Internet Explorer 6, now almost ten years old, was once a power house in its own right. Now, the browser is drowning under its poor support for web standards, a pool of modern web technologies that it can never support, and a flood of hacks that many sites need to employ just to provide a decent browsing experience for IE 6 users. IE 6 was superseded by Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, followed by IE 8 in 2009, and recently IE 9 last week. Of course, alternatives to Internet Explorer, like Firefox, have been around much longer.

According to Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer 6 Countdown, 12% of the world still uses the ten-year old browser. The highest concentration of IE 6 users is in China, with 34.5% of the country still using it, but usage is down to 2.9% in the USA and 3.5% in the UK.

There certainly could be an economic issue or general inability to upgrade keeping IE 6 alive, as the browser only requires Windows 98 to run, while IE 7 requires Windows XP. Firefox seems to have finally pulled the old releases that were still compatible with Windows 98, but Opera supported Windows 98 all the way up to 10.63 (released October 2010), and potential users can still download it here.

With such a powerful and modern alternative to IE 6 available, even to Windows 98 users, the question remains as to why there are so many users still on such an outdated browser.

If you’re a fan of IE 6, please leave a comment and let us know why. If you work for a company that forces you to use IE 6, march on down to the IT department and demand to know why you’re forced to use such an archaic browser.

Premiered this year at SXSW, Blogger will be launching a completely overhauled user interface, putting to rest an interface that has begun to show its age. Following on its heels will be new mobile themes, and a new content discovery engine, “that lets you uncover interesting and related content based on the topics of the blog you’re currently reading.” Google promises that there will be more to come, but they are not ready to reveal anything else at this time.

2011 is starting to sound like a big year for the blogging giant, and it will certainly be interesting to see what comes of it.

New Features (and Some Comments)

• Landscape mode with extra wide keyboard
  
  This is probably the most desired feature for this application simply because it is physically painful to type a full length blog post in the iPhone portrait keyboard. I am glad that the portrait keyboard restriction is now a thing of the past!
• Link creation help
  
  
  I wasn’t sure where this feature was hiding at first, but I soon found the trick to invoking this feature. Basically anytime you are writing, you can type something that resembles a link (for example “www.” or “http”) to invoke a little prompt that asks you if you want to create a link. Answering yes will bring up another prompt asking you to fill in the URL. I think this is slick interface although some people might find it a bit annoying. It would be nice to merge these two dialogs into one dialog and also have the option to turn this feature off.
• Support for editing and creating pages
  
  There’s not much to say here. Previously you weren’t able to create/edit pages. Now you can. Note that this feature is only available for WordPress.org 2.7+ or WordPress.com blogs.
• Comment moderation
  
  This is one of my other favorite enhancements because I usually spend more time moderating comments than writing blog posts. To be able to do this on-the-go without having to continually login and deal with browser cookies is quite convenient. Note that this feature is only available for WordPress.org 2.7+ or WordPress.com blogs.
• Asynchronous publishing
  There weren’t any visible changes for this feature, but I assume asynchronous is better than what was in the earlier version.
• Photo resizing options
  
  When this feature is enabled, all photos attached to the post will be resized to be no larger than 640×480 to save space and publishing time. It’s a nice feature to have, but I don’t think I will be using it personally.

Bug in Version 1.2

I know that you are thinking, “already?” right? Indeed, the WordPress for iPhone App team has confirmed the existence of a photo bug in this version.  They are assuring us that the fix will be pushed out as soon as possible.  It’s best for you to wait on the upgrade if you post photos with the WordPress for iPhone application. If not, then you should definitely upgrade and enjoy these great new features! Version 1.21 is out with this bug fixed.  Go grab it now!

Go grab it!

You can get the WordPress for iPhone (and iPod touch) app for free at the iTunes App store.

OpenClip has come up with the much desired free application framework for the iPhone to copy, cut and paste content. It works with the WordPress iPhone application by placing the copied data to a shared location in the iPhone memory which is then accessed by other applications. The application was released on GeekBrief.tv (who were at WordCamp Dallas and are WordPress aficionados) and seems to be getting a good response.

Anyone test it out yet?

[EDIT] As pointed out by Jason in the comments, OpenClip is not an application by itself but a framework that can be used by iPhone app developers to add the copy and paste functionality to their applications. OpenClip will only support copying and pasting of text between applications that support the OpenClip framework.

I am really excited about quite a few of the features of Weblog Tools Videos. In addition to the obvious ability to browse through the latest videos and the most popular ones, readers can add videos from various video upload sites, link to videos published elsewhere, upload their own videos and most importantly, record and upload videos from their computers directly from their webcam. There are plans to allow screencast capture and record and post Skype videos and conferences as well. So go ahead and register and start uploading and linking videos.

The power of Weblog Tools Videos is in its users (which is why I ask you to register). When you upload a WordPress or a blogging video to YouTube, your video is lost in YouTube’s content stream, picked up and washed away in the barrage of new content. On Weblog Tools Videos, your multimedia will be exposed to a highly concentrated and well defined audience looking to view and absorb just the kind of media you are looking to produce. Since most of the other features, including the embedding and the social interaction is the same, you could upload your newly produced videos to Weblog Tools Videos and use it/embed it on your blog and/or social content in almost exactly the same way as before (expect an embed plugin soon). In the process, you will receive the attention of the Weblog Tools Collection audience as well as benefit from the exposure on your own site.

Are you videoing yet?

Small Potato is starting a “WordPress Premium Themes Club” where he plans to offer twelve themes during a period of one year for a price of $5 per year in membership costs. There are four themes in the club and all new members will get the four themes and twelve more over the next 12 months. Now from a users’ perspective, if you like his work, the nominal charge is a good deal for 16 new themes and considering his promotion methods and the quality of his work, I believe he will do well. The themes include support and do not require attribution for use on multiple domains.

Use the code weblogtoolscollection2873ry (good for 500 signups, another 500 will be added as soon as these are used up so that everyone gets a chance) and signup at the following link. You can read more about the club here and preview the current themes here.

If you have tried Lijit, what are your thoughts?

I used to blog actively at WordLog until academic pressures forced me to take a break from blogging. Regaining lost rhythm is difficult, and that blog hasn’t been updated in months. Other more recent pursuits have taken the upper-hand now.

So what is your strategy for maintaining the perfect blogging rhythm?, do you guys have a “Workflow” for maintaining frequent updates to your professional blogs? I’d love to hear from you. Write a post on your weblog and then pingback this post (just link to this post) so everyone else can also learn about your techniques. Optionally I will try to condense the best practices and post them here, with links to the submissions.

For me, it all begins with a good feed reader. I use Gregarius which is written in PHP, open-sourced, and gives me a default “river-of-news” view (as opposed to readers which organize posts by which blog they originate from). There are a host of plugins for Gregarius which make life simpler too. I use Gregarius to keep up to date, and as a source of inspiration for posts on my other blogs. I try to avoid replicating posts from other blogs on my own, since I believe that in the long run, reblogging is counter-productive, and leads to a depreciation in the quality of the blog. On weekends, I write a few draft posts, or if the posts are complete, I schedule the less time-insensitive ones to appear over a few days. This keeps my blogs alive and ticking. The time I invest in blogging is totally amazing on some days. I do it for the love of the things I blog about, and so I guess it is justified.

So write in dudes/dudettes, and teach me how to keep blogs going in difficult times, when “life” calls.

I think I changed my mind after looking through the scrapblogs that are already created. This could be interesting and fun for the casual blogger. I think of these as photo albums on steroids. You can even embed your scrapblogs into existing blogs. Looks like you drag and drop peices into your “slideshow” from existing objects.