Earlier this week I opened my web site UVFood.COM, the latest (well, second, not counting the blogs) Blue Forest Research site.

UVFood is a food reporting and review web site dedicated to food in the Connecticut River Upper Valley area of Vermont and New Hampshire (towns like Hanover, Lebanon, Norwich, White River Junction, Windsor, Quechee, Claremont, Enfield, Plainfield, Cornish and more). Currently its database is stuffed with restaurants but I’m slowly adding more non-restaurants to it as well; my goal is to get all the local food producers and retailers in it.

The software is still evolving as well; there are many social networking and blogging features to come to it, and I hope that it will come to a point where it will be a good piece of software to pick up and transplant to more urban areas.

Technically, it’s written in Perl using the Catalyst Framework and HTML::Mason; it uses the standard platform of Apache, MySQL and Linux.

It uses tags to help organize businesses. Rather than have categories or types of cuisines for restaurants, businesses are tagged. So a Chinese restaurant would have the tag “chinese”, and one of those odd hybrid Chinese restaurant/sushi bars would also carry the tag for “sushi”, as would any Japanese restaurants and any markets that sell sushi. Click on the “sushi” tag and you get a quick list of all your alternative sources for raw fish. Eventually you might get a blog article or two on sushi as well. At this time tags are only “editorial”, put in by the system administrators (me) but my aim is to allow all users to tag as well.
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No, this isn’t an “Internet Explorer is crap” article.

This was very frustrating. I was rewriting the CSS for the web site I’ll be opening up later today, doing a first test of the changes in Firefox, and none of the changes were showing up on the page.

Using Firebug and XRAY, the changes weren’t even appearing in the CSS as they reported it.

I started out tweaking the CSS and became more and more confused as the changes I was doing failed to make any impact on the appearance of the page. Once I found that they weren’t being recognized I thought that Firefox must be caching the CSS file and not reloading it… I found an extension to give me a handy “clear cache” button… that didn’t do it… I went into the preferences and cleared the cache by hand… no good.

I tried the page under Safari and it rendered the way I expected it to. I tweaked the CSS and saw the effects of the tweak. That was good news… but why wasn’t Firefox working? I’d never run into this kind of problem with it before.
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Wordpress 2.2.2 (and for those still on the older version 2.0.11) has been released. It primarily addresses security issues with a few other bug fixes rolled in, and isn’t expected to break any plugins. You should update.

Via: WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.2.2 and 2.0.11

A very nice new tool called XRAY showed up recently. XRAY works with the Safari, Firefox, Camino and Mozilla web browsers (unfortunately no Opera or Internet Explorer support yet). It helps you examine elements on a web page, bringing up information about their dimensions, inheritance, attributes and styling. Best of all, it requires no installation and it’s free. Just drag its bookmark to your bookmarks bar and click on it when you want to examine a web page.

Thanks very much to Western Civilisation Pty Ltd for sharing this with everyone.

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