There is a widespread assumption by many bloggers that comments on old posts are mostly spam. There are several WordPress plugins to prevent commenting on old posts, even posts as recent as one month old like, for example, Akismet. This is plain wrong and can result in losing many valuable comments. Such practices should be discouraged by bloggers. Let me explain why.

How crappy is your Java code? Often we find others code crappier than ours, especially if we are given to maintain their code. Crappy code authors are almost always happy with their code quality. Can we quantify crappiness?

Microsoft was the sole leading browser (all versions combined) in 2002-2003 with over 85% of market share. The earlier leader Netscape had by then sunk into oblivion. Flash forward 2007 and we can see Microsoft Internet Explorer barely holding on to over 50% market share with its fortunes steadily declining. It is still at 57% (all versions combined) as of October 2007.

Cross-browser and cross-platform testing is a bane as well as a requirement for web applications. Consider Internet Explorer on Windows. There are two major version 6 & 7, not to mention still used 5.5. You need to either use different machines or multi-boot machines or use hacks to run them simultaneously or virtualization software like VMWare; not of them are really easy to setup and use for common web developer. Then you have Opera & Firefox (we develop in Firefox so it gets tested first in our case). Did I mention testing on Mac with Safari, Firefox and other browsers? Oh, and don't forget Linux too. Are you feeling overwhelmed? Let's see how you can solve most of these problems.