• I’ve installed and built out 3 WordPress sites and have become quite proficient at the inner workings of WP.
• I’ve installed and built out 2 bbPress sites and have similarly become quite proficient at the inner workings of bbPress.
• I’ve integrated 2 bbPress and WordPress sites.
• I’ve styled 3 WordPress and 2 bbPress sites utilizing CSS, a language I knew NOTHING about three months ago.
• I’ve learned to leave graphic art up to graphic artists.
• I’ve learned that Google Chrome needs to develop a tool as useful as Firebug to win over the developer world.
• I’ve learned how fast Chrome is, and how slow Firefox is becoming.
• I knew IE6 was shit – nothing new there.
• I’ve styled (from a comp) a WordPress site and a bbPress site to look like one and the same.
• I’ve fixed countless WP theme bugs and while I’m not a proficient PHP developer quite yet, I’ve learned to back track to the source of the bug.
• I’ve learned the only real frustration I have with WordPress is the “open source nature” of plugins and themes and the compatibility issues with upgrades.
• I’ve learned that the quality code/hours of coding ratio is a factor of 10+X  greater with a team of 2 when compared to a team of 10.
• I’ve learned that a team of 3, maybe 4 is probably ideal.
• I’ve been reminded of how much fun it is to build something.
• I’ve been reminded of how nice it is to not visit an airport every week.
• I’ve learned that most people aren’t motivated by the end of year bonus, rather a work environment where they are appreciated and can make a difference.
• I’ve grasped how debilitating chaos, confusion, and lack of leadership can be to a company.  Luckily it’s been from an arms length.
• I’ve realized how foolish you would be to start a corporate/personal website from scratch – the blogging and CMS tools are evolved – unless you are doing it for job security purposes.
• I’ve been reminded of how easy it is to come up with great business ideas – and how hard it is to execute.
• I’ve been reminded that execution wins.

I’ve neglected this site more than I should have over the past few months, partially due to the amount of time I have spent building out other sites.  The good news is that they are approaching public release and I can soon finally start talking about them.  Amidst all of this, my business partner and I have started Praxis, LLC and are working hard on our first application, HouseFly (which will go into private beta in the next 10 days).  More on that later, this post was really just aimed at reminding myself how much I’ve enjoyed the last three months.

In my former life as a VP of software development for a development/consulting company, we estimated that we had to carry 25%-30% extra developers, because of IE6.  That means out of every 1o developers we had, 25%-30% of those man hours went into “dealing with” IE6.  We had a number of screens that we replicated in our applications, one screen utilized by IE6 and the other version utilized by the rest of the browsers.  Granted, the company was 100% focused on large enterprise customers as the user base, which has been slow to adopt IE7 and IE8 as their corporate browser of choice.

For those not familiar with software development, the vast majority of developers develop software using the Firefox browser.  The browser has a number of developer tools (mainly 3rd party add-ons) that substantially increase the productivity of the developer.  And by now you’ve probably deduced that not all browsers are equal. IE6 has a lot of known bugs that were just never fixed by Microsoft and it just wasn’t built to utilize many of today’s technology like off-line capability, CSS/Layouts, and a good JavaScript engine.  So, over time, developers hacked their way around IE6 (and to some degree IE7 & IE8) as it couldn’t be ignored even though it should have been put to bed.

Did you know?

IE6 was released in August 2001, here are a few major events that have taken place since then:

• 9/11 happened two weeks after the release of IE6
• Terminator 2: Judgement Day was the top grossing movie of the year
• Life House – Hanging by a Moment was the top song of 2001
• Enron scandal starts to unfold
• 13 months later Firefox 0.1 released (most importantly they are now at version 3.5.3)
• I’m 8 years older than I used to be

Introducing a smack down, corporate America style.  Google has release a beta version of Google Chrome Frame, an application that has to be installed on the computer.  But what it does, via a single meta-tag in the code, is serve up the application inside of IE6, IE7, or IE8 utilizing Google’s Chrome engine.  So in essence, Google has made Microsoft’s browsers work.

I gave it a quick test drive and it seems to work quite well, granted it wasn’t thorough testing.  The image below is an image of my Wyoming Road Trip site in native IE6 with all of the IE6 “hacks” removed.  What you can’t tell is that I’m attempting to mouse over the CSS driven menu bar.

Native IE6 Mouse Over CSS Driven Menu Bar

You may have to click on the images to see them full size to see the quality differences.  Notice the quality of the images in native IE6, the blue “shading” or whatever it is above the menu bar, and the twitter image without legs.

Now lets look at the same image also in IE6, running Google’s Chrome Frame.

IE6 Using Google Chrome Frame

Notice a few things, the first is that the IE logo on the top left corner of the screen is replaced by Chrome’s logo – very nice touch.  Also notice how much more crisp the images look, no more blue “shading” above the menu bar, the menu bar actually works when you mouse over it, and the twitter bird has legs!

I can’t even begin to express how cool this is, and the impact it COULD have.  I fear however, that it will not have the impact that one would hope for.  The only reason that IE6 has even 1% market share let alone the 20+% it does have, is once again, because many enterprises have not moved to IE7 or IE8 for various reasons.  They usually state security and training issues, I call BS on both of those excuses.  But the problem is that there are still a lot of enterprise users that don’t have access on their desktop or laptop to install software – hell if they could they would be running IE8, Chrome, or Firefox in the first place.  So while Google has successfully slapped Microsoft in the face, will the adoption of this frame really make a substantial difference, or just be another distraction for developers to worry about?  I hope the former, what do you think?