Interesting debate going on over at Jeffrey Zeldman’s site about the state of web standards. Just last week Jeffrey was profiled in an article in BusinessWeek with the title “Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards. It’s a great article showing the grassroots effort he co-founded to get the browser companies to follow the W3C’s standards.
As for a crisis in web standards, there is none. Yes, there hasn’t been a ton of movement on CSS 3 …
About a month ago Facebook released Facebook Platform. It’s a way in which people and companies can build applications within the Facebook social network. It received a ton of buzz when it was released and a lot of misguided people anointing it as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, some of the hype is starting to run its course. I noticed two articles recently, one from Jason Calacinis and one on Wired.com that are starting to look at Facebook with a more critical eye. …
As a web designer, I have to deal with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a lot. (between you and me, a lot more then I would like to). My opinion on SEO is that it is 99% best practices, good marketing and good content. The other 1% percent is the gray area that takes up a larger percentage of my time. SEO is important, but it’s not some magic elixir that is the answer to all your site’s problems. I try to design for human users and not for Googlebot. …
I exclusively use the Mac OS for all my development, with occasional forays into Windows via Parallels for checking in Internet Explorer 6 & 7. Some people like Dreamweaver’s integrated approach with FTP and editor in one, but I’ve always felt that Dreamweaver was a huge resource hog. I prefer using a couple of tools that are best in breed rather then the Swiss army knife approach. …
What’s Twitter? A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!
I wrote a script that uses the Twitter API to build a customizable twitter status badge. I’m pretty much a novice PHP programmer and this is the first piece of code I’m releasing. It should …
My computer habits have changed in the last year. I’ve noticed that I’m using more web based software. I find data portability to be the over riding factor in the products I use. Last year, I changed from using Apple’s Mail program to using Google Apps for my email, calendar and documents. This gives me amazing flexibility. I’m able to get my email, calendar, and documents wherever I have access to a web browser. With the advent of ajax and lean javascript frameworks, developers are creating products that act more like desktop applications, thus making operating systems less relevant. …
From time to time people ask me how I learned how to hand code HTML and CSS. I learned by reading a bunch of books and from lots of trial an error. Below are a list of books I recommend for someone who wants to start hand coding HTML and CSS. If I was just starting I would start with the HTML Dog book. If I had some coding experience and just wanted to learn proper use of CSS I would pickup the Dan Cederholm books Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. …
Over the last two weeks I’ve been using Last.FM and discovered it’s quite addicting. It’s not that I need a twelve step program or anything but Last.FM does what it does very well and really helps you find new music.
On the surface Last.FM is a recommendation engine that tracks what you’re listening to with a little downloadable application, but it does a lot more. There is a Windows, Mac OSX and a beta Linux versions available for download. …