I know it’s late notice, but this should a fun one. Adam has put together a great event, with Dietrich Ayala, a Portland-based Mozilla developer, giving a preview of Firefox 3. Thanks to ISITE for hosting too!

When it comes to web innovations, Firefox definitely fits the bill. I remember first discovering Firebird (as it was known before the name change) a few years back along with the Edit CSS plugin, and was amazed that I could edit CSS on the fly and see the changes live. Its been my browser of choice ever since. I didn’t even bother with Safari when I recently bought an iMac, took it out of the dock on the first day in fact. It’s only used for compatibility testing. The main reason I use Firefox? For the plugins. No other browser can compete with the sheer volume of useful plugins. This speaks to a compelling reason for offering an API as well, if you can get developers building cool stuff on your platform, the users will follow, and I do believe Firefox will take over IE.

Remember when they launched in November after their strategic shift from Riya to Like? I don’t quite understand why they were so quick to change, but people make decisions I don’t understand all the time. It appears the decision has not paid off. I read that they raised enough to last through 2009 and go through 3 iterations. If the Riya was #1 and Like is #2, I’d bet they’re thinking about that 3rd iteration by now, especially considering how silent the CEO blog has been since the beginning of the year.

Not really a web thing, but this is engineering/usability/design related.

There’s this crazy idea floating around that Oregonians don’t know how to drive. You hear it mentioned every once in a while, usually by someone from the busy roads of California. I admit I have seen my fair share of people going 65 in the left lane on I-5, driving along in ignorant bliss, as the lineup behind them is preparing to run them off the road. But, usually this is an occasional annoyance.

I’ve been avoiding Twitter like the plague, figuring if I got hooked it would be a major productivity dagger, even more so than reading/writing blogs. Jason asked if I was on Twitter yesterday, and I responded “nope and don’t plan too.” However, the thought occurred to me last night, maybe I can do something slightly different with Twitter.

I decided to start a Twitter feed for the building of NetworthIQ. Kinda like bare naked app did by blogging about the building of Amigo and what Steve Poland is doing now at Ringside Startup, only mine will be “microblogging” allowing me to make quick entries instead of long blog posts.

I was just reading the Radar post about Google Maps new support for GeoRSS and wanted to take it for a little spin. I know that Platial supports GeoRSS, so I decided to take the Web 2.0 HQ Feed (which is where new startups are mapped, since I coudn’t keep up on the Web 2.0 Innovation Map), and plug it into Google maps.

Here’s the result:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=http://www.platial.com/rss/map/1768

Platial also lets you create maps from GeoRSS, so the new Google feature doesn’t really do anything new or better, it does however make it a bit easier since I just have to enter a URL for the feed (no account required). Plus I always like playing with Google Maps and its API features and this gives me reason to learn a bit more about GeoRSS.

The OregonStartups site is beginning to come into the modern age. Up until now, the biggest value of the site is their weekly email newsletter, which includes the most extensive local business event calendar that I’ve come across. They now publish the calendar to Google Calendar which can be subscribed to, making it super easy to know what’s going on around town.

There are also a couple of blogs now (main and news), which for me anyway, is a much easier way to get information these days.

I know you want to share. Well, jump over to the head-to-head refund smackdown game that Adam and I (mostly Adam, but he’s gracious enough to say I helped :-)) just released.

Yes! Somebody wrote a book about NHibernate. I can’t tell how woefully lacking NHibernate is on helpful documentation and articles. Couple that with the little time I have to work on building out my app and I am not nearly as efficient as I could be. I hope this will help. Maybe now I’ll be able to figure out how to delete a persistent object without breaking into plain old SQL and ADO.NET.

Ducks, Cougars one of the biggest games of the weekend! This is basketball season isn’t it?

Go Ducks!

SEO Toolbar: The bad, the bad, and the not so ugly

There is definitely no lack of tools in SEO arena. But, there is also a wide range of quality in these tools. I have a couple of favorites in my toolbox including SearchStatus and SEO for Firefox. I have to say after giving the SEO Toolbar a run through, I like the tools overall, but I give it thumbs down and will not be adding this to the toolbox. Apparently I’m wrong though, because 100% of polled people can’t live without it. (note, there was 1 vote at the time of this post)