Web Development

Google assploded the blogosphere yesterday with the slip up announcement of Google Chrome, their very own webkit and V8 powered web browser. Today they released the beta version and being a sucker for anything new I had to give it a whirl. I decided to use Chrome for the whole day to see if it really is worth all the fuss.

I have to say, I’m very impressed with it so far. It is clearly a beta, there are plenty of rough edges and more than a few sites have problems with the new Javascript engine (although no crashes so far, and I don’t think there are any memory leaks), but there is a lot to like and clearly a lot of potential in Chrome.

Small projects are always a breath of fresh air, specially when in the midst of a major, time consuming (and sometimes often frustrating) project. I had the opportunity to tackle 3 of them over the last few weeks, and it was great to be able to flex some neurons on sites that take a few days to about 2 weeks to complete.

I’ve been tagging away all the cool stuff I find through Delicious for as long as I can recall (Their Firefox extension makes it ridiculously easy and addictive!). Wordle takes all my tags and pretties ‘em up. Yumm, I want a shirt with this.

Fine Upgrades is a product catalog site for the company, showcasing the distributor’s products, and linking the visitors to any retail outlet that they can purchase the items from. The site is straightforward, with the usual pages, story nodes made into news items, and a few content types to deal with the products, reviews, and dealers.

Acmeweb Solutions’ Galan did the site’s excellent design, while I integrated the layout with Drupal and did all the customization needed.

Finally added in 3 of my completed projects to my portfolio. All 3 are based on Drupal (5.x) and I should be writing about each of them very soon. I will probably start with Ryan's Fine Upgrades this week, with the rest to follow.