Hari's Corner

Over the last few days, more than one of my Geeky and Meeky toons have been submitted to StumbleUpon by a few of my online friends.

While I appreciate your gesture, I request my regular blog readers not to submit any more of my "Geeky and Meeky" cartoons to StumbleUpon.com as it has already featured there a few times and I'm not sure it's helping generate any real interest among users of that community. Yes, the number of visitors does increase for a very short time, but that doesn't mean a thing to me. I also removed the StumbleUpon.com icon from here, so that I'm not seen as actively encouraging people to submit my articles there.

This probably goes for most other social bookmarking sites.

Call me anti-social

Here's my next Geeky and Meeky episode. Well, it's been that kind of a week, as I've been piling on ideas after ideas, thanks to encouragement from talented artists like Krishna M. Sadasivam. Hope you enjoy this one, entitled "Unacceptable Answer."

There's a neat little trick in b2evolution, which allows you to get RSS/Atom feeds for any category of posts on this blog.

If you wish to get updates only to a single category on Hari's Corner rather than the full feed, just do this:

• Copy the URL of the category or click on the category link in the sidebar.
• Add the text ?tempskin=_rss2 to the end of the URL.
• Use that URL as the feed URL in your favourite RSS reader.

You can also use ?tempskin=_atom to get an Atom feed instead of RSS if you prefer that format.

So instead of getting updates for every single post I make on this blog, you will be alerted only if I've made a post to that particular category. Use that feature as you wish!

Well, when it rains, it pours. Sometimes I just get an idea and I want to visualize it quickly. This one is entitled "Then and Now." Slightly different from the usual format.

My next Geeky and Meeky toon is here! It's entitled "His True Colours." Hope you enjoy it.

I've been noticing a new trend with worry. A lot of web designers are optimizing their website to work with Firefox and ignoring every other browser out there. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but when websites start actively *recommending* Firefox for "best results", I'm getting worried. It reminds me of a few years ago when many websites would refuse to work properly with any browser other than Internet Explorer. Worse, when plugins and extensions refuse to install in Debian Iceweasel just because it's not called Firefox (Iceweasel is Firefox rebranded in Debian due to legal reasons) it starts getting a bit ridiculous.

Now I'm not a Firefox hater, but there are plenty of other browsers out there I could use, like Opera or even Konqueror on Linux. The lack of a 64-bit version of Opera is an impeding factor here, but given a choice I would use it instead of Firefox because it just is better in many ways. For instance its built-in RSS reader is miles ahead of Firefox's "Live Bookmarks" and its rendering engine is a tad faster. That's not the point though.

The point is that I am a big believer in open standards and I think no single web browser should control them. Microsoft did it with Internet Explorer after winning the browser war against Netscape, but now that Firefox is starting to dominate the browser scene, we should watch for the same problems.

There are specifically some issues I'm concerned about, like

• The assumption that all users are using Windows XP or higher.
• The reliance on non-standard browser features.
• The lack of cross-platform and multi-architecture (x86, AMD64 etc.) support for certain technologies.

I believe that no website should be optimized for viewing in any single browser, even if that browser is Firefox. I am a big believer in standards compliance on the web and more importantly, interoperability and platform independence. It doesn't matter whether a web browser is proprietary or Free software, so long as it complies with accepted standards.