One thing I dislike about YouTube is how people with good content don’t make the top ranks while others with relatively poor content do. A typical case of this is the channel Fred. I have watched about 2 full videos, but attempted to watch others with unsuccessful results and was thinking to myself, “who would watch this and why has a million people subscribed to this?”

Don’t get me wrong, the kid is a genius for coming up with the story and making a consistant series but I don’t see how this is funny or where the incentive is to subscribe. For this reason it frustrated me that Fred was number one until just a day or two ago. NigaHiga, who produces funny content, regained the number one spot again. I think he had it before at one point, I can’t remember.

The margin is only 3000 subscribers (Hey! That’s how many I had!) so it could still reverse. It would be interesting to see how many YouTube accounts there are and what percentage are subscribed to these channels. I have actually subscribed to NigaHiga on my personal account because of the reasons stated before. It’s also nice to see large corporations, specifically record labels not dominating the Most Subscribed list because they don’t produce content which belongs on YouTube.

To the contrary, look at the most viewed rankings and majority of the channels are record labels or music associated acts. It’s disappointing to try and see who has got (and most likely deserved) the views of top channels and to see good content when it is spammed by music videos. All music videos do is give a reason for the music in to be played on TV, go to Last.FM or Pandora for that stuff.

My channel is RhysIsKindaCool if you want to subscribe, no videos yet though, it’s mainly for subscriptions, I am unsure if I will post my videos again on YouTube or not. Time will tell.

Well if you’re like me, you like everything to look good in every browser (except IE6). Of course you can use sites like BrowserShots but there is a few things terribly wrong with it (enough to make me not actually use it). The load times are horrendous for starters, upwards of 10 minutes to an hour in some cases, probably due to the popularity of the service. I think you can pay for faster load times but that isn’t what we want (do we?). And there is way too many browsers already pre-selected. There should be common browsers and then older or less common browsers. I guess it needs a better UI is what I am getting at.

Well once again Adobe have come to the rescue with Adobe BrowserLab a.k.a Meer Meer. My first impressions are that it is unbelievably fast compared to other similar services. It also renders multiple browser images (yes, images, I thought it was straight HTML at first) at one time, so you can “onion skin” your selected browsers and see where objects are skewed. For example I found out IE7 renders the video page incorrectly on this site.

This free service by Adobe is still in beta so I suggest you get in quick. It was only by luck that I got in; I decided to see if it was usable after trying to find a multi-browser preview solution. You can find BrowerLab here and you need an Adobe ID (also free).

Included Browers/OS:

• Firefox 3/XP
• Firefox 2/XP
• Firefox3/OSX
• Firefox 2/OSX
• Internet Explorer 7/XP
• Internet Explorer 6/XP
• Safari 3.0/OSX

As you can see there is no support for Linux or Chrome (yet?). I’d expect Firefox on Linux to display similar to other operating systems. Firefox2 and Firefox3 usually display identical pages, same for IE6 and 7. Also, Chrome uses Webkit and so does Safari! Perhaps Adobe is still sorting out a deal with Google or still porting it over as everything is presented through Adobe Flash Player.

Also note, you need to comment out or remove any conditional statements that prompt the user with a JavaScript alert box. I just PHP-commented it out or you could add letters in some places to make it invalid.

Remember, sign up while you still can!

Well I haven’t actually worked on a newer version of my WordPress Theme, RubiX for sometime simply because I’ve been busy with other projects but I am resuming progress soon with heaps more options and ironing out anything that seems to cause issues.

I might release my theme (the one you are looking at) if people want it and will work on another theme!

Stay tuned for the new release!