Archives for 2006
Naked Conversations: One Paragraph Review
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote this self-professed sequel to The Cluetrain Manifesto, focusing on blogging in the business world. As you might expect if you’ve ever read Scoble’s blog, the book clearly advocates blogging for companies, but they also point out some of the most common pitfalls and reasons not to blog (such as [...]
OneNote 2007
I was hooked on OneNote the first time I saw it beta before Office 2003 was released. When I was at Microsoft, I had a couple of opportunities to meet Chris Pratley and he always showed me some amazing feature that I never knew about. There are a few features within OneNote 2007 [...]
Bulletproof Web Design: One Paragraph Review
Having already written a book introducing readers to the web standards movement, Dan Cedarholm returns to cover more advanced material. While his first focused on markup and basic scenarios like grocery lists, this book focuses on CSS and accessibility. In particular, he explores how to let a web page flex around things like large font [...]
November Accomplishments
SelecTrucks Center Sites We launched two new Center Sites in November. Kansas City was a challenging design, with lots of absolute positioning, which caused a few problems when IE7 came out. The client was really excited about the puzzle theme. Birmingham is, I think, one of the best looking designs we've done. The diagonal navigation is [...]
CSS Mastery: One Paragraph Review
In the introduction to this book, Andy Budd writes “There are an increasing number of CSS resources around, yet you only have to look at a CSS mailing list to see the same questions popping up time and again.” In that sentence, he’s neatly summarized this book. The material contained here is certainly available elsewhere, [...]
Web Standards Solutions: One Paragraph Review
Dan Cedarholm has written a very nice book introducing the reader to the concept of web standards. Unlike Zeldman’s book, which is nearly all theory, this book is heavily focused on markup techniques, with some basic introduction to CSS. Each chapter presents a variety of scenarios, such as how to mark up a grocery list. [...]
Designing with Web Standards: One Paragraph Review
If you want to be a successful musician, you don’t just pick up an instrument and learn to play, you also study music theory. Similarly, if you want to be a successful web designer, you need to learn theory as well as code. Where most books cover code and technique, this book is the definitive [...]
How to Make VirtualPC and Synergy Get Along
Recently, I installed VirtualPC on my XP box so that I could still test IE6 after installing IE7. However, I immediately ran into a problem. There is some sort of conflict between the mouse emulation being done in the VirtualPC window, and the mouse emulation being done on my PC to let me use my [...]
Eric Meyer on CSS: One Paragraph Review
Eric Meyer, known in the web community as the Godfather