A few notes on browsers, snow and hacks …

Browsers

Insomuch as this is possible, I try to use alternate browsers, products other than Microsoft. Of course, the company makes this as difficult as possible in its seeming attempts to blanket a monopoly on PCs, browsers, operating systems, the Internet and the rest of it.

At home, as my whims dictate, I alternate between Safari, Firefox, Opera and Explorer. The former three are actually the least dependable as I have run across numerous Web sites that either cause them to crash or where some script on the Web site fails to work and the Web site suggests I change browsers. I have the most recent versions of all the browsers (except Explorer, ironically), so it seems to still be a matter of compatibility against mighty Microsoft. That said, I know some would disagree with me about the dependability of alternate browsers — and I don’t like admitting it either — this has just been my experience thus far. Of the alternate browsers, I think Opera is my favorite, though the least compatible with a wide array of Web sites, while Firefox I would probably judge to be the best all around.

Since snow doesn’t just conjure up images and memories of the holidays — indeed, it snows in many, many places in America from November-March — I think the WordPress snow should be an available option through the rest of the winter. Since the ability to see and enjoy snow here in South Carolina is mostly fleeting, the scripted snow is something of a treat for us Southern folk. Folks up north are probably less amused as they look out the window at a freshly shoveled white pile.

Haxors

Because of all the php included in the packages, I have found WordPress blogs, those run on external servers, like at www.jeremystyron.com (shameless and redundant plug, since the content there is the same as here) and Joomla sites to be quite a bear when it comes to locking them down to security compromises. This is something that was fairly new to me as I attempted to develop a site for a retail client, but I am learning. After finding bunches of erroneous code in numerous WordPress files, I upgraded to 2.7, created a .htaccess file and tried some other methods to lock things down. I still have to run through some steps to do the same over at the Joomla site.