Today, as part of MIX 2010, some exciting updates were released on the progress of Internet Explorer 9. The IE team is implementing some incredible features, such as HTML5, CSS3, SVG support, and a new lightning fast JavaScript engine, Chakra! Further, they’re currently scoring a 55 on the Acid3 test – a figure that’s surely to increase substantially before the official release. What about the idea of Microsoft contributing to an open source project, jQuery, with their proposed templating engine? Within moments of these announcements, the Twitter-verse spilled “tears of joy.”

Want to dive in and check out the developer preview? That’s available too, starting today!

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Hi everyone, the winners have been selected and contacted. Thank you all for entering this great competition. If you weren’t successful there are still two more days for you to get on the Rockin’ List and get the voucher for the book.

The winners are Khaled, Kay and Achikochi.

Today we’ve got three copies of the new eBook from Rockable and FreelanceSwitch, How to Write Great Copy for the Web, to give away. Entering takes seconds, just leave a comment below and three lucky people will be selected.

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Over the last three days we’ve been steadily rolling out a new Tuts+ theme across all 8 sites. The new design is a refinement more than a big change, with lots of little improvements in usability and more suited to big screens. Read on to learn more about the redesign and lots of news about Plus!

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On February 1st, we announced an enormous scripting competition on CodeCanyon with prizes equaling $6200. You now have just one week left to enter!

For those unfamiliar, Envato recently launched its newest marketplace, focused specifically on selling high-quality scripts and components for PHP, JavaScript, ASP.NET, and Java. As we’ve only recently launched, we’re hoping to build up our repository with a plethora of fantastic scripts and components, across all of the categories.

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Over the weekend and into Monday we unfortunately experienced some pretty severe downtime on all Envato WordPress blogs. The downtime was due to problems in the data centre of our current hosting company which was out of our control.

It seems to all be resolved now, but I just wanted to make a quick apology for the inconvenience and interruptions. We’re going to be re-examining our hosting setup to make sure we avoid this situation in the future and to generally try to pull up the quality of service across the board.

In the meantime there may be some further minor interruptions as we shore up the setup. Thank you for your patience!

Little did we know that, for the last six months, Facebook has made use of a custom compiler for PHP that they refer to as “Hip Hop.” Essentially, it takes your PHP source code, and converts it into C++, and is then compiled with G++. As a result, they’ve managed to reduce their CPU usage by 50%. This project has apparently been in development for the last two years, but has only today been released to the community.

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Nettuts+ is a success solely because of the fantastic community. Today, we have a $50 Amazon gift card to give away to say thank you for sticking with us as long as you have!

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A weekly writer position has just opened on Nettuts+. If interested in filling the spot, your duties, should you choose to accept them, will be to submit one design-focused article each week. Mostly, you’ll be free to choose your topics, as long as they’ll appeal to our audience. We’re in need of articles which focus on advanced CSS, HTML 5, the intricacies of a design, typography, adding depth to a layout, round-ups, and anything else you can think of!

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Where I live, it’ll be 2010 in six hours. Wow – 2010! And that means, in five years, we’ll be in flying cars where the postal service isn’t as efficient as the weather. (First person who names that movie reference will be sent a web dev book.)

As the year comes to a close, I want to take a moment to thank all of you so much. While my job is to edit and create tutorials, I can promise that I’ve learned far more from the comments of these postings, and I’m grateful for that. I also would like to go over what I have planned for 2010…

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In this video tutorial, and companion article, we will go over how to install and configure the Zend Framework to work with your local development environment. I will be using Wampserver 2.0i on a Windows Vista computer but these steps can be adapted to XAMPP, MAMP, or whatever stack of Apache, PHP, and MySQL that you’re using. Become a Premium member!

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