Google will be phasing out support for Microsofts eight year old browser starting in March. This is great news for anyone who has to develop for IE6 and for users who haven't found the benefits of a modern browser.

You can sign an online petition on the number 10 website to force the Government to phase out IE6 in its departments.

Full details from Google:

"In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team"

Just a quick update this week as I've been busy working on my book. I've launched a new website that has all the best deals from Argos.

www.argosdeals.co.uk

Check it out for some great offers.

Cinema chain Cineworld have put in some serious work into their mobile site over the past few months concentrating heavily on exploiting latest technology to improve usability.

The updated site fits nicely on the iPhone screen, automatically finds your local cinema and suggests others nearby.

After selecting a film you can click on a time to book tickets through the mobile site.

The improvement in using the mobile site over the normal site on the iPhone is huge and finding film times for your local cinema is much faster.

The Google Chrome beta for OS X is out and I've been using it for a few hours - here are some of my thoughts:

1. Dislike: Not being able to see the full page title is annoying

In all other browsers the page title is shown on the top bar of the window, this isn't such a problem for sites such as ImAFish where the title doesn't change but for Google Mail for instance the title changes when you have new mail.

2. Like: The speed is awesome

The whole experience in Chrome feels fast, pages load quickly and the interface is snappy. Compared to Firefox this is a huge improvement (scrollbar lag has been driving me crazy recently in FIrefox), the speed seems to be on par with Safari.

3. Dislike: No status bar is annoying

When you mouse over links in other browsers you can see almost the full address of where the link is going in the status bar. However in Chrome you just get a little box appear at the bottom which shows you a truncated version of the link. Again I don't see what Google hope to gain by not showing the whole link.

Above: When putting your mouse over the title of the article only part of the URL is shown.

4. Dislike: Tab Mess

Often at work I will have at least 15 tabs open with various projects on the go - Google Chrome makes it very hard to distinguish between them when you have a lot open.

Adding in lots of tabs doesn't scroll them or add them onto another line - you just get lots of little tabs.

5. Like: Maximum Real Estate for Web Page

By removing titles, the status bar and other parts of the browser it does mean you have the maximum amount of space to see the actual web page, though as I've pointed out this does have its downsides. 

About two months ago I sold my first website on Flippa.com, a site dedicated to buying and selling websites and domains. Launched earlier this year by a team from the internet resources site Sitepoint the marketplace is like Ebay for buying and selling websites.

The site I sold was www.ipodhistory.com, I originally bought the site from the Digital Point Forums about 18months earlier for $180 (£90 at the time), it was my most expensive site I had bought and was a relatively big gamble. Over the following year and a half I invested in search engine optimisation, added new content and grew a community. In this time I tripled the traffic and advertising revenue. 

I listed the site on Flippa and immediately received interest and a number of offers. After around two weeks the site sold for $2000 (£1300). I was paid through PayPal and the transaction went very quickly and smoothly. 

You can list sites on Flippa either with an auction style listing or where people submit private bids for a site. Flippa charge a listing fee with various optional extras (about $28 for my site) plus a final value fee of 5% (with a cap of $498). 

It's sad to see the iPod History site go from my portfolio but I'm more than happy with the return on investment. 

On Sunday disaster struck, my hard drive corrupted and OS X wouldn't boot. I feared the worst but had been backing up for the past two years using OS X Time Machine. Could it be as simple as restoring from backup to a new drive?

My first job was to install a new hard drive, this is easier said then done in the all in one iMac. Fortunately this video from camodesto went through step by step, first removing the glass front, then the aluminium case and then the screen. Finally you can replace the hard drive, I opted for an upgrade to a 1TB drive.

After booting from the Snow Leopard DVD I created a partition on the new hard drive then restored from Time Machine. The process took around seven hours to copy my 300gig of data from the External drive.

When I rebooted my Mac had been restored to 5pm on Sunday, 90mins before it had died. All my files were restored, even my Firefox tabs were saved.

For the past four months I have been developing a new service called Shopinsky. I've been excited to talk about the site (and may have let slip a day early by joining the Facebook group) however had to wait until launch before I could blog about it.

The idea is simple, each town in the country has a Shopinsky Page, businesses can join Shopinsky to be part of their local town. They can post messages via the website or sms that are distributed on the site, to the local Twitter account, a RSS feed and a daily mailing list.

For businesses Shopinsky offers a great way to connect to local consumers through social networking services. Building up a following on sites such as Twitter or your own blog is a lot of work, the idea with Shopinsky is that audience is already there for you, all you have to do is send your updates/offers.

For shoppers the site offers a great way to find out about local businesses, offers and freebies. We have made it as easy as possible to interact with Shopinsky and understand that people want content delivered to them rather than having to search for it. Therefore people can bookmark their towns page, subscribe to the RSS feed in their news reader, follow the local town on Twitter or subscribe to a daily email. 

Shopinsky is also great for tourists who want to find out what is on offer before visiting a town, they can easily see local restaurants, shops and services all from the towns page.

The site is based on Drupal 6x and heavily uses CCK, Imagecache, Views and a number of custom made modules. Where possible I've tried to keep to the Drupal api's and systems. For example messaging uses the Drupal comments system, categories uses Drupal Taxonomy and profiles are built from content types and custom fields.

By using Drupal as the starting blocks we have managed to save months (if not years) of development and adding new functionality is a much easier process.

Find out more on www.shopinsky.co.uk