Weblogs.com watch – high water rising

Continuing the Weblogs.com watch, it looks like everyone’s favorite list of updated weblogs survived the blogstorm following the MacWorld keynote pretty well. In fact, it’s hit three or four consecutive high water marks in the last three days.

This seems like a good time to update the graph I did in October showing the high water marks over time. For a while in November and December it looked like the rate of growth was slowing down, and the slope is slightly less than it looked then. But if the activity over the last couple of days is anything to go by, it looks like we might expect a slope increase in the next few months.

Here is the updated graph:

weblogs.com high water growth is approximately linear at 2.74 weblogs a day

I still can’t separate how much of this is due to new weblogs coming on line vs. old ones blogging more frequently. I suspect that this would require more data than Weblogs.com currently collects.

Welcome Macintouch readers

Looks like Macintouch printed my letter about my size comparison between the different PowerBook models in their reader report on the new models. Other reports on the page include the experience of someone who had a 15.2″ TiBook in the pipe from the Apple Store (they’re offering him the new lower price point and honoring the “double RAM” deal since he placed his order before 12/31) and some details about FireWire 800, the new double-speed implementation of FireWire.

On a more personal note, thank God for the fine hosting services of Weblogger.com. If I had gotten as many hits while my site was on editthispage.com, the site would have fallen over (and did, quite a few times). Right now I’m up to somewhere north of 650 hits and climbing…

Safari: my $0.02

Apple made a new browser available in public beta yesterday. This doesn’t happen every day. There was, naturally, a rush to get it, and then a rush to test it. I think every web designer and blogger in the world was thinking what I was: “Great, another browser that I have to worry about. How many things on my pages will break with this one?”

In this case, for me, not much breaks. If you’re reading my page using Safari, the title of each post will appear in the same font and size as the paragraph text below it. It should instead appear in Verdana, Helvetica, or your favorite sans serif, at 14px (slightly larger), as specified by my CSS rule for the H3 tag. Also, periodically a page will load but not show any content or only show a few images on a page; reloading generally fixes the problem. So far I haven’t found anything else broken yet. It does seem a little faster than Chimera, though I haven’t done any stopwatch exercises.

There are a bunch of other folks looking at the browser, though, chief among them Mark Pilgrim (who has both an initial review, in which he strongly states that the lack of tabbed browsing is a showstopper, and Safari Information For Web Designers, in which he summarizes rendering successes and failures of the browser). and Mena Trott (whose article contains links to most of the other big articles on the subject, including the changelog from KHTML to Safari). Finally, here is the blog of Dave Hyatt, one of the team members, in which he addresses some of the initial review comments.