A little over a month ago, I had satellite Internet service installed at my house. In this entry, you will find my review of the service so far.

Introduction
The service is pretty good overall. At it’s best, it’s not quite as fast as DSL or cable, but it is better than than the Internet service you get from wireless companies, such as AT&T Wireless, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, etc. The service is very reliable. I have only lost my connection a handful of times since I’ve had it, and it usually comes back within an hour. Most of the time, if I lose my connection, it’s storming badly enough outside that I shouldn’t have my computer turned on anyway.

Today I decided to check each of my Analytics accounts, and came across some very interesting statistics.

On two of my sites, Firefox has actually surpassed Internet Explorer as the most popular browser (just barely, but it has). On a third site, however, the race is not even close.

As you will see from the images I’ve posted below, Analytics can be extremely important. On two of my sites, if I do not have them set up properly as cross-browser/cross-platform sites, then I will lose more than half of my visitors. On the third, however, the overwhelming majority of visitors would most likely never even notice if something on the site was broken outside of IE.

Provided she has experience with a server-side scripting language, of course. The main point is simply that AJAX, although it is a technology that relies heavily on JavaScript, really only requires a few lines of JavaScript in order to work. Once you start the AJAX function with the teeny bit of JavaScript, everything else can be (and probably should be) handled on the back-end through a server-side language.

So, for all of you that are as afraid of AJAX as I was, here is a quick post to teach you everything you need to know about the JavaScript side of AJAX.

This is just a quick tip regarding the “empty” and “isset” functions for people that are fairly new to the world of PHP programming. I learned this the hard way a long time ago while I was working on my first few form processors in PHP.

To take things slightly off-topic, and to get a blog entry in for this week, I decided to post reviews of two albums I picked up recently. One of them is brand new, the other’s about a year old at this point.

As more and more development is using Ajax, why not create a cool looking Ajax loader icon to match your site? Check it out here:
http://www.ajaxload.info/

In the footsteps of QuickTime and iTunes, Apple decided to port yet another Macintosh application over to Windows. This time, however, it’s less of a necessity, and more of a “look what we can do” type of move.

I have moved into a new house. We are working on selling our 1,100 square foot mobile home (which is on rented land), and have purchased a 1,500 square foot double-wide, built on a permanent foundation, on 1.57 acres of land.

We moved in to the new house two weeks ago.

I have an update on my experience with Hewlett Packard and their customer support. I did not want to post anything more about my situation until I had spoken with their “Quality Customer Care”, as I was not sure whether things were going to turn out badly, or if they would make things right for me.

Well, it appears as though they are going to make things right, and I must say I am extremely impressed. All the same, it would have been nice to have them simply throw in an extra hard drive, or some sort of nice peripheral, but I am still overwhelmed by their response to my situation.

Within this blog entry, you will find the correspondence I sent to HP, along with their e-mail responses. I will then tell you about the phone call I received yesterday afternoon.

I remember my first purchase of fonts. It was at a state fair in New Jersey in 1992 (could have been 91). This man had about 500 different floppies for sale, each was $3. I bought his font disk and was really excited on the way home to be able to finally create better looking text. Today, fonts are basically the most important element to everything we see.

You can purchase fonts for thousands of dollars or search online for loads of free font sites which typically have a cruddy selection. Today I am taking a look at a free fonts site which changes all of that. The site is called Urban Fonts and is really a well put together site.

The first thing that stands out to me is how “rich” the site is. What I mean by this is the use of Ajax for quick pageloads and mouseovers for help. When you mouseover a font sample, you can see the letters that go along with that font before clicking for more details. Lots of Web 2.0 features including tagging.

Selecting a font will take you to the main font page. This page is very rich in function. You can see the uppercase/lowercase/special characters that accompany the font, change the sample font character color, background color and view samples. What I think is innovative is the ability for you to customize the sample text – this will help with perhaps picking a logo font. My suggestion here is that they add the ability to rate and comment on the font to the main font page. Currently those options are only available on the preview page. By adding it to the main font page, that should help to increase the number of votes and comments.

Urban Fonts also has several other sections as well including a paid commercial fonts section, blog and a forum. The blog has links to other interesting font sites and font items.

Check out my video review below: