If you are looking to register online for Bloomsday, please Click Here.

If you would like to download a mail-in entry form, please Click Here. (requires Adobe Reader)

Why am I here?

The Short Answer:

Web browsers become obsolete over time. The simplest way to think about it is to remember when everyone stopped using cassettes and started using CDs. People made the move to CDs because they provided better sound, were more convenient, and eventually artists stopped releasing cassettes, instead only releasing CDs. Since only about 0.6% of the visitors to the Bloomsday site use an outdated browser (mainly Netscape 4), we’ve decided it’s time to “stop releasing cassettes” and roll out a faster loading, sleeker, and more informative Bloomsday site. Over the next year or so, you will notice other major sites upgrading as well.

Just like making the move from cassette to CD, updating your current browser may be a difficult decision to make... although downloading a browser is free and you can do it right here. We want to help make this as easy as possible for you so we’ve checked your system and provided some links on the left for you to download a FREE new browser. So click a link on the left, download a new web browser, install it, and try it out... we’re sure you’ll be happier with your Internet experience because of it.

The Long Answer:

When web browsing became popular in the mid 90s, several companies began battling to develop the most dominant web browser on the market. Since there was no standard on what a browser should really look and act like, these companies all released their own browsers using proprietary methods, and the end result was a slew of browsers which were barely compatible with each other. As a result, anyone who wanted to run a web site often had to write 5 or 6 different versions of each page on their site, just to make sure it worked in all of these proprietary browsers. As a user, you may not realize this is going on, but the end result is a page which is not necessarily presented as it *should* be but rather as a "lowest common denominator" for all the browsers it must be viewed on.

For the last several years, organizations (including Bloomsday) have supported all of these older browsers because large percentages of their audience still used them. The results were heavier pages which took longer to load, longer lead-times on developing and publishing new content, and all sorts of complicated JavaScript to send different people different versions of each page.

Finally, along came a set of open web standards for everyone to use. For the past couple of years, every major web browser released has been built around a set of open standards designated by the World Wide Web Consortium, a non-profit organization charged with overseeing the continuing development of the web. What this means is that one piece of code now looks the same on every modern browser, whether it be Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, or others. The only catch is, the majority of users actually have to *use* these modern browsers before sites like Bloomsday can present content which is optimized for them.

So when we began talking about redesigning the Bloomsday web site, the first thing we did was look at our audience. Our numbers show that about 0.6% of our audience still uses non standards-compliant browsers, and most of that 0.6% uses Netscape 4, which is a non standards-compliant 5-year old browser and is easily, and freely, upgradeable to Netscape 7 (a very nice browser).

So we said to ourselves, “If we can produce twice the amount of content, create faster loading pages, and offer more features to 99.4% of our audience at a cost of having to tell less than 2% of our audience to freely upgrade their browser, then well, that’s a pretty easy decision.” If it was more like 10%, then perhaps we wouldn’t have made the same decision, but the fact is, most people have already upgraded and most of the remaining 0.6% simply don’t realize they are using an outdated browser.

We’d like to make perfectly clear that we are not trying to get you to use Microsoft browsers, Netscape browsers, Apple browsers, or Opera browsers. This is not about telling you what brand of browser to use. It is only about alerting you to the fact that each of the companies above, plus a few more, makes a modern, standards-compliant browser which you can easily (and freely) switch to using the links on the upper left side of this page.

Over the next year or so, you will begin to notice more and more sites concentrating their efforts on supporting open standards and dropping support for older non-compliant browsers. You may consider this an invitation from your friends at Bloomsday to get on board. If your systems administrator has you locked into using a non standards-compliant browser like Netscape 4, then feel free to send him or her to this page. They already know about this issue and we feel strongly that it is in their best interest to get you upgraded.

Bloomsday is proud to help further the cause of open standards on the web. Since you are eventually going to upgrade your browser anyway, why not use this as your opportunity? We’re sure you’ll enjoy the new Bloomsday web site, as well as every other site on the web a lot more because of it.