Since I began using Thunderbird some time ago, I have missed having a new mail notification in my tray. Of all the things I miss from Windows, that’s about it, but it has been missed. It’s time consuming to have to check my email manually every so often to ensure I know when I get new mail.

Thankfully, I found a solution recently. It’s a Firefox extension and is called the Mozilla New Mail Icon extension. I had no problems installing it and it works perfectly.

Welcome to my new web site. If you have come here through my old web site address, blog.hirebrianburridge.com, please change your bookmarks and links. Hirebrianburridge.com still exists for my online portfolio and resume, but I have moved the “blog” portion to this new site. I have also completely redesigned the site, and plan to add a few more functionality/design enhancements (particularly in the comments section) soon, as well as a lot more content.

Brad Neuberg has a good post that discusses further the pros and cons of returning data to your Ajax requests, with out without markup.

This is a good post on The Ajax Response, discussing if it should be XML, HTML, or JSON. I personally think under no circumstances should it be HTML, or anything that includes markup. That violates the principle of separating the content from the style and it prevents reuse, by yourself and others.

I think deciding between JSON and XML is going to depend on your situation. XML is much more universal. With XML, you can create Web Services from your back end, and call them for display in PHP, JSP, and with Ajax. That Ajax call you are making today maybe a non-Ajax call you make later.

Google Suggest is a prime example of silliness. That data response is completely unusable in any other scenario. Perhaps, knowing Google, they have done this on purpose to prevent others from using that feed as freely, but it could be a handy service to offer and implement in other locations. The way Google has chosen to implement it, would require Google to have many versions of that response, for multiple uses.

With the rare exception, when you serve up data from your back end, think in big picture terms of making that data available to all your front end applications, and then apply style (HTML, CSS, etc) to it, once the data is in the front end.

UPDATE: Ignore my reservations about HTML in AJAX responses and see my followup post: AJAX Returning HTML (change of opinion).

These CSS3 tips will certainly come in handy and will thankfully eliminate all those corner gif’s that I see so many websites using to get this effect.