Expression Web Designer and Internet Explorer? Think Again!

Yeah, you read that right. To re-iterate: if you want to code a site and expect it to load even semi-reasonably in Internet Explorer 6 or 7, you probably don’t want to write it or even touch it in Microsoft’s Expression Web Designer. At any rate, not this version of Expression.

Expression Web Designer is very Web 2.0 compatible. It’s the only really big HTML interface that validates directly against the W3C standards, by default checking page-display compatiblity against CSS 2.1, instead of against FF, IE6, or something. It does a very good job at that too, but unfortunately, it’s far ahead of Microsoft’s time.

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Bad Behavior Patch for Opera Users

Bad Behavior is an excellent ‘profiling’ plug-in that deters most spam bots and attacks on web-based scripts, especially blogs, wikis, and forums. It uses a very detailed and sophisticated combination of checks and algorithms to create a ‘spammer’s profile’ and if a visitor to your site fits it, it’ll block them.

The algorithm is so good that there are almost no false positives, and together with a decent spam plug-in like Akismet or Spam Karma 2, you’re blog will be forever clean. But it has a problem with Opera. Most builds of Opera trigger a false alarm, leaving your blog reader-less, especially with the release of Opera 9, an excellent browser in all rights, but there is a solution. Continue reading

ReactOS Reviewed: The Next Windows?

The idea is simple: Linux isn’t always the best non-Windows operating system. Windows is excellent and unbeatable for quite a few people and tasks. But neither is perfect. Almost exactly 10 years ago, a team began to search for a fix. In 1996, Linux was unusable for anyone but the most technologically ‘gifted’ and Windows 95 wasn’t anywhere near as complex as Windows today.

Originally called FreeWin95, the project had a decent idea, but terribly organized, implemented, and coded. Two years later, the dos-clone kernel was dumped, and the real project began. It was called ReactOS, and this time it was for real.

ReactOS is a 100% Open Source (mostly GPL) rewrite of the Windows Kernel. At its heart, ReactOS is an initiative to create an open-source project that is fully compatible with the all Windows NT-based drivers, applications, and services.

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Spoofed Spam from NeoSmart's Domain

An hour ago a spamming agency seems to have sent out thousands of messages from random @neosmart.net email adresses. NeoSmart Technologies was not involved in this spamming attempt (check the message headers!) and we’d like to assure everyone that we never have and we never will condone spam to come from our servers.

These messages were sent to random addresses, so whether or not you’re a member here doesn’t matter. Odds are, you won’t receive one of these emails, but we just wanted to make that all clear.

Some background on domain spoofing:

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Inventors of Feed Icon Scrap Design, Start Anew?

If the Mozilla has one cross-browser innovation fully licensed and acknowledged across the world, it’s their feed icon. The now infamous feed icon even has websites dedicated to it, and has successfully been adopted by Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and the much of the rest of the browser herd.

But is it about to change? Just today, the Mozilla Foundation released (on it’s official wiki) concept art for the new Firefox 2.0 theme, and something caught our eye. Is it possible that along with the new UI for tabs, buttons, and boxes, Firefox will ship with a brand-spanking-new RSS icon? It sure seems that way!

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Internet of the Future II: A Common Platform

Following our first article in the “Future of the Internet” series earlier this week, we have another story for another era. “Blending the Browser” focused on the client-side of things, how the software developers will adapt their programs to meet the needs of corporate and home users around the world. Part two of this series covers the internet protocols themselves and the impact it will have on the web as we know it.

Judging by previous trends and publications, HTTP is here to stay. As far as server-based communications are concerned, HTTP offers a very versatile and easy-to-use universal medium of communication, at decent speeds, and with relatively few draw-backs. Even if a better protocol could be implemented, it is highly doubtful that it any from-scratch implementation will ever replace HTTP simply because of how widespread it has become, and how much everything depends on it.

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CompleteRSS: Content-Complete Feeds Raring to Go!

NeoSmart Technologies is proud to announce the release of CompleteRSS 0.1 Beta.
CompleteRSS is the only WordPress plugin used to guarantee complete article text in RSS feeds. Some of the things it does are things that end-users can change on their own (such as selecting full-text entries), but it’s biggest feature is a work-around for the much-contested ‘upgrade’ for WordPress 2.1: RSS and Atom feeds will not show text past the <!–more–> tag!

CompleteRSS is the only way to get WordPress 2.1 to display the full article content to display in your feeds, since there are no options to disable this ‘feature’ of WordPress 2.1. CompleteRSS is also the only way to display your feeds entirely free of the heavily-abused ‘content:encoded’ tags.

CompleteRSS has been implemented here on The NeoSmart Files, and you can check it out in our proudly FeedBurner-powered Atom feed: http://neosmart.net/blog/feed/

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The Real Deal with Microsoft Virtual PC

Longhorn Blogs recently reported about the dismal lack of activity from Microsoft’s Virtual PC camp, and what they would like to see in it. But we think there is a bigger question afoot: why Virtual PC?

VirtualPC is dead. It has been dead since Virtual Server became free. Virtual Server is Microsoft’s ultimate virtualization framework; and the only real VMware competitor.

The only problem is: Virtual Server is made for enterprise environments and server-based implementations. Kind of like VMware’s ESX server, but without the linux. Virtual Server is relatively fast, definitely powerful, and supports a large variety of guest operating systems. Virtual Server isn’t anywhere near as user-friendly as VPC and most certainly not even comprable to VMware, and it’s much, much, harder to set up than either of them.

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NeoSmart IRC

NeoSmart Technologies now has an IRC channel on SlashNet…
Our address: irc://slashnet.org/NeoSmart

This will be our temporary address until we find or write a decent IRC script to run from our local servers, but until then, please join us!

We also have a new userbar for EasyBCD:
EasyBCD Addict

Internet of the Future I: Blending the Browser

Every couple of months a tech magazine will print an article about technology in the future, covering everything from wrist-watches to laptops to cable television, but no one ever discusses what the internet will be like five, ten, or fifteen years from now – because no one knows. This is the first of several articles NeoSmart Technologies is publishing regarding the internet of the future: how we’ll use it, what it’ll be like, and where it’ll go from there.

The growth and expansion of the internet and its associated programs and technologies can best be compared to that of a living species: the laws and theorems revolving around the expansion of technology provide sufficient evidence that its growth cycles can be interpreted in the same way as that of an organism – and from there we have our first glimpse at the future of the internet.

In studying the growth patterns of such a technology, it becomes apparent that the model being followed is one of heavy and very spontaneous growth fueled my innovation and necessity, followed by long periods of stabilization and standardization. The best example would be in the 1990s when the browser wars between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

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