What's New On These Pages: March 2004

Next month: April 2004

• Thursday 25th March
  Bought two more tickets for Saturday's main draw rollover.

• Saturday 20th March
  Won my 32nd £10 prize tonight on my first ticket.

• Sunday 7th March
  Had to adjust my Gecko checking to look for "Gecko/", because Safari on the Mac very naughtily says "(KHTML, like Gecko)" in its user agent string. This means Mac Safari users will see the Mozilla/Firefox line too now.

  I've now also reformatted the Gecko message to include the percentage figure of Gecko site visitors. The percentage is calculated from the last 31 days of access logs and re-generated overnight via a daily cron job. I've also put the message in both "manual" and "automatic" pages now, so the whole site is covered by it (yes, including this page).

• Saturday 6th March
  Doing my bit for Gecko evangelism, the bottom of all pages now have a JavaScript check for a Gecko browser (this is a family of Web browsers using the same rendering engine and includes Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape 6, Netscape 7, K-Meleon, Galeon, Epiphany and Beonex) and if you aren't running such a browser, it suggests that you try out Mozilla or Firefox.

  No, the pages don't depend on any particular browser at all before you ask, it's just that I bet a fair chunk of visitors to my site have only heard of Internet Explorer and yet there's far better free browsers out there. If I can help just one person switch away from IE to a Gecko browser, then putting the footer message in was worth it.

  Now let's see how many people complain about the footer message ! Before you get all "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" about my small one-liner text message at the bottom of each page, try Mozilla or Firefox for yourself first. If you can give me some good reasons why users shouldn't switch to them (and "IE-only Web sites" don't count - that's a fault of the Web site designers and not the browser !), then I may reconsider keeping the message on the site.

  For your information, only a pitiful 2.1% of visitors to this site are Gecko browser users (and, yes, I'm one of them), so clearly the non-Gecko users need to be told where to find a better browser :-)

• Tuesday 2nd March
  Bought four more tickets for tomorrow's double rollover main Lotto draw.

Previous month: February 2004

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