My wife and I welcomed our new son, Cameron Alan Chase, into the world on Tuesday, July 29th at 8:24pm. Thanks to the aid of several web-based applications, we were able to quickly announce to the world our exciting news in a lot of really effective ways. For other parents-to-be, here’s a quick guide to the fantastic services we used to share our excitement:

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Now that music has become mostly a commodity in the minds of consumers, music industry companies are having to think of new solutions in order to stay relevant and profitable. While they struggle to figure out how to reach those consumers, companies like Last.fm, Pandora, and Slacker are exploring today’s real innovation in music - customized and personalized listening experiences.

While all three services offer their own unique implementations of online radio, there are a number of ways that each solution trumps the rest in features and user experience. Let’s dive in to a comparison and find out what makes these services so slick:

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I recently started a Twitter discussion with Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks on the relevance and usefulness of the <small> tag. I’ve had this same debate with co-workers on why one would still use <small> over just using a <p> or <span> with an appropriate <class> or <id> to define the “smallness” of the tag. The one thing we both noticed is that no one uses the <big> tag anymore, so why should anyone use the <small> tag? This seems to be only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to determining which element to use for an intended result. Let’s look at a few more instances of controversy in the realm of standards and semantics on the web.

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Ever wished you had one place to test your web designs in all browsers easily? Well thanks to IETester, it’s now possible to check your work in IE 6, IE 7, IE 8 Beta (and even IE 5.5 for anyone still living in the year 2000). It’s still in alpha, so it has occasional crashes, hiccups, and limited browsing functions. In spite of this, the app in its current release is already incredibly useful. The developer has a forum set up for feedback and bug reporting as well which should hopefully keep the project moving forward.

With IETester combined with VMWare Fusion, I can now test my work on my Intel Mac in Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox without having to resort to remoting to other machines, using slower web-based visual checks, or using Virtual PC to test multiple IE versions anymore. It’s a fantastic setup.

Now if only there were conditional comments, and a version of Firebug for IE and Safari… Hey, a web designer can dream, right?

credit: CATR

Twitter is now all the rage. Your friends are doing it. Your mom is doing it. Even educated fleas are doing it. Microblogging is here to stay, and it’s caught on in a big way. According to Wikipedia, there are over 111 different ways to let everyone know what you had for breakfast online! Now the question is - how do we update them all at the same time?

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