The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced a public beta of the next version of the official website: lds.org.

Check it out at beta.lds.org

From the official announcement:

A major project to improve Church Web sites has been in process for the past few years to (1) provide a redesigned, user-friendly look with navigation and content in languages and the ability to search across all Church Web sites and (2) upgrade the software and infrastructure to allow us to build Church Web sites more efficiently and with greater flexibility.

When version 1.5 of the wonderful Firefox web browser was released last November, I linked to some of the extensions that I have found most useful.

When the Firefox 1.5.0.1 upgrade was released in February, I found that the spell check extension, Spellbound, was no longer compatible!

Check out this interesting post by psychologist Daniel Goleman about the well known effect of electronic communication that allows people to say things online that they would never say in person.

A key mechanism for this involves circuits that ordinarily inhibit impulses for actions that would be rude or simply inappropriate — or outright dangerous.

In order for this regulatory mechanism to operate well, we depend on real-time, ongoing feedback from the other person. The Internet has no means to allow such realtime feedback (other than rarely used two-way audio/video streams). That puts our inhibitory circuitry at a loss — there is no signal to monitor from the other person. This results in disinhibition: impulse unleashed.

Today Google announced an exciting new tool for Firefox users called Blogger Web Comments . This fantastic little extension for the firefox browser automatically searches Google’s blog search service for posts that link to whatever page you are currently viewing. Then it displays a notification window in the bottom right hand corner of the browser window that shows the most recent blog posts that link to the page. If you click on any of the listed posts, it opens them in a new browser tab.

Mozilla has released version 1.5 of the award winning Firefox Browser. I have been using the beta and release candidate versions of Firefox 1.5 for a couple of months now and it has been great!