Last November, the Mozilla Developer Network put out a survey targeted toward Web developers and raised a call to action. Although it doesn’t seem they ever posted the final set of results (they did some preliminary results at the link above), they had over 5,000 developers respond from 119 countries. Pretty cool.

What I find even cooler, though, is that they took the time to respond to individual responses. In my feedback, I told them I always seemed to have trouble finding alpha/beta versions of Firefox and Thunderbird to test. What I received last month was a friendly response from Alix Franquet with a helpful list of places to go to find early releases of Mozilla products.

Also in my response to the survey I mentioned how I was having serious memory usage issues with Firefox 3.5 – and I wasn’t alone. It’s also not the first time I’ve run into this problem, either. I think 3.5 peaked out at ~1.7 GB  of RAM – insane. Alix asked if 3.6 was better, but at the time I still hadn’t upgraded because Google Gears and, more importantly, Ubiquity weren’t supported. Having upgraded now, I can happily say 3.6 is much better at managing memory. Right now it’s idling at 280 MB, or 17% of what 3.5 would so often near.

More important than getting the information I commented on (after all, I usually found the product version I was looking for after a while of searching) is the fact that the company – a big one, at that – took the time to respond to an individual user’s concerns. Even when I had issues over two years ago with Firefox’s memory usage, a Mozilla rep reached out then, too. It really goes a long way to building a foundation of trust and loyalty in a customer when they know their needs are being addressed.

It’s been a few years in the making, but I’ve finally moved my blog from shatteredreality.com to mikebranski.com, and I’m working on updating the photography content that was here originally – for now it’s available at http://mikebranski.com/v1/.

When it came down to it, it was just too much work trying to keep three sites up and active and full of content, which led me to update none of them. Far from ideal. It’s also a lot easier to give people one link instead of three and makes it less confusing when they don’t have to try to decide which one they want to visit.

Next steps will be to take my web development stuff over at Left Right Designs and bring that here as well, which will coincide with me getting some of my projects set up on GitHub. Over the next few days I’ll also clean up my blog categories and tags that came over with my old blog and start filling out some of my pages.

Until then, have a look through some of my other posts while I get settled.

Update: For those of you who subscribed to my old feed, be sure to grab the updated link! The old Feedburner one will still work, but you should update yours anyway.

I carved up Yoda on the right, Cassie did the bats on the left.

I wish I was as cool as Josh Scanlan. Check out his brutally sarcastic posts, laced with an asshole preservative, and topped with a layer of “I don’t give a shit.” Oh, and sometimes he has polls. Go check it out, I’ll wait here… Back? Offended yet? Don’t be; he just says what you’re thinking and you’re envious of that, so you take it out through misdirected anger. Not quit crying and go read some more.

Pretty quiet on the blogging front these past few months, “pretty quiet” being a huge understatement. I haven’t been keeping up with my blogroll either. Could go on and on about why that is, but all that matters is I’m writing now.

Let me just say this: Whoever says Macs are more stable than PCs are full of shit. I purchased a MacBook a few weeks ago, and while so far I’m enjoying it, programs crash like I didn’t believe possible. As Seth W. said:

My iBook is giving me more beach-balls than a holiday weekend… at the beach.

Speaking of Seth, he recently plugged my Warped Tour shots on BuzzGrinder. About that: this year I was approved for a photo pass for Milwaukee’s Warped Tour. I have to say, it was easily one of the coolest things I’ve done. You can check out my photos from the event on the Warped Tour page I put up.