After a much needed vacation we’re glad to say we’re back, refreshed and ready to go again. We spent our time in the beautiful island resort of Kuramathi in the Maldives. To celebrate our arrival back I thought I’d generate a photo album front cover that captures the real essence of the place and our time there. Maldivian Dreaming in a Maldivian Paradise.

This is my traveling counterpart Zoe doing the modeling for us at Sunset while looking up at the moon. It was a special moment in a special place. How I wish I was still there…

Now we’re back we have big plans for The Floating Frog so stay tuned and watch this space

Frog (me) and Piggynap have created another pointless website to help us waste as much of our free time as possible. It’s called Google Suggest of the Day. We post a daily Google Suggest that we have stumbled across. Why? Why not!

Suggestoftheday.com just loves to mock! We find the strangest questions asked on Google (via the suggest feature) and plaster it here for your amusement. If you find any strange suggests yourself and feel we should be notified of it then please let us know.

There is a Suggest feature so if you stumble across a funny or shocking Google Suggest, let us know.

Buzzing around Twitter today was a link to a Microsoft competition where users of Internet Explorer 8 have the chance of winning $10,000. What you have to do is follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter, watch out for the clues to uncover the location of the prize somewhere on the internet. Sounds like a fun challenge, but what’s in it for Microsoft?

IE8 has been out now for a short period and believe is now part of Windows update. The amount of IE8 users should now increase dramatically as users update. To coincide with this launch, Microsoft are tangling a carrot at users of other browsers with the aim of converting them to IE8. $10,000 is a very tempting but requires IE8 to participate. They follow up this tasty carrot by saying:

But you’ll never find it using old Firefox (so get rid of it, or get lost.)

A lawsuit in the happening?

To me this seems like anti-competitive behaviour. Microsoft got fined £680.9m in May 2008 by the European Commission and previously £194m in 2006 for a similar act. This isn’t in the same relms, but it’s still targetting it’s competitor Firefox with a monetory bribe.

The concept

Stripped down, this is a clever viral campaign. It engages both non-IE8 users and the ever growing Twitter community for a period of time. Personally I don’t have the time to digest it, but I’m sure others will embrace it.

Will you be taking part?

This post is aimed at all web designers and developers that insist on using the dirty hack <br clear="all"> within their website builds. Most people won’t understand my rage for <br clear="all"> because it takes a certain level of web geekness to fathom what it is and why it’s so god damn unnecessary.

<br clear="all"> is typically used by crap developers who hold no appreciation for web semantics nor accessibility. Ironically these culprits are usually the smart a**** that are the first to point out others mistakes, no matter how minor. They build websites that are both bloated, slow and unstable cross-browser. <br clear="all"> to me acts as the ultimate professional insult to those that have crafted for years, through changing technologies and user demands. <br clear="all"> is like a bird crapping on your freshly washed and polished hatchback, a minor little thing that really p***** me off when I encounter it.

Like the story ‘The Princess and the Pea’, no matter how much preparation and effort you put into something, all it takes is a stupid little pea to annoy you and reduce a potentially relaxing nights sleep to an unexpected search for the very thing that shouldn’t be there in the first place, the <br clear="all">.

Dear Website Developer,

If you need to clear a floated element, please don’t use <br clear="all">. As a last resort use a simple CSS class on the element you want clearing. In your bloated, unstructured CSS file, which more than likely will be inline, create a class:

.clear{
     clear:both;
}

and remember you can add multiple classes to an element, like:

<div class="className className clear">
I'm a clever little developer aren't I
</div>

As Borat would say, this is ‘unbelievable’!!!

<br clear="all">

<div class="className">
Hack hack hack
</div>

<br clear="all">

<div class="className">
Hack hack hack
</div>

So next time to quickly quack in <br clear=”all”>, think, you’re a dirty little bugger! One last thing, if you write <br clear="all">, it should be <br clear="all" />, but I guess you don’t care do you?

WordPress in itself is very safe and secure platform, however there are chances that your blog may get affected because of loopholes in your themes.

Antivirus for WordPress is a useful plugin that will scan your templates and also can monitor it on a daily basis for malicious injections in the themes.

You can also setup the Antivirus plugin to run a check daily and send you a email if it finds anything wrong in your templates, definitely another good tool to keep your blog safe and secure.

Credit WebLogTools.