Facebook has just released it's new messenger for windows but it only runs on Windows 7.

Prior to this there was a leaked version whilst in beta phase that ran on Windows Vista.

The new version may also run on Windows Vista but I haven't bothered to try it out by downloading on a Windows 7 computer and installing it on another, I do know however that this version runs fine and there is no difference that I see from the latest version.

So if you would like to run Facebook Messenger on Windows Vista then download it from this link.

If you have the beta test version of firefox then it can be quite annoying when you upgrade to find that most of your addons don't work anymore.

I used to scour the internet for working versions that people had managed to pull from google trunk, but last night I discovered a must have extention which makes all addons work (I never said compatible!) with the latest version of firefox.

The reason addons stop working is the configuration file of the addon stating which version it is compatible upto. So how do they know if it is compatible with the latest version if it stops working as soon as the new version is released? The community of course! but how do they find out if it works?......

Read more: Pagespeed Addon for Firefox 7 (and enable all your incompatible addons!)

Last night I had my first play with the new Adobe Edge prieview (available free to download and works for just over 100 days). It creates flash style objects using only html, css and javascript.

Having never really used flash before I was unfamilliar with the layout of the program (it's a kind of cut down flash ui) but with the help of youtube I managed to knock something out in about an hour, including the time taken to prepare some images to use.

Read more: Playing with Adobe Edge and getting the Output into a Joomla site

Well, the google +1 works fine, the tweet this button is cool, but really.....FHTML is rubbish. Basically facebook never picks up the current url through fhtml, unless I'm even more stupid than I think I am. Here's how to get facebook to take the right url for each page.

Read more: The Facebook Like Button Never Picks Up The Right Url

Set Expires Headers in .htaccess to speed up page load times

If you use the firebug pagespeed addon or yslow you will be used to seeing the warning 'Add Expires Headers'

This can be quite simple to fix by adding the following lines at the bottom of your .htaccess file.

Read more: Set Expires Headers in .htaccess

Although not on the official page speed site, Google have actually released a version of pagespeed that runs on Firefox 4.

Why it's not on the site I have no idea, I would imagine it would have something to do with pushing developers towards chrome.

Anyway, the link is here:

Read more: Google Pagespeed for Firefox 4

@fontface is a great tool for giving your site an individual look, the down-side is that on a standard site, the font is downloaded on each page view.

As the font can take a little time to download, the page text is loaded first and then the font is replaced once it has finished downloading which (especially on slow connections) leads to a flash of unformatted text (sometimes described as FOUT flash of unformatted text).

There are a few tutorials which explain how to stop the text displaying until the font has finished downloading, but I feel this is against the readers interests as ultimatley they are there to read the text, however it looks.

My partial workaround for this is to instruct the users browser to cache the font so it doesn't have to redownload for each page view. You can also add a local source in your css that will look to see if the font is already installed on the users computer.

So, assuming you have used the font squirrel generator to create your fonts, or that you have fonts suitable for all browsers, we need to cache the following file types:

.eot (IE6-8)
.woff (IE9)
.ttf (firefox,chrome,opera,safari)
.svg (safari,chrome,opera)

We can do this using the .htaccess in your root directory by adding the following lines:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header unset ETag
Header unset Last-Modified
</IfModule>
FileETag None
<FilesMatch "\.(eot|woff|ttf|svg|)$">
Header unset Cache-control
Header set Expires "Wed, 28 Apr 2016 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>

Add a date quite far in the future and the font will be stored on the users computer with no need to reload.

There is also another method which I haven't had time to test which uses (the benefit being that you would never have to change the date):

<FilesMatch "\.(eot|woff|ttf|svg)$">
ExpiresDefault "access plus 10 years"
</FilesMatch>

You can add any other file types to this string to further speed up loading times in general. I normally use the following to involve the favicon, css and js files and also flash content:

(ico|gz|js|css|swf|eot|woff|ttf|svg|)

To redirect all pages from http://www.olddomain.com to http://www.newdomain.com in the domain root of your old domain create a .htaccess file and paste the following code, changing the domain name:

Read more: 301 Redirect Each Page of Site to New Domain Address

I stumbled upon this yesterday whilst looking for something completely different...

In windows 7 and vista you can activate a hidden 'god mode' which creates a desktop control panel giving you direct access to many useful features.

Read more: Activate Windows God Mode on Vista and Windows 7

Many people seem to be having this problem. Here's 2 solutions I found.

Read more: Facebook Chat not Working, Shows no Friends Online