Web Page Development ala Opera

I love the Opera Web Browser. It's the browser I use to check mail, read feeds and chat (yup Opera comes with an IRC chat client).

It's the one browser I can keep on for almost forever on my linux desktop without crashing or using up a ton of resources. If it does crash, it's intuitive enough to resume and launch the pages prior to it crashing. Firefox has that same feature now but I do recall Opera was first to introduce it (please correct me if I am wrong). In fact, tabbed browsing has been an Opera mainstay way before Firefox or IE had it.

What's interesting and maybe laudable about Opera (the company) is that they're not out to conquer your desktop. It seems they're taking aim on consumer devices like mobile phones and game consoles. I was rather intrigued to find out that Opera developed a web browser for the Nintendo Wii. They even have a javascript API for the Wiimote. Too bad I don't have a wii yet and the browser (aka the Internet Channel) isn't free anymore.

If any geeks out there happen to have a Wii and would like to develop web pages on Opera, they might find this page helpful. I've always raved about the firebug on firefox combination for developers.

It seems Opera has a couple of nifty developer tools to challenge the dynamic duo of web development with its Developer Console and DOM Snapshot tools.

On the Other Hand: The Flip Side of Entrepreneurship by Glenn Kelman

If you're like me, I'm sure you were elated after watching this video. For a split second I'm sure you thought that you too could create a site like or even better than Plenty of Fish that gets twelve billion page views, 380 hits per second, $5-6 million a year in ad revenue and with only two hours of work a day.

The elation gradually wears away though after reality bites and you realize how hard starting a Web 2.0 company really is and that Markus Frind is probably in sane to believe that his site is up and running getting that many hits with ASP.Net on just one IIS server.

Well, after the let down, I encourage you to read this article, also from Guy Kawasaki's blog on Glen Kelman's counterpoint.

He makes interesting, encouraging and comforting points about the flip side of entrepreneurship. He cites very interesting and relevant anecdotes and quotes while presenting his points in a free flowing train of easy to comprehend text. If he wasn't introduced as CEO of Redfin I'd say he's a professional writer/blogger and a good one too.