It bears mentioning that not only is this post about the Opera web browser on the DS, but I am also writing it from within the browser as well. Honestly, I’m not sure whether that second point is more a testament to the application, to WordPress’s ability to gracefully degrade so the tools are still useful using the limited interface, or my sheer patience/stupidity to stand the hunt-and-peck required to write this.

Overall, the browser is fairly painless to use. The resolution on the DS is the biggest limitation, especially in terms of content width. But even such fairly intensive web apps such as gmail are usable from the browser, even if they do become slightly more complex to navigate.

I am half tempted to try and use the browser without the RAM Expansion afforded to me by the 3-in-1 (see my previous post about that), but I just don’t see it running very well. As it is, a little bit of sluggishness can be found on some sites, and I’m sure removng the expansion certainly wouldn’t HELP screen render times.

Using a browser like this and not having much experience with portable web browsing before now, I do wonder about the future of web standards and how long it may be until MOST sites either have WAP-friendly versions or simply all become coded to a proper standard that the content is displayed in a format specifically tailored for these types of web clients. In some ways I’m pretty late to the “mobile web” game, but really it’s still such a novelty that most developers that I know aren’t really thinking about it when they program a web site/application.

I guess we’ll see in time how long it takes before this type of surfing goes beyond something only the technophiles and the Blackberry/iPhone owners are doing.

I’m not exactly sure what happened, but here’s the brief rundown… the other day I see the “urgent security release” news about WP v2.3.3 and send off a line to my buddy who runs the server that BT is hosted on about it. He does an update after executing some backups, says he followed the instructions to the letter, and – poof. BT completely vanished from the face of the interweb. Uhhhh, ok? Now I trust he did the install fine, but unfortunately while I did disable any plugins I had running just to be on the safe side, I did NOT disable K2 as my theme. Considering I was running something around RC1, I’m not sure if that was the issue or if something else was the root of the problem. Suffice to say K2 started puking due to suddenly being unable to find a function in a WP include file.

So next step, do what I can do get K2 back up and running. I decided that rather than try and repair the current installation I’ll just back up the current one and install RC4. Which worked to an extent, but yet there was still some “set in WordPress but somehow affects K2″ settings that were still throwing some behind-the-scenes errors when trying to reference a small handful of files. All told from the “oops” point, it was probably 20 minutes of back and forth with me trying to fix things in the admin side and my buddy reporting on what PHP errors were still being thrown by the site. Good times.

Next time we do an update, K2 is being safely put on the shelf and reinstated once things appear to be all patched up. I still have some minor tweaks to make to the new install of K2, you may notice that things are a slight bit different on the site than they were before (a little less black, no HTML sidebar in the rightnav…) but I’m going to have to find the time to make these little adjustments. Soon.

I’ve known about meetup for the longest time, but as social networking sites go I’ve never really spent a lot of time looking that way. Tonight for some reason I decided to do a little google searching for local groups that may, perhaps, meet up and discuss topics that apply to webdev stuff; lo and behold, the first link sent me to meetup.com. Granted my original search term didn’t come up with any hits (I guess hoping for web standards was a little too specific?) but the “CT Web Designers and Developers” works for me!

Currently there are no scheduled meetups happening in the near future, but at least I signed myself up so I’ll be kept in the loop in case anything ever does come about. It would be really interesting to sit down with people that are within the industry, that aren’t my coworkers, who aren’t my friends, and jam out on some topics related to what we do. It never hurts to hurt new people and exchange ideas, you know?