Each time Is see something like this, I’m very, very pleased. Look at the names that are in the same list as me: Matt, Dan, John and Jason! Not that I don’t admire the other ones in the list, but — oh my gosh — it’s so good to see that someone who dares to compare me to great bloggers.

Anyway, you may think I’m boring because I’m too enthusiastic about the fact that someone put me in their blogroll with some of the best-known web designers in the world.

But seriously, if you were in the same unordered list as Dan Cederholm, you’d understand. ;-) If there was a XFN value named “idol“, I’d tag an hyperlink to Dan’s website with it.

Mint? Don’t know what Mint is? Well, if you have been away from the Earth since tuesday, it’s probably normal; otherwise it’s quite not normal!

Mint is the replacement for ShortStat, the freeware statistics viewer using PHP. Both are — were (for ShortStat) — made by Shaun Inman.

First, let’s talk about the weekend buzz caused by the release of the so-waited software. Announced on the weblog of mostly every beta testers (I guess, I don’t know how many they were): Jeff Croft, Jason Santa Maria and Kevin Cornell to only name a few. There were so much good words about the final product that the community couldn’t dislike it.

I didn’t test the software so I can’t say if it’s worth 30$ for each site it’s installed on. My instinct tells me that it is a excellent product (as ShortStat is) but there are some excellent freeware or open-source alternative out there. Awstats to name only one.

Also, I don’t think my site is popular enough to spend 30$ to see max. 20 different referrers a day. If I had over 200 uniques per day, I think I’d consider buying it.

The best thing for me — but not for Shaun — would be a free version with only basic features, like last referrers, total unique visitors/day, etc. Something like ShortStat, but with that awesome green and gray design.

At school we’re currently doing something I expected but not wished: we’re learning how to design websites with… tables. Well, we’re using CSS but not for layout structure, only typography, backgrounds and such — what a waste of time.

At least I’m trying to convince my school mates that tables suck for designing.

*Sigh*.

I’m using a single MySQL database to handle all of my projects (this very blog, Élyste, Anticubed) and I realized its size was around 60mb. So I thought I should split it up in two different databases, since the tables that contain my Shortstat’s stats were around 58mb.

I don’t know if I’m right but I thought that if my projects data was in a leaner database, it could be accessed faster — because I recently experienced some slowness problems on the MySQL server.

What I did is, I exported all Shortstat’s tables to a single .sql file with phpMyAdmin and, after creating another databse in another host, I imported this 58mb .sql file in it with this command I found on a WordPress codex page:

mysql -h mysqlhostserver -u mysqlusername -p databasename < exported_file.sql

After deleting the old stats tables from my main database, its size was now 2mb, which is more convenient for daily backups than a 58mb one.

You might ask why I didn’t use the function in phpMyAdmin to import data instead of using MySQL command line? It’s because phpMyAdmin can’t handle file whose size is above 10mb.

I was getting tired of using my webmail client to check my new email messages at school, since it’s the only place I can, I gave Portable Thunderbird a try. It’s fantastic! Thunderbird is quite great, but taking it with you on your USB key is greater.

Why didn’t I try Portable Firefox you may ask? It’s because it’s already installed on every computer at school. Finally, our so-loved-favorite-web-browser is considered by the staff, since I had to install it on any computer I was using last year.

The two things that are on every blogger’s sideblog, or remaindered links, or del.icio.us account these days are:

• A List Apart 4.0; Really, great redesign, we couldn’t expect less from the major leading website when talking about web standards, but, did it really need to be featured on mostly every CSS showcase galleries? Nevertheless, I’ll still buy this t-shirt.
• Google Talk; yes, Google is not doing something new here (talking in IM) but the thing is that they do it for free. That’s always been the reason why Google is so popular and loved by all: free technologies (think about Gmail).

That’s it. The summer is over. After mostly 80 days of working in a row, with only 1 (one) day off in the whole summer, I’m glad to start something new; a brand new term at Cégep.

Since this is our second year, the courses will be focused more on “professional” skills, such as team-working skills, autonomy, professionalism. We’ll also study technologies like:

• JavaScript (good), but check the little note below this list.
• ASP (bad), I prefer PHP.
• SQL (good)
• XHTML (good)
• CSS (good)
• Flash (bad), but can be good when working on static media.

Ajax? You must be kidding, the staff only begins to take CSS seriously; they’re 3 years late. Ajax is 8 months old; Forget it.

This year will be an interesting one, probably more than last one, because of friends I now have, teachers I now enjoy, and school I don’t get lost into.

Well, at least I’m not as nervous as I was last year…

If you are studying at Cégep de Ste-Foy and reading this blog — first, congratulations, you are three. — you probably noticed that the 2005-06 agenda’s cover looks like exomel style. The cover is an exact duplicate of this weblog’s header image, isn’t it?

Well, maybe not. Perhaps that green was chosen because of the theme of this year’s agenda: environment. Nevertheless, that’s great of them. Although I didn’t see my name in the credits page.

After using WordPress for more than 7 months, I decided it was time to share my work with other WP users. My two (2) WordPress plugins are now available for downloading.

• Relative Posts is a plugin that put relative links in the <head> of a document. For example, when viewing a single entry, it will place rel="next" linking to the next entry in chronological order.
• Email Comment Author is a plugin that places an email link to each comment, thus allowing the blog owner to reply privately by email to the comment’s author. Only admins can view the link.

What are you waiting for? See the plugins!

Inspired by Jon Hicks‘ OS X browser Survey 2005, I decided to do the same thing, but with cross-platform. I’d like to know what browser you’re using, not only based on the stats I get with my referrer logs, because there’s a lot of confusion on user-agent declaration, especially about Opera, which declares itself as Internet Explorer.

So, what web browser are you using? Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, Camino, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.?