time, and I’d seen hits start coming in from StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, about a week ago. But that was a trickle. I wasn’t prepared to check my stats at lunch today and see 1,112 visits from StumbleUpon (here’s the review page) since 5pm yesterday (WordPress’ daily stats rotate at midnight GMT), with another 632 the day before. Continue reading →

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Alternative Browser Alliance - New LogoI’ve been thinking about this for a while, but it’s time to refocus the Alternative Browser Alliance. Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler has referred to Firefox and Internet Explorer as the “mainstream browsers” for more than a year now, and it looks like that’s become true.

The web is no longer an IE monopoly. It’s become an IE/Firefox oligopoly. Firefox is no longer an alternative web browser. It’s sold out, its ads are everywhere, and it even allows people to build Firefox-only code.

So, starting today (April 1, 2007), the Alternative Browser Alliance will no longer promote Firefox.

So what will replace it? I thought about Opera, but most of its install base is on cell phones and PDAs, and we all know the mobile web browser is dead, right? Safari? Well, it turns out that WebKit is shutting down.

So the site will be putting its weight behind iCab. It’s as alternative as they come, and it’s guaranteed to remain that way (since it won’t run on Vista).

Update: Yes, it’s an April Fools joke.

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It’s hard to believe, but it’s been three years since the first post on this blog. I still think of myself as being kind of new at this, but at this rate, we’ll be in the old guard. Or at least the new old guard. 😉

Topics have shifted around. It started out as a personal blog with Sci-Fi overtones, and slowly took on more of a focus on humor, comics and tech. Posts in the early days were divided 60/40 between me and Katie. These days it’s more 90/10, partly because we’ve both shifted a lot of the personal stuff over to LiveJournal. Strange photos started showing up very early on, making up what are now the Strange World, You Must Be Mistaken, and Signs of the Times categories.

The site started on B2 and moved to WordPress when the project forked.

Even the title is subtly different. It started out as “Ramblings,” with a “K²” icon to the left. After a while, the icon became part of the title, and it’s been known as “K-Squared Ramblings” for most of those three years.

According to the WordPress Dashboard, we now have 912 posts and 961 comments Continue reading →

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I’m launching a new browser switch site, with a bit of a twist. It’s promoting all alternative browsers, kind of like Browse Happy, but a bit more inclusive and aimed at a slightly different audience.

The idea is that a diverse browser “market”—one with three or four major browser suppliers all competing with each other—is the best way to maintain innovation and security. Anyone following the classic browser wars, the lull in IE development, and the sudden appearance of IE7 can see the difference competition makes for innovation. As for security… If someone can hit 90% of the world’s computers by hitting IE on Windows, we’re in trouble. But if they have to hit 30% each on IE, Firefox, and Opera, and even those are split among Windows, Mac and Linux, it’s a lot more effort for the bad guys.

I got the idea back in May, during some rather heated Firefox/Opera flame wars. It seemed to me that fans of the two browsers had more in common than they thought, if they’d just stop fighting each other. I worked on it during June, and launched a test version last month, asking for feedback from friends and from the Spread Firefox and My Opera communities*. It’s still not where I’d like it to be (Comic-Con, then procrastination), but after the net went crazy over Paul Thurott’s “Boycott IE” article I realized I’d better launch what I had and refine it later.

So, without further ado, I’m officially launching the Alternative Browser Alliance.

Alternative Browser Alliance

*I’ve since imported my comments from the post on Confessions of a Web Developer, my old blog at My Opera, because it was largely the same content. That’s why some of the comments here are dated earlier than this post.