blueprint css has a new home
The Blueprint CSS framework made a pretty big splash late last year in the web development community. Strangely, after a few months the creator, Olav Bjørkøy, disappeared. The project was hosted on Google Code with a corresponding Google Group, and unfortunately had no other administrators. As the discussion board filled with spam, people began to question if the framework would ever make a comeback. Many expressed their displeasure with the situation and left, presumably, for good.
Flash forward to these past couple weeks and a group of developers are resurrecting Blueprint. The project is now located at blueprintcss.org which links to a new repository hosted at GitHub and a new Google Group. Check it out.
Also, if anyone knows of a good post comparing CSS frameworks, I’d love to see it.
A potentially dangerous new Firefox extension concept
Now I’m not trying to be the boy who called wolf here… but I do believe there is a potentially bad development on the brink of occurring in the Firefox extension world.
That development is the inclusion of the extensions author’s own referral links to any website that utilizes url based referral codes.
So far, I have only found one example, and it is used in a purely benevolent way. I am referring to the I ♥ Miro extension. According to the site “The extension works by simply adding our referral code to the URL when you browse on Amazon. If you follow an Amazon referral link from someone else’s site, this extension will not override their referral code.”
But what happens when an eager developer decides to include their Google Adsense id in every instance of a Google ad anywhere on the web? There is no way for a website owner to ever even know they got bypassed. In addition, how many people are going to investigate the code of every extension they download. Next to none. The only potential safeguard available is for those extensions that wish to be listed on Mozilla’s Firefox Add-on site be screened for certain types of code to make sure they don’t try to pull such a move.
I’m not sure what the solution is to this issue, but I’d sure like Mozilla or the community to start coming up with it before it becomes a rampant problem. Thoughts?