Just a few shorts here, none of which are really worthy of a blog post in their own right, but I thought that if I stuck three of them together it might just about pass muster. So here goes.

Pointless Twittery Thing #1: Cursebird

Yes, thanks to Cursebird you can now see exactly how much you swear on twitter. This is where you discover that the word “cunt” will crop up on 0.69% of my tweets, which was somewhat a surprise to me, as I didn’t believe it was a term I used with anywhere near that degree of regularity, although I am somewhat sceptical about the rest of them too: I’m not afraid to use the words “fuck” and “shit” when I believe it is appropriate.

But I don’t believe that over 40% of my tweets contain a fuck, and that a further 40% plus contain a shit. I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s something wrong somewhere, particularly since it’s supposed to be a ‘seven day overview’ and the list of tweets they highlight are arranged between February 1st and July the 11th — in other words, none of the sweary tweets they highlight were in the last seven days.

Mind you, I do like the fact that they say:

thepickards swears like a Scottish ComedianCursebird: ThePickards

…even if I am somewhat less convinced about the accuracy of this assessment.

Pointless Twittery Thing #2: TwitterCounter

TwitterCounter will count the number of people following you on twitter. This isn’t exactly impressive, as the basic twitter web page does this — and it’s even less impressive that the TwitterCounter numbers don’t seem to agree with the official ones, although as I know the count of people who I follow on twitter is wrong (by around 200), I’m not going to assume that TwitterCounter is the one which is wrong here…

What it does do is to indicate the average number of followers you have gained during a particular day, and estimate how many followers you will have after a given time period (defaults to 30 days). Like most of the rest of this sort of thing, it doesn’t really have much of a point, but don’t let that stop you from playing with it.

The Long, Slow Death of IE6

But of more importance to those of us in the field of web design is that that the accursed browser, Internet Explorer 6, is starting to be kicked aside. There will be those of you browsing from corporate council networks (you know who you are) where the IT department’s idea of being with the times is for you to be using Internet Explorer 6, which was released in 2001, has been superseded by Internet Explorers 7 and 8, has 22 unpatched security vulnerabilities, and is generally shit.

You people are the ones forcing the rest of us to continue support for this terrible product. You should all unite, kick up a big fuss, and demand to be shifted to a browser which at the very least works properly. Or even IE7, which is at very least a lot better.

If you design for Internet Explorer 6, your site will in all likelihood not look right in other, standards compliant browsers. What you should do is to design for a standards compliant browser, and add fixes for IE6. Which is a pain in the arse. As designers, we shouldn’t really have to provide support for an 8-year old browser with a collapsing market share, and mostly, we wouldn’t. Only it’s still used in some corporate networks for some bloody stupid reason and if you want people in these networks to be able to have your site look correct, you’ve got to put a bit of effort in.

Which is why I was delighted to find an article saying that You Tube are to drop support for IE6 and Digg are considering the same thing. That’s precisely what we need. We need a few of the bigger sites to take this sort of stance, to say that they will support decent browsers that at least come within spitting distance of being standards compliant, instead of the hodge-podge mess that is IE6.

It’s not like other browsers are not available. And free. And better. So let’s encourage people, where they can, to drop support for IE6, and then when the market share has collapsed that bit further, the rest of us can stop supporting this throwback too…