Fitz

A colleague recently told me about Kayak. It’s a tool for searching flights, hotels, rental cars, and cruises, but I’ve only used it to lookup up and compare flights. Kayak’s pretty useful for finding the right flight; you can choose the number of stops, which airlines you’d like to consider, and what online travel agencies you’d like to search.

Some of its more interesting features are charts that show the historical prices for flights between the cities you picked. There’s a chart for the past 90 days and a chart for every day of the month you’ve chosen to travel.

On top of its handy features, Kayak has an interface that’s both useful, easy on the eyes, and easy to navigate. Plus, the site uses advertisements sparingly. Most travel sites I’ve seen are teaming with ads, slow to load, and visually confusing. Nice job, Kayak.

I’m running Fedora 7 on my old laptop.  Take a look at Yahoo’s message to me after signing out of Flickr and clicking the “Return to Yahoo” link:

Windows, Mac, and — what, no Linux?  You’ve got to be kidding!  Firefox is only supported for Windows and Mac?  Why on earth would my operating system matter, as long as it’s the same browser?

Well, Yahoo, I recommend that you stop censoring content based on my operating system.  It’s bad enough that you’re doing it based on browser.  And this from the developers of the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) that supposedly has wide browser support!  I suppose I should at least thank them for providing the link to continue “living on the edge” and not completely banning me from the site.

I stumbled across the css Zen Garden today. This site lets web designers upload their own external css stylesheets to be applied to the site with the goal of attracting graphic artists to the wonder that is css web design. I found this one and this one particularly appealing out of the handful of designs I’ve viewed.

I’m wondering if I should make a stylesheet for css Zen Garden. I have been learning quite a lot lately about css and web development in general, but I don’t think my focus has been on the design aspect as much as the technical.

Also, I think I’d like to design this blog’s stylesheet. I’d like to put my personal touch on it, and I think it would be fun! Before I do that, though, I’ll need to get my own server space to host the blog, and I don’t have the time at the moment to look for a hosting provider.

I’ve never really been a fan of business directory listing types of websites; they tend to seem poorly designed, and I’m never sure about trusting the reviews. YellowBot.com has my interest for the moment, though, with its nice, clean interface and handy google maps. You have to register (it’s free) to write reviews or recommendations, but you can use the service to find a business and read reviews without doing anything special. YellowBot’s thing is that it’s a “local” search site — I’m not entirely sure how that makes it different from other business directories. In true Web 2.0 style, it also supports tags for each business. Give it a try!

The next time you’re in need of a tech book, you should check out nerdbooks.com.  I’ve found that this online bookstore has some really good deals on topics ranging anywhere from desktop publishing to programming languages.

If you’re not willing to actually buy a book, check out freetechbooks.com.  This site hosts links to freely-available tech books — a very useful tool for students

This is a fantastic site for HTML and CSS reference. You should bookmark it. It also has other web development topics, including XML, SOAP, and AJAX reference. Give it a try the next time you can’t remember a css property’s options.