Who over what
Ever since I began strapping myself in for the 10-18 hour days in front of the glowing screens I've traveled widely over the internets. What a strange and wonderous place it is indeed. I've found a lot of things that run the gambit from vauable professionally through personally interesting and deep into blissfully escapist. Recently, however, it hasn't been so much the things I've been finding but the people I've been finding that have peaked my interest and inspired me to push through the more difficult professional situations and even provided some uni-directional compatriatism in a very interesting kind of way.*
As with all internet trends, I don't think I'm alone. I'm feeling this shift due to a mass of interview style podcasts and video shorts that are cropping up everywhere. So if you've seen the fringes of the podcasting and video interview segment world out there and like it, pull the thread. All these people are tight with each other; spend any time with one and you'll find connections to a dozen others. Many are extremely talented, honest and open people who genuinely put themselves through these mediums.
Here's a very short list of personality centered pod/video casts that I've been moving through.
- http://www.myextralife.com/appslappy/ - very light and entertaining podcast "for iphone, ipod touch and Apple app store addicts" founded by Scott Johnson who has a built quite a domain of cartoons and nerdy movie/game/culture podcasts at http://www.myextralife.com.
- http://www.havocinspired.co.uk/category/please-start-from-the-beginning/ - a series of interviews in which freelance-ish web/design people are encouraged to start from the beginning and talk about their careers.
- http://twit.tv/ - I don't know where to begin with this one. Leo Laporte has produced a staggering amount of content and built a whole network around himself. I have mixed feelings; while I have enjoyed some of the shows, I find Leo himself to be a little too much of a personality and not enough of a person. This judgment is probably due to some kind of mishandled envy of his success on my part... (EDIT: I have since listened to a few more of his podcasts with and determined that, yes, it is just my own insecurities. Leo Laport is an excellent host, striking the balance of candid and professional). but there is a lot there to explore and subscribe to.
- aaand then there's http://davidpogue.com/. What a screwball. I enjoy catching up with his videos every three months or so.
I'd love to hear who you listen to in the comments.
* - An example of the real engagement: just this last weekend one of the commentators that I listen to was hired by his dream company, a move that will require him to go off the air. This moved me to write a contratulations email that was as heart-felt as any that I've sent to people who I know and, well, know who I am.
Tough love for Firefox
This is a shout to add to the cacophany surrounding how badly Firefox 3.5 sucks. It is true, this post isn't meant to be a bug list or a how to make browsing better page; it is not constructive in that sense. Instead is is a bit of tough love to tick up the stats that some employees over at Mozilla may be reading that will weigh into their strategy meetings and hopefully help steer the project back to it's roots of stability and speed, etc... I mean, I installed Opera today and it struck me just how bad things are getting.
Now, I admit that I use firebug, which slows things down, but the problems reach far beyond that.
So if you have the FF3.5 blues, download an older version and rekindle your romance with what is still the most promising browser project out there.
looking forward to 3.6!
Inside look into successful design shop
A List Apart is running a great article by Simon Collision, a driving force behind http://erskinedesign.com/. Simon gives an intimate account of how his shop began with just two people, ran into the traps and pitfalls indemic to such a venture, but then systematically overcame them with clear vision and sound operating priciples to move past the problems and grow to (what seems to be) a very successful six person shop. As half of a small business myself I closely identify with the challanges and am inspired by Erskine's solutions.
Read the full article here: http://www.alistapart.com/authors/c/simoncollison
Here's a video interview with Simon that looks interesting but is too long for me to watch right now because I'm eye-brows deep in one of the pitfalls that stems from setting out on the frontier: avoidance stemming from stress resulting in a dual whammy of lack of setting of clients expectations and allowing projects to run far over schedule due to lack of client engagement: http://www.colly.com/comments/starting_from_the_beginning/
Update: If you like the article on alistapart and are hungering for more check out the 9 part writeup on the Erskine website. Simon has a great passion for what he does and puts it out there with fearless abandon. If I had a hat I would tip it to him.
Resources: CSS for Readability
In design, some things should jump out at you while others should fall to the background. The readability of your site (or any copy) is probably the best example of something that should go unnoticed at the conscious level. Why? Because text is a medium for conveying information. It should get the word across while being invisible itself. Great readable text does this seamlessly, almost pulling the reader through the content. Good content in readable text will cause a reader to sigh and relax, or stand up with a smile and raise their arms in the air or even sometimes pause for a moment as if something has just whispered in their ear to find their life's problems and hardships unraveling toward a wondrous future.
Below are some sources for readable typesetting (fonts, lines spacing, color, etc..), some tutorials on how to design readable text and the occasional neat tool or site that is relavant in some other way.
Here's the best statement of style, including readability standards, I've found on the web. Yes, it's from http://www.alistapart.com. A must read anyone producing content - http://www.alistapart.com/contribute/styleguide/
Here are some other random ones: (I will add to this list as time goes on)
- http://www.legistyles.com/ has three nice styles to choose from.
- If you're just getting into CSS, here is a very clear and straightforward tutorial for CSS readability.
