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We’ve had a lot of snow over the past few days making for some beautiful, bright snow photos. Great Braxted Park. Stuart Axe, on Flickr Star Burst! Scootzsx, on Flickr

Here’s an edgy stand-off I find myself in the middle of every so often – Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as my default browser. From a day to day, quick browse, everything is on the web perspective I’d have to say I prefer Google Chrome. It’s fast(er), simple and gets the job done. However, from a web developer perspective Firefox has the add-ons that you so sorely need. I’ve tried designing a Drupal Zen sub-theme with Chrome’s ‘inspect element’ feature but it’s not as comprehensive as the Firebug add-on for Firefox which I couldn’t work without. However, when I want to check my daily barrage of social sites Chrome shaves off valuable seconds. For today, I’ll leave Firefox as my default browser simply because of the add-ons – they’re useful, I need them and I don’t mind sacrificing a bit of speed.

I’ve been switching between Facebook’s two feed modes, live feed and news feed, for a while now and up until now I didn’t really know why. Facebook introduced these options a month ago and it’s been confusing users ever since. So, what I’ve found is that by default I am shown the news feed which shows the most relevant information, but it’s often out of date, sometimes by a couple of days. That’s not good. Then you go to the live feed, which seems to be up to the minute but is bloated with Farm Ville and whatnot. That is also not good. The terminology “news feed” and “live feed” are also quite confusing, as you’d expect the “news feed” to be up to date and the “live feed” to be relevant. ...

The Drupal Zen sub-theme, Zen Classic, is to no longer be included with the Zen theme download. The Zen theme will now purely be a theme framework and starter kit. If the Zen Classic theme is to be continued it may be done so as a separate project. Although many people said it was bland I quite liked the simplicity of it, but since it’s been removed and I’ve been thinking of redesigning my site anyway maybe this was the kick up the butt I needed to put pencil to paper! ...

Although the spam seems to be dying down a little on Twitter since they introduced their ‘report as spam’ option I’m still a little cautious about clicking some shortened URLs - SO many of the links seem to lead to spam (spam and more spam). The whole concept seems to have gone full circle as well with people using extensions like Long URL Please to make the short URL long again. Although I think this is a good a useful add-on, the whole process seems a little excessive. I can see benefit in using shortened URLs in printed media but, when it comes to the web, why are we making links short just to make them long again? I guess Twitter has a big part to play in this by restricting messages to only 140 characters, but surely there’s got to be a better way?! With this in mind, I’ve been trying to get some perspective on the issues. Shortened URLs: ...