yourminis is Goowy’s foray into the ‘customizable homepage’ space, a veritable smoragasbord of RSS feeds and widgets. The service is very similar to Netvibes, but with one big difference - yourminis is a Flash application.

An article on the importance of making hyperlinks stand out might seem like an exercise in stating the obvious. I would have thought so too, until I came across the portfolio site of a reputable web design firm last week and found myself playing a game of link hide-and-seek.

Back in 2003 Mark Angeletti wrote an article for Sitepoint titled Flash Vs. CSS/HTML: Which Will You Choose?, in which he examined the strengths and weaknesses of Flash. Mark closed his article by suggesting that in the future Macromedia had the opportunity to fix Flash’s weaknesses, and would likely do so. I thought it would be interesting to look at how much progress has been made in the past four years, and see if those weaknesses have indeed been addressed, or if there is still work to be done.

Recently I designed a site that had two navigation menus: a global navigation bar and a breadcrumb trail. It was the first time I had ever used breadcrumbs as the only form of secondary navigation, and it got me thinking about this humble form of website navigation.

It’s a while since I gave any thought to spacer gifs, but I was looking at the Exxon website tonight (as you do on a Tuesday evening) and saw something that made me chuckle. I was viewing the site in Firefox (of course), and noticed that on many pages the text “spacer.gif” appeared prominently within the layout.

CSS Advisor is a newish community website from Adobe. On CSS Advisor users can post their own CSS tips, or pose questions which other community members can attempt to answer. This question/solution format promises that CSS Advisor will remain more focused than the average forum, and provide a practical resource to call upon when faced with a sticky CSS issue. Within a few minutes on the site I discovered a potential solution to a long time CSS bugbear of mine - Safari’s ‘Wmode flicker’ when DHTML dropdown menus are displayed over a Flash movie.

Well it looks as if Microsoft has screwed up royally with Outlook 2007, at least insofar as the way HTML emails are rendered. Instead of using the not-too-shabby Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine to display HTML emails, Microsoft opted to use a customized version of the Word 2007 rendering engine. That’s right, from now on your beautifully constructed HTML newsletters are going to be rendered by the crime against layout known as Microsoft Word. That fact alone was enough to send shivers down my spine, but when I dug a little deeper I discovered just how dire the situation really is.

So I’m back from my Christmas break, two weeks spent on a whirlwind “tour” of New Zealand catching up with family. It was a blast as always, but god damn it was cold for this time of year! I’m back in sunny Melbourne again and slowly easing back into work mode, and I’ll kick my blogging year off nice and easy with a review of Firebug which I ran out of time to finish before my holiday.

In the past couple of years it has been common for Flash developers to design elastic sites, rather than sites with fixed dimensions. These elastic sites fill the browser window, and content is positioned programatically on the stage according to the size of the viewport. The trouble with this approach is that because the width and height of the embedded Flash swf are set to 100%, the browser will never display scrollbars. If the user sizes their browser window too small then content will begin to disappear off screen. Due to the lack of scrollbars, this hidden content is inaccessible to the user.

By writing a small JavaScript function that is triggered when the window is resized, we can overcome this restriction. When the window size is detected to be smaller than a minimum width/height specified by the designer, the Flash movie will stop scaling, and scrollbars will be forced to appear.

In a recent post on the Microsoft Internet Explorer blog, Pete LePage announced that Microsoft have released a Virtual PC 2004 image that includes Windows XP SP2, Internet Explorer 6, and the Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Kit. Here’s the kicker: you don’t have to buy an additional Windows license, which was previously the case when running Windows under VPC.