Yes, I do. First, I promised to update my blog more reg­u­larly, almost on a daily basis, and then I fail to deliver. It’s not my fault, really. My new router – a Linksys WRT350N – almost made me go berserk. It just stopped work­ing after a few days of reli­able oper­a­tion. Noth­ing I did made my wire­less net­work work­ing again. After a hefty 30 min­utes call with a guy from the sup­port line it still didn’t work. They sent me a new firmware (v2.00.13(04)) and … still noth­ing. Hell, I down­loaded and installed the newest dri­ver for the NIC and … still noth­ing. I tried to install only the dri­ver … noth­ing. More out of fancy than rea­son­ing I installed the newest ver­sion of the Linksys Mon­i­tor­ing Tool and … noth­ing. Of course, some­how it didn’t install the nec­es­sary ser­vice. After fix­ing that … it worked! Even faster than before. Let’s hope it stays that way.

As far as my work is con­cerned: Last week we had to move our offices from one wing to the other, with only two days warn­ing. The move worked bet­ter than I antic­i­pated but there’s still some work to do. And then, there’s this blog I should work on (for instance, as Evil Spock sug­gested, there’s still no link sec­tion) before start­ing to blog for real. Well, I omit­ted my pri­vate life in which I was try­ing to buy and set up a HDD-Recorder for my girl­friend which turned out to be a rather nasty task. They sold us a device that doesn’t sup­port EPG although they told us so. Tomor­row we will hope­fully fin­ish this unpleas­ant busi­ness so that I can sleep well again.

What’s the mean­ing of this? Well, if every­thing goes accord­ing to the plan, this site should see some improve­ments next week and I will be able to keep my promise. Sadly, over the last three weeks noth­ing seemed to respect the fact that I laid out a plan …

The next iter­a­tion of the famous browser has been released to the open. It’s ver­sion 9.5 and it’s still in its alpha stage. Nev­er­the­less, it’s work­ing well and the browser indeed is incred­i­bly fast. Just how fast it really is can be seen on this site. Opera 9.5 (code-named Kestrel) doesn’t quite add enought fea­tures to jus­tify a ver­sion num­ber bump but con­tains some very wel­come improve­ments. It’s faster than ever before and Opera claims that the user inter­face has also received sig­nif­i­cant opti­miza­tions. The inte­grated Bit­Tor­rent client has been reworked and plenty of refine­ments have been added. More­over, there are new fea­tures like Syn­chro­niza­tion or Full His­tory Search. More­over, there’s full CSS3 support.

It’s a fine release and I really like it, even though it’s still an alpha. I tried Opera before but being a heavy Fire­fox user I couldn’t quite get myself accus­tomed to it. Things have changed now and I’d like to give you some assis­tance in using Opera, espe­cially if you’re used to Fire­fox. Read more…

Jakob Nielsen pro­vides yet another valu­able insight for your home­page design. He writes that the usabil­ity of a home­page was com­pro­mised because of fancy for­mat­ting and fancy words. Users ignored a key area because it resem­bled a pro­mo­tion. They looked at the right parts of the page but they didn’t see the essen­tial information.

It’s inter­est­ing how peo­ple ignore things they don’t want to see. I too mostly ignore adver­tise­ments, mainly because I’m not inter­ested in it. Since most sites try too hard sell­ing you some­thing it’s not won­der, I guess. Obvi­ously, less def­i­nitely is more. In order to get the most out of your online pres­ence you should check out Nielsen’s Top Ten Guide­lines for Home­page Design. Even though these guide­lines are clearly aimed at com­pa­nies they are quite use­ful for the aver­age Joe.

Yee­haa! If you’re read­ing this you made it to my new blog. I tried to import the older posts from Blog­ger but one can only do so much in a given amount of time. There’s work to be done over the next few days so don’t expect every­thing to work per­fectly yet. The design isn’t quite final, I’d say, and I’m going to get a new domain as soon as I’ve made up my mind about it. Heck, even I have to impose an order on the issues at hand fight­ing for my attention.

Apart from a new, more pow­er­ful blog­ging sys­tem, a more appeal­ing design, and a soon-to-come own domain, what do I have in store for you? Truth is, I don’t know. More fre­quent updates, I seri­ously hope. More diverse top­ics (I still won’t get into pol­i­tics, though). More pic­tures? Not likely. More exper­i­ment­ing with styles, designs and related stuff? Pos­si­ble. That’s not too bleak a future, I’d say. Any­way, stay tuned and drop by now and then to look at the progress I’ve made.