- The folks at http://readable-app.appspot.com/setup.html have a pretty neat idea. They put together a tool that allows you to decide upon a typeset that you like, then make a bookmark in your toolbar that will convert any page to that typeset. I don't forsee myself using the bookmark much but next time I'm trying to figure a font for something clicking through the style element may come in handy.
If you know of any resources, please leave them as comments. Thanks!
Contest anyone?
I have been talking with the creator of http://www.advertology.com about the possibility of starting up a mini web development competition. Here are the rules I've come up with so far. I'd like air out these ideas to let some of the stink out before throwing them down for the massive event. Please let me know if you'd be interested in entering such a competition or if you have any ideas/suggestions about it or if you'd like to play some frisbee anytime in the near future.
Rules
- The competition will run for a set amount of time. I say 4 months, but I may be off.
- Everyone will create a site containing the same subject matter to be decided via committee having:
- a decent amout of popularity (ie is being searched for) and
- some web commercial value (ie is associated with items that are selling on Amazon.)
- A maximum budget will be set, say $50, to be paid out of pocket or hustled from friend or family member
- Each contestant will hook up a google analytics account and share it with a centralized competition account so that everyone can see everyone's traffic, goals, etc...
Judging criteria
- Visitors, uniques, time on site, etc...
- Goal conversions
- Ad Revenue collected
- Commission profits, such as Amazon Affiliates revenue
Prize: deep fulfillment and lifelong well being.
Fledgling site sees uprecidented increase in rank
Fledgling site http://www.davidjerwin.com experiences a metioric rise in Alexa page rank. Hold on to your buts (and if and and ors): this hitherto unknown site has reached the staggering rank of 2,207,675, blazing up from the obscure ranking of 7,142,393 or so a mere month ago. Web experts are baffled, although they haven't heard about this so their general confusion is due to other factors. This is is, indeed, more rank than ever before... and according to Alexa, only about 2.2 million sites posses more of the precious precious rank.
Strategies for creating web traffic and revenue
If you're looking for a practical, down to earth resource for building a niche site and generating web traffic, check out http://www.doshdosh.com/. Rarely does a website do such an exacting job of focusing on a niche and expanding upon the subtitles therein without loosing focus on practicality. It's an inspiring site in both form and content.
Some Drupal themes
I spent some time today scanning for a new theme for this site. Here's a list of some of my favorites from the community.
http://drupal.org/project/tendu
http://drupal.org/project/terrafirma_theme
http://drupal.org/project/zen
http://drupal.org/project/Aeon5
http://drupal.org/project/Amor_Azul
http://drupal.org/project/shallowgrunge
http://drupal.org/project/scruffy
http://drupal.org/project/salamander
http://drupal.org/project/interactive_media
http://drupal.org/project/painted
I found these using http://themegarden.org/drupal6/, an excellent theme visualizer.
If all goes well in the next couple of hours you'll be reading this in said skin, and possibly even said skin in an evolved state. Shannon is making dinner now, however, so there's no guarantee that the new skin will go live tonight. Only time will have told.
(Edit: I eventually went to wordpress, which says something about these themes...)
Low level Windows 7 kernel architecture interview with Arun Kishan
In my recent wanderings I came across this msdn interview with kernel engineer Arun Kishan covering his redesign of the way the new Windows 7 kernel handles spinning off multiple processes. Up until recently, there was a mechanism known as a spin lock in place that checked for permissions and resources for a process that wanted launching. The problem with this was that with the explosion in cpu cores comes an explosion in the multithreading capacities of hardware. The singular spin lock model just can't keep up. So if you're itching to know how Kishan solved this problem and you're willing to put your hour where your mouth is - or if you just love tech discussion involving whiteboard notes and diagrams - this video is for you!
Exciting advancements in CSS from lesscss.org
CSS has always been a strangely beautiful but notoriously static and redundant language. LESS CSS has tackled this problem head on introducing a variety of programing concepts that will vastly improve the experience of writing and maintaining css. They also have a great logo.
The main ideas include:
- variables,
- 'mixins' (embedding definitions in other definitions as variables),
- embedding (explicitly declaring definitions in definitions) and
- mathematical operations.
Introducing these concepts into css would vastly improve the css experience. Unfortunately, Less has ony implemented them as a Ruby Gem, which is not useful to me and my PHP ways. I applaud them none the less and hope that the PHP community will respond with a solution.
For large or complex sites, there's not been any straight forward way of getting around writing huge or many .css files each of which repeats colors, styles and properties for many similar but different classes and page elements. Sure, semantics goes a long way but raises problems sometimes, as does thoughtful nesting and clean use of classes, but, lets face it, reality doesn't allow for optimized css. This is one of those things where you have to compromise any ideals you may be harboring or consine yourself to non-productive insanity.
Another interesting angle on Less is that it sidesteps the biggest barrier to the advancement of css: browser compatibility. The pre-processing, in effect, is a compiler for a meta-css language. So, more kudos to Less for finding a way around the beast of multi-browser issues (aka: ie 6 should have been shipped with an auto-updater.)