“I remember thinking that this would be a pretty harmless easter egg, that no one would really use it, but I was very wrong. When we released Netscape Navigator 1.0 we did not document the blink functionality in any way, and for a while all was quiet.”

I like Lou’s reaction to the first time he saw the BlinkTag in the wild:

“It was a lot like Las Vegas, except it was on my screen, with no way of turning it off.”

Read the rest of the Origin of the Blinktag.

On Feb 26th at 9 AM right at BlinkTag HQ Mike McDerment, Freshbook CEO will explain the secrets behind building a business around a web app.  Read more about it on the Freshbooks Blog.  Tickets will probably go fast, so register now.

I found this picture of when the Freshbooks crew on our swinging couch.

Freshbooks Visits BlinkTag

As long as we stay under 100 employees and keep our average annual gross receipts of $12 million we get a 5% bid preference on applicable state solicitations, waived fees and a streamlined bidding process for state contracts. Also, non-small businesses who use us as a sub contractor are eligible for some bid preferences. Let us know if you are interested in working with us.

View our profile.

This new domain name is easier to communicate and matches our company name. All links to the old site redirect properly and all @blnktag.com email addresses forward to their @blinktag.com counterparts.

Firefox 3.6 beta was released today. It added support for “Orientation” events in web content. This javascript event can use a devices built in accelerometers to detect the orientation and update accordingly.

Since our company name is based on a non-standard HTML tag that makes text Blink I thought it would be fitting to apply the orientation event to our entire site. To view, you need a laptop with an accelerometer (a newer macbook pro or Thinkpad) and to install and run Firefox 3.6.

Check it out some demos:

• A level Web App
• Accelerometer + Canvas Tag Demo
• Rotating Video & Other elements
• Rotating Firefox Logo
• View some code examples

In case you don’t have that, I made a video of the fun effects you are missing out on:

It turns out that if you actually have orientation events enabled, this embedded youtube video will disappear as it doesn’t play nice with embedded youtube videos. However, if you are seeing this effect live, then you don’t need to see the video.

Here are some choice shots:

We don’t email our list very often (once a year or less).  If anyone wants to follow us more closely than that, subscribe to this blog or follow us on twitter (@brendannee @jedhorne).

Many of our clients send out emails to their constituents/customers/subscribers/fans using a variety of platforms.  We’ve had good luck with Campaign Monitor and PHPList.  Campaign Monitor is fully hosted and costs money, but provides a slick interface, decent analytics and bounce tracking and supports custom templates and custom user fields.  PHPList is an open source application that you can host yourself.  As such, its customizable in any way you’d like and its completely free.  The interface isn’t as streamlined and intuitive as campaign monitor but it does the job.

Thanks Eli Horne for bringing this to our attention.

An article about the future of the tech industry published in The Economist cites the often neglected converse of Moore’s law, which holds that computing power will double about every two years, to point out what we’ve been claiming since our inception as a company: the future of computing is doing more with less.  Maybe that sounds obvious, but, usually, the reverse has been true, with every version of Microsoft Office or Adobe Suite requiring an expensive new processor and fifteen frantic calls to the IT department.

For us, that means breaking away from bloated products like FrontPage and moving towards simple-to-use, open-source solutions that give our clients greater control.   It means making web pages that aren’t bogged down by crap flash introductions and the like.  Here’s what the smart people at Britain’s best business publication have to say about the shift:

“Firms have since [the first IT crisis] started to opt more for good-enough ‘cold’ wares, which save them money and allow for more flexibility: commodity hardware, open-source software such as the Linux operating system and programs accessed over the internet, or ’software as a service’ (SaaS).”

We couldn’t agree more.

Why blinktag?  The blink tag or blink element is a non-standard tag in HTML which causes the text to blink which was popularized by Netscape Navigator at the dawn of the browser wars.  Its a bit of an inside joke among web developers as it renders text very unreadable, is a non-standard element and is not supported by all browsers.  If you are using Firefox (or Netscape Navigator for some reason) this text will be blinking.

We thought blinktag inc was nicely ironic name, as we build accessible, standards compliant websites which generally do not incorporate the blink tag.