As you may have read in a previous post, I recently removed Internet Explorer from my wife’s computer and made her switch to Firefox. Today I get home and she tells me “The computer wouldn’t work to pay our Alltel bill online!”.
Turns out that Alltel doesn’t support the Firefox web browser. Argggh! There’s a little message at the bottom of the page that says “This site is best viewed using Internet Explorer 6.0″. Nice touch, guys. Shouldn’t the message say “We don’t want your money because you are too smart to use Internet Explorer”?
I’ve re-enabled Internet Explorer (after making sure it had the most current patch), but I’ve changed the icon label to say “Alltel Bill Payment Only”, and gave a stern warning that she must still use Firefox for general web browsing.
I’ve been using an extremely customized blog template from blogger.com for a while now. I was using blogger’s interface to compose my blogs, then ftp’ing just the blog comments (no formatting or template html) to my server. Then I used php’s “require_once” to pull the comments into my page content. It worked pretty well, but I was looking for an all-inclusive CMS (and didn’t really want to create one from scratch), so I just moved to a WordPress installation. So far, I really like it. We’ll see how it goes.
I did have to jump thru a few hoops to get my old content working with WordPress, because:
- I wanted to make sure links from the old site still work with WordPress AND
- I didn’t want to lose comments from the old guestbook.
This actually turned out to be fairly easy. To fix old links not working, I used Apache’s mod_rewrite to rewrite the old urls to the new urls.
My old guestbook system (I wrote it several years ago) stored all comments in plain text files. I wrote a quick php function to read all of these text files and generate the sql code needed to insert the old comments into the comments table used by WordPress.
As part of the new CMS, I’ve also moved from my home-grown photo album to the Coppermine Photo Gallery, because it provides easy integration between the CMS and the photo album.
I’m still working on moving my pictures over to the new photo gallery, so please be patient. Some of the links to specific pictures won’t work until I get everything moved over.
I’ve just done a very bad thing. Actually, I think it’s a very good thing, but I’m sure my wife probably won’t appreciate it.
I’ve just removed all of the internet explorer links from our PC, and set Firefox as the default web browser.
I’ve been a die-hard Firefox user since the preview version last year, but I’ve been unable to talk my wife into switching. I use an Apple PowerBook almost exclusively, and don’t use our desktop pc much any more - but my wife still uses the PC + Internet Explorer.
I read about a new IE exploit today, and that was the final straw. No more Internet Explorer in my house.
I urge each of you to dump Internet Explorer, and switch to a better browser, like Firefox. Fewer vulnerabilities. Better features. Switch Today!
We went to the baby doctor for our first appointment today. Doc says everything looks good, and our baby is about the size of a raspberry!
The “official” due date is July 24!
The ultrasound picture doesn’t show much, but here it is!
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Stay tuned for more baby news!
