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.

Micro-sculptor Willard Wigan is launching a new exhibition. The Birtish sculptor is known all around the world for his miniature sculptures that are invisible to the naked eye. Willard uses tiny homemade tools and paints with a hair plucked from a housefly’s back and carves microscopic figures from grains of rice or sand or sugar. The sculptures, which often take months to complete, are then mounted on pin heads or needles.

Curiosity cat

Pictured is a miniature sculpture of the US President Barack Obama and his family

A big part in history, but scaled down in size…. Henry VIII and his six wives

The Incredible Hulk rips apart the head of the needle……

Former South African president Nelson Mandela perched in the eye of a needle….

Marilyn Monroe in a classic pose on a diamond…..

The prestigious Oscar statuette…..

Homer strangles Bart in a classic scene from the The Simpsons…..

A Dressage rider sits elegantly on top of a needle……

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No….. it’s Superman! A very small Superman that is…..

A detailed Statue of Liberty……

Dwarfed… Snow White and her Seven Dwarfs

The Last Supper…..

Dorothy and her friends on the yellow brick road in a scene from The Wizard of Oz..

Born in 1957 in Birmingham, Willard Wigan began his artistic life at a tender age. Suffering from dyslexia and learning difficulties, he struggled at school, finding solace in creating art of such minute proportions that it virtually could not be seen with the naked eye.

“It began when I was five years old,” says Willard. “I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to where my dyslexia didn’t hold me back and my teachers couldn’t criticise me. That’s how my career as a micro-sculptor began.”

Willard’s micro-sculptures have become so minute that they are only visible through a microscope. Each piece commonly sits within the eye of a needle, or on a pin head.

The personal sacrifice involved in creating such wondrous, yet scarcely believable, pieces is inconceivable to most. Willard enters a meditative state in which his heartbeat is slowed, allowing him to reduce hand tremors and sculpt between pulse beats. Even the reverberation caused by traffic outside can affect Willard’s work. He often works through the night when there is minimal disruption.

Willard’s work is described as “the eighth wonder of the world”. One of the specifically commissioned works includes the replica of the iconic Lloyds of London Building. This piece was later auctioned by Eric Knowles of Bonhams. Willard was subsequently honoured with receiving an MBE from HRH Prince Charles for his services to art.

Unsurprisingly, Willard’s life is now attracting significant attention from the literary and film industries alike, each eager to secure his life story.

You can see Willard Wigan’s work at 40a Museum Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1A 1LU

Today, WordPress Version 2.8 has been released to the public. Download it manually here, or if you are on version 2.7+ you can update automatically from your WordPress admin Dashboard. Remember to backup your website files and database before you upgrade!

Highlights

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

Last year Hitwise highlighted the massive growth in UK Internet traffic to Polish websites, noting how the increase in visits reflected the growth of the Polish immigrant population in the UK (over a million). Things have changed significantly since then; and one theory is that many Polish workers are returning home to escape the recession in the UK.

Estimates as to the number of Polish people in the UK range from half a million to over a million. Mass immigration from Central and Eastern Europe has led to a rush for the ‘Polish Pound’, with everyone from multinational banks to independent grocers getting in on the act. One of the great things about Hitwise is that we can use Internet data to illustrate changes such as these. As you can see from the chart below, UK Internet traffic to a Hitwise custom category consisting of the top 100 Polish language and community websites increased nine-fold between January 2006 and January 2008.

This year the wind has seemingly changed direction:

While statistics from the Home Office indicate that the number of Eastern European migrants has fallen since the economic downturn started to bite, it is less clear whether there has been a net reduction on the number of Polish and other ‘new Europe’ citizens living in the UK. Maybe Hitwise stats might provide some evidence: if Polish Internet usage in the UK increased during the period of net immigration, surely the opposite trend would imply net migration? Well, looking at the chart below, it’s certainly the case that Polish Internet usage is declining in the UK for the first time.

Top 10 Polish websites in the UK, ranked by market share of Internet visits to the Polish sites custom category during April 2009

1. Nasza Klasa (22.8%)
2. Google Poland (15.7%)
3. Onet.eu (14.3%)
4. Wirtualna Polska (9.8%)
5. Interia.pl (4.6%)
6. poczta.wp.pl (4.5%)
7. www.o2.pl (3.2%)
8. Polish Wikipedia (1.8%)
9. Peb (1.4%)
10. Wizz Air (1.3%)

Nasza Klasa, as highlighted in our recent post Top 20 Websites and Search Engines in the UK, in the 9th most popular Social Media website in the UK, above websites like Gumtree.com with a respectable 0.63% of the overall traffic.

It’s seems like Firebox.com have a brand new website. It’s wider, it’s orange and at first glance a nice designed site. Technically the build leaves much room for improvement with inline css styles and incorrect semantics being used.

New Firebox website

Old Firebox website

Thoughts?