What is Z.ips.ME you say? Z.ips.ME is a little open source program that my business partner Adam came up with that lets you create your own URL shortening service.

Simple to use and easy to install, Z.ips.ME gives you control of your URLs. I think it took me less than 10 minutes to get everything set it up. Follow the 5 installation steps and you’ll be golden. The installation process is just like WordPress.

Key benefits of Z.ips.ME:

• URL naming control with keywords. (i.e. I twittered about Jet Blue’s unlimited flying for $599 using my very own shortened link http://www.michael-li.com/zipsme/JetBlue)
• Peace of mind that your URLs are safe from being dead links because the service you used closed down.
• Private admin system with robust statistics with clicks, referring sites, browsers, and operating systems.
• Branding your own domain.

Don’t know how to do the installation or just don’t want to, Z.ips.ME does offer a installation services if you contact them.

This is one of the many little projects that I hope Pure Adapt, Inc will continue to develop.  We have tons of ideas.  While developing these little projects, hopefully we hit a couple more like Sports Lizard and HotteeeZ.  Those twos sites make some decent money for very little amount of work.  Minimal work and maintenance equaling continuous income is a no brainer, I think.  Like Adam said about projects that don’t pan out, ” If not, there’s really no loss for us and we can just try some more until something works. How fun is that?“  That’s the truth, these are not high risk projects that we’re taking on and it’s fun as H E double hockey sticks.

Back on to Z.ips.ME.  If you’re looking for your very own URL shortening service Z.ips.Me is simple to use and gets the job done.  Check out the Z.ips.Me for more information and screen shots.

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INTERNET EXPLORER TOTALLY BLOWS

From a web designers perspective, IE really sucks and specifically IE7 and lower. With the recent release of IE 8 it will certainly be better but as of March 2009 there are still 41% (via w3Schools.com/browsers) of people still using IE7 and lower. The sad thing is people are still using IE6 in that percentage too.

Why does Internet Explorer suck? It basically sucks at rendering webpages and isn’t compliant with w3c standards.  Until the release of IE8, Internet Explorer was so far behind in web browsing standards.  This just creates extra work for developers because they not only have to develop for one brower, they have develop for multiple browsers becaues IE wants to be different and be sucky.  This will continue to be problem for while until the old IE browsers are phased out which may not be for a few years.

As we were developing the new Detailed Image site, coming soon, we ran into some wacky problems that can’t be ignored because there is still such a large percentage of people using IE7 and lower.  IE has been such a pain in the ass, so I want to share the problems that I’ve encountered while developing the new Detailed Image for Internet Explorer.

Stupid IE Problems

• PNG image transparency support.  This has been a known problem with Internet Explorer for a long time and even with the release of IE7 it wasn’t fixed.
• In IE7 a repeating transparent PNG image will cripple the browser.  This problem freaked me out because this could’ve meant developing a whole new design for IE7 and lower.
• In IE6 and lower there are major problems rendering css padding and margin.
• When using a css list style image as your default list style, list-style:none will not work.  You must use list-style-image:none.
• CSS list-style-position inside and outside may create funky list layouts.
• No CSS table support in IE7 and lower.  CSS tables are the future of  web design.

Those are some stupid problems that IE creates for web developers.

If you’re developing for Internet Explorer a must have tool for is IE Tester.  IE Tester is a great tool that lets you view websites from IE5.5 – IE8.  You can also add the plugin DebugBar for easier debugging of IE problems but this is in no way comparable to the Firefox plugin Firebug,  where you can make lives changes to a webpage which I highly recommend for web developing.

On the new Detailed Image we’re making a push for people to upgrade their browsers if they are using IE7 or lower with a subtle message at the top of the site and warning sign.

Users of IE7 or lower please upgrade your browser for a safer and better internet browsing experience.

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