There are a number of problems in this site for Firefox and Safari users, which have been brought to my attention. As approximately 23% of all visitors use Firefox, and a further 3% use Safari, I am now listing these below. These problems do not occur in Internet Explorer 8. I have not checked for problems with other browsers, as only 1% of visitors use browsers like Chrome and so on.

1. The thumbnails for flash videos do not appear on the video page, or the testing humour page. This has been particularly problematic on the video page, as when a Firefox/Safari user clicks 'play' the video will always start at video 1 (Validity); however, from 1st May 2010 I have managed to get 'blank thumbnails' to appear on Firefox so you can select a title even if you still can't see the thumbnail.
2. The real problem is that both Firefox and Safari need a flash plugin, whereas IE has an active-X flash player. On web pages where I use stand-alone video, each video has a 'poster graphic', which you will see when using IE; but Firefox and Safari users will just see a black or grey box, which detracts from the visual appearance of the page.
3. The bookshop page does not load properly. This is a fixed width page generated by the Amazon aStore software, and the html for the page makes it possible for the Amazon content to be displayed. For some reason Firefox is not able to recognize the information coming from Amazon.
4. I am now using web slices for users to receive notification of when frequently updated pages change. To my knowledge, web slicing only works in IE8.

As I develop this site I normally check pages in Internet Explorer, and I take great care to make sure that there are no problems for users. My apologies to users of browsers that are not entirely compatible with what I produce. If you wish to use these features, I can only suggest that you temporarily switch to IE.

RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. It has become the standard method to send news and information from websites directly to the user who wishes to keep up to date.

Extensive use is made of RSS feeds on this website. The most obvious is LT.info Bulletin, which you can subscribe to by clicking on the RSS symbol . Whenever I make a major addition or change to the site it will be announced on this feed. I sometimes also use it to notify subscribers of more general language testing news.

Many pages also contain information that is generated by RSS feeds, but filtered using software that selects content using keywords and strings, before aggregating the information on the page. Examples of this are the article aggregation, and article alert services, which scan journals for language testing content and updates this page whenever new articles are published. This makes keeping up to date extremely easy, especially in the latter case where it is combined with web slicing. Developing the filters for some pages has taken over a year, such as on the employment page. However, some 'rogue' jobs still get through, particularly from the fields of computing, health care, and engineering. I continually update the filters to reduce such instances, but cannot eradicate them completely.

If you would like to know more about how aggregation works, there is a useful Wikipedia entry that you can consult.

You may notice that the dates by the news stories on the Home Page are somewhat different to those on the actual story when you click through to it. The reason is very simple. This website is on a server in the United States, even though I live and work in the United Kingdom. The date and time stamp on my pages are the US time at which the news item was generated. These will be different from the date and time at which the actual news item was posted on the internet.