The folks who I asked to collaboratively write posts here have gone off their separate ways long ago. My own posting slowed down to a crawl a few years back too. In cleaning up the archives this January I was shocked to see no posts for all of 2009.

How did this happen? A lot of blogs taper off, die or get closed down – for, probably, all sorts of reasons. When it comes to web-graphics there are multiple reasons too, but the biggest one is that I stopped reading blogs.

When I first started blogging, it was a perfect compliment to my own efforts to learn more about CSS, HTML, web standards (and more). The blog landscape was already hopping then, but it seemed to be more personal. Then the landscape changed, re-blogging, blogs that mostly consist of posts to other blogs, and the pervasive list-as-content blogs came into prominence. It was hard to judge these new blogging formats – on the one hand, they can be a handy way to discover stuff outside of your own reading network, on the other hand, they add so much noise as to be suffocating.

We are not short of RSS reading tools, many of which have beautiful UI and thoughtfully considered functionality. I feel that none of these readers have been able to solve the essential dilemma of RSS: it feels like work. You have to maintain your list of blogs to read so that you’re not suffering under information overload, yet still getting access to relevant and timely content. This is something I’ve been wrestling with for a long time, and I believe my skill set has suffered for not mastering it.

I do want to read more, to learn more, and in a very interconnected way – to write more. My latest attempt is to take a more active jump into learning how Shaun’s Fever application works. From what I can tell, it has a paradigm that could work for me.

You’ve probably noticed that HTML5 is now the new hot. It has lots of new features (dive into some of them here) and is being supported bit-by-bit by the better browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera).

HTML5 video (an actual video tag) is being beta tested by youtube, and while the way different browsers support it varies, we’re starting to see some nice UI treatments for it.

I can’t stop looking at this Sublime player for example.

This is an MP4 video file called right into the page, with Javascript for controls and CSS for style. It even has a way of going back to a flash player for IE. And yup, unlike anything in Flash, this video plays on an iphone.

Something I used to do, when browser differences were almost ridiculously difficult to manage, is use the worst browser as my primary browser. Winner of the “Worst Browser” award changed hands often, but these days it’s championed by the corporately entrenched yet sorely outdated IE 6. The fastest way (for me) to test IE CSS layout and rendering issues, is every-step-of-the-way, locally, and as I build. As a Mac-based developer, my development time is greatly sped up if I can review work locally via Parallels (or some other Windows emulation). The problem: Parallels is a guest operating system, intended to have it’s own identity on your network. Locally served sites are not automatically accessible via Parallels right out of the box.

The good news is that it’s not hard to make your locally served websites accessible, it’s just a matter of choosing the method that suits your needs. Unfortunately there’s a lot of information on this topic out there that doesn’t quite give a complete solution, and I think some of the solutions out there are based on an older version of parallels.

So, without further ado, here’s how I’ve setup Parallels 3.0 for Mac with a guest OS of Windows 2000 and a series of websites served locally on the mac via MAMP Pro.

• Change the default parallels networking setup in System Prefs – There are 2 of them, you want to change the one that includes “(en3)”. Change it from DHCP, to DHCP with manual address Enter in an address like: 192.168.2.102
• Add an alias for the domain you are working on (bottom part of MAMP window), use the IP you entered above, save changes to mamp.
• Be sure to be on shared networking in parallels
• In parallels, open the ip, plus the port in your browser, it works!
• Use a unique port for each site, and add an alias for each site in MAMP

Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on this post about your own experiences, this is by no means exhaustive and does not account for firewall settings, and probably many other factors. I am by no means qualified to do more than just report what works for me, and would welcome expertise on the subject here.

Update

Parallels 4.0 is out now, I managed to get the setup above working there too, however there are some modifications.

• You may need to set your parallels network adapters (in system prefs, network) to “manually” configure. Instead of being labeled “(en3)” they are now labeled the more logical “host only” and “shared.” The one you want to work with is “shared”. I set my IP to “10.211.55.2″ and my subnet mask to “255.255.255.0″, the rest I kept blank.
• The default for network settings in Parallels itself has to be set back to “shared” and “shared networking” in the little web icon at the bottom of your virtual machine window (or in the virtual machine config window)