I always test my sites in the latest crop of browsers – FF, IE, Safari (Mac and Win), Opera. I’m still supporting IE6, unfortunately, but once IE8 comes out I may put a stop to that. Mostly I don’t find it too horrible; a few conditional comments usually take care of whatever issues pop up.

I was invited into a Fundable group for an annual Browsercam account and just got word that I was one of the last two that made it in. I find Browsercam to be really convenient for Mac testing since I don’t, at this point, own a Mac. (When my Dell laptop finally dies, it will be replaced with a Mac).

I know there are some pretty good free browser testing sites out there now, but when I only have to pay $25 as part of a large group and I get remote access to live machines, I can’t really pass that by.

Here are a few of the free browser testing URL’s:

• http://browsershots.org/
• http://litmusapp.com/pricing (50 tests per month are free but you only get to use two browsers of the 23 available)

More info on cross browser testing from Smashing Magazine.

Speaking of Fundable, that’s a pretty neat site in itself. You can set up a webpage to collect funding for anything, from trips to medical bills to group purchases like our Browsercam page.

I’d used phpslideshow for my website’s portfolio a few years ago, but lately it had gotten unwieldy. Because of the layout of my site, I could only fit in three columns of thumbnails, and I’ve launched quite a few projects recently. The thumbnails were way below the actual content of the page, so I decided it was time for something new.

I really like SimpleViewer after using it for a client’s site, and that’s the one I started working with first, but I needed more control over the captions.

One of my tweeple pointed out how nicely Javascript-based Highslide allows you to style captions by showing my his own nicely-done portfolio, so I decided to try it. I liked that Highslide is a thumbnail viewer and not primarily a slideshow – that’s just what I needed. I also really liked the very nice caption styling options.

I downloaded a copy and found it extremely easy to work with – in about 30 minutes I had the first few thumbnails set up and working. This is a very nice script. It took me several hours to dump all 36+ projects into the page, but I’m very happy with the results in my new portfolio.

I installed Evernote on my machines several months ago but had never really used it. However, when I had my laptop in the workshops at Web Directions North on Monday, I discovered that Evernote is actually quite convenient.

I can write or drag text into a note, or drag an image or web URL, and then tag the post so that I can search for it later. Pretty cool. I’ll probably start using it more; I can take notes about a project and tag it with the project name for easy recall. It’s kind of like a perpetual notepad.

I’m not a Javascript person – I know the bare essentials but I don’t program.

That said, today I downloaded the Yahoo User Interface library (YUI) and started working on tabsets for a client for whom I’m doing an interface design. I’ve never, ever done anything like this before, but I actually got pretty far. I have three tabsets on my page, I’m about 2/3 of the way done skinning them. I just need to find out if I can apply a background image to the content area because I wanted to have a gradient there. Otherwise, it’s all good so far.

What a great little application!

My client wanted a very simple, very sleekand Flash-like gallery for her portfolio. I installed Simpleviewer a few hours ago and just finished my first gallery (with an hour break for an Asiago cheese pretzel at Barnes & Noble) and I’m very pleased with how easy it is to use. I don’t even have to have Flash, which is convenient since my version of Flash is 5.

I’ve built a few recent sites using Wordpress as a CMS. For the most part this has worked out really well – the main thing that’s been problematic is when a user adds a new page that is not supposed to show up in the menu.

In the past I’ve had to go find that page number and add a bit of code to remove it from the list. But yesterday I came across this great plugin by Simon Wheatley to exclude pages. Works like a charm; this will give me greater incentive to keep creating Wordpress/CMS sites and encourage my clients to go this route.

Found a nice color tool this morning – it extracts multiple color palettes from any image you upload or from a random image it pulls from Flickr.

I finally got my first Blackberry – a Curve 8320 Titanium. It came in the mail today and I left it in the box because I knew once I got it out that would be the end of work for the day.

I got it for one reason – so I can catch emails while out at meetings. Some days, like last Thursday, I spend 4-5 hours away at client or networking meetings, and being able to quickly respond to an important email is critical sometimes. I figure if it gets me just one additional hour of work per month, it’s earned its keep.

I’m excited to see what it can do…