A lot of people have been emailing me with Firebug questions in the last couple months - more emails than I've been able to reply to, so I apologize if you haven't heard back from me. In the last few days the emails have been more urgent than usual, so I figured that blogging would be the best way to get some answers out to everyone.

A lot of people have been writing to let me know that getfirebug.com has been down for the last week or so - especially bad timing given that Firefox 3 is here and people are looking to upgrade Firebug too. I'm very aware of the problem with getfirebug.com's web host. To prevent this from happening again, I decided to just transfer ownership of getfirebug.com to Mozilla, who will take much better care of it than the crappy web host it has been running on to this point. The transfer is in progress and getfirebug.com should be up and running again within a day or two.

Firebug 1.2 is the new version that is compatible with Firefox 3. Don't thank me for the new version, as I didn't write a line of code for it. The credit goes to the open source community that has sprung up around Firebug in the last year, led by John J. Barton of IBM. They've done an amazing job and made me feel really good about the decision to make Firebug free and open source.

getfirebug.com may not be back online tomorrow when Firefox 3 ships, but fret not, because Firebug 1.2 is already available to download from addons.mozilla.org. If you have Firebug 1.0x installed in Firefox 2 then you should get automatically upgraded when you install Firefox 3.

Today marks the third major iteration of this blog since its inception in 2002. On the outside there is nothing interesting about the new design - it's intentionally plain. The really exciting thing (to me, at least) is what you can't see: joehewitt.com is now 100% Python-powered.

The blog had previously been running on Movable Type (Perl) with some PHP around it. I'm really a Python guy, so that kind of irritated me. I've always wanted to use the site as an experimental platform for new publishing ideas, but not so much that I wanted to suffer through PHP or Perl to do it. Now the blog is a very simple Django application which I can easily enhance at a moment's notice. This was my first Django app and I can say without qualification that Django rocks. It was so easy that I wrote most of the code on airplanes while flying across the country.

Another change is that I have decided to go without comments this time around. I think that I've self-censored a lot of potentially interesting blog posts because I didn't want to get into arguments with readers in the comments. I'd like to blog because it helps me find clarity in my thoughts and improve as a writer, not because I want to entertain or persuade anyone.

The Carnegie Deli may be partially responsible for global warming.

I'll be right back.