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Could RSS be crossing over into the mainstream? New data about RSS readers from one of the web’s biggest blogs might suggest that it is. But data from one blog, no matter how large, isn’t a big enough sample size, so vote in our poll and let us know what you think.

Slow page loads getting you down? The data: URI scheme could be the solution! While not supported in all browsers yet, data: URIs allow you to embed images within an HTML documents, thus reducing the need for an http request. As Meitar describes, it couldn’t be easier to use—whether you’re calling images for content within your HTML, or for background decoration from your style sheet.

The time between Christmas and New Year’s Day is an ideal opportunity to take a break and close the office down for a few days; this gives both you and your staff some time to relax and enjoy the fruits of all the hard effort you’ve put in throughout the year.

We’ve all heard the arguments that Rails doesn’t scale, it’s hard to deploy or that it will explode in your hands at any given moment. For those of us that use Rails on a daily basis, we know that those are just myths, though.

The SitePoint Podcast is now on iTunes! Click here to subscribe.

Hosts: Brad Williams, Patrick O’Keefe, Stephan Segraves, and Kevin Yank

News topics covered on this episode:

Firefox Hits 20% Browser Market Share Worldwide (SitePoint)
ReadWriteWeb: Firefox Reaches 20% Market Share for First Time Ever

Microsoft Offers Free Software to Startups (SitePoint)
ReadWriteWeb: Microsoft Offers Free Software to Startups

Ballmer “Interested” in Open Source Browser Engine (Slashdot)
Full video at CNet: Hell freezes over: Ballmer considering open-source browser?

Google’s OpenID Support Questioned by Experts (SitePoint)
SitePoint: Google Removes OpenID Whitelist Requirement

Main Show Topic: How did …

Sometimes the money making ideas or business models you dream up are duds, but that’s not such a bad thing. Just thinking about new ways to make money is a great sign.

I’ve been tinkering with dumping PHP objects, and have found myself constantly running into a brick wall. The output from print_r and friends is fine in some contexts, but for larger structures, it would be nice to tidy the output up a bit and wrap it in some HTML.

arguments is the name of a local, array-like object available inside every function. It’s quirky, often ignored, but the source of much programming wizardry; all the major JavaScript libraries tap into the power of the arguments object. It’s something every JavaScript programmer should become familiar with.

Inside any function you can access it through the variable: arguments, and it contains an array of all the arguments that were supplied to the function when it was called. It’s not actually a JavaScript array; typeof arguments will return the value: “object”. You can access the individual argument values through an array index, and …

There are lots of reasons for hating HTML Email, but perhaps #1 on most people’s hit list is having to produce HTML Email to deliver to potentially hundreds of different mail clients and configurations.

Now, clearly it’s completely impractical to test your work on hundreds of mail rigs, but…