Your chocolate filled christmas calendar will be empty by tomorrow and nothing more than plastic and cardboard.

Whereas a bunch of online calendars that revealed helpful artices every day throughout December, have now grown to an Eldorado for developers, 3D designers and other passionate collectors. These really made the long wait for Christmas Eve a lot easier. Respect to all the contributors and brilliant writers for giving this to us.

I also like to wish all readers and visitors of my blog Happy Holidays and a Merry Christmas! Have a good time of contemplation and enjoy the feast!

Mozilla just released Operator, a very promising microformat detection extension for Firefox that demonstrates the usefulness of semantic information on the Web, in real world scenarios.

In creating Operator [...] goals were to create something that was useful to microformat developers as well as users looking to explore microformats. As such, the Operator Toolbar can be displayed in two modes: Microformats mode and Actions mode.

If you’ve not heard of Microformats yet: Those are simple markup structures that allow expression of semantics in an (X)HTML web page, making it easier to read for machines and easier to built for authors because of the adaption to standards.

In Development Diary: Taming the Fisheye, developer Alexei presents the development process of one of their user interface components — something that looks and works like the Mac OS X Dock (A clicked icon even jumps up and down).

In relation to the bunch of JavaScript dock menus that are found over the web, the one from Nitobi really seems to be the best working one if you look at the outcome. Unfortunately it’s pure JavaScript. No degrading. No replacement. But as the component is not finished yet, maybe they’ll improve accessibility until the promised release in early spring.

This reminds me to revisit a proof-of-concept script I started a few months back. I experimented to build an OS X dock-flavoured Web menu, based on a pure unordered list and the Script.aculo.us effect library. Maybe I will digg into that after Christmas again and then present some results, too.

The german hosted blogging-service blogg.de accidentally deleted all comments from user weblogs last Friday. This worst case scenario occured when the administrators tried to fight down comment spam platform-wide. And due to corrupt backup files, all previously saved database dumps from mid-August to December 5th are useless. [#]

My 2 cents:

1. Shouldn’t large user-content-driven sites have local test-environments?
2. Shouldn’t important backups always be checksummed?

Of course this will never happen here, thanks to WordPress Database Backup.

Two keyboard shortcuts in Firefox 2 on OS X really annoy me — one of them used in the extension LiveHTTP Headers:

Shift + 7

Whenever I want to type an URL with http:// I can’t type a standard slash, because this brings up the Firefox search bar at the bottom of the browser window. When did they build in that one?

Option + L

This key combination is supposed to print the @-character (mostly important to type E-Mail adresses). Unfortunately the extension LiveHTTPHeaders — an extension to visualize the traffic under the hood — uses this shortcut to bring up the Live Headers Sidebar.

There are already many complaints in the suggestions area — the first reporting of this issue even was in March 2005. This plugin is really useful and absolutely cool, no question. But should it be that hard to change the shortcut keys in the code or implement a user-defined one?

These misused shortcuts give an extra bonus on annoyance when filling out web-forms, because that’s where you usually type in an E-Mail or Web adress (using slashes and the at-symbol).

Any suggestions on how to “repair” this?