Syzygy

ContentWatch updated their website today (it’s been in the works for several months) and released version 1.8 of it’s content filtering products.

The website redesign looks pretty spiffy. I like the way they’ve organized things, but I’m a little dissappointed that it’s not coded to current W3C standards (they don’t even declare a doctype!). During the redesign they gave demo links to employees so we could test the new site. I pointed out that the pages weren’t validating, but they must not be worried about that because they haven’t made any changes (other than some bug fixes and minor cosmetic stuff).

The newest version of ContentProtect is wonderful. I’ve been using the beta on my computer for a while and I’m very happy with the changes they’ve made. There are now time controls, so you can fine tune when each family member is allowed to be online down to half hour blocks of time. If you want to restrict your kids to one or two hours of surfing after school, but let them surf most of the day Saturday, feel free.

With the new version comes a new pricing scheme. We’ve switched to a subscription basis for updates and technical support. The update also fixes the recategorization of URLs (which has been broken for a while) and several bugs and incompatibility issues. This is the most stable release so far (they’ve all been pretty stable since 1.4).

For more information, visit ContentWatch on the web. Be sure to check out the most recent press release.

I’m not sure how I missed this one on MozillaZine last week. Apparently, the U.S. Patent Office has decided that Eolas’ patent on browser plugin technology is invalid. This is a victory for the W3C and open web standards, but it’s almost unfortunate, since IE is the only browser that would have been affected. No plugin support in IE probably would’ve caused more people to move to standards-compliant browsers like Mozilla Firefox.

Read the whole story at Reuters.

I just realized I missed the site’s birthday. As of February 27, 2004, I’ve been posting to this blog fairly regularly for two years.

The site has changed (hopefully evolved rather than devolved) a lot since then. It would be a lot of fun to put up some past layouts screenshots, but that will have to wait for another time.

Happy birthday!

I changed my style sheet a bit and revamped the logo today. These both took me all of half an hour, but they freshen up the site a bit. It’s just weird seeing my own writings in black rather than my trademark green, but I’ll get used to it.

I also installed some plugins (namely SmartyPants and MT-Textile) that change the way curly quotes and other fancy typography is generated, so don’t be surprised if you find screwy typography or layout in some of the older posts. It will probably be some time before I can get to that — in fact it may never happen at all.

I have grand schemes to redo the entire site, but it’ll be a while before I have the time to do it. I want to roll back to a simpler layout. The bloated menus are beginning to bug me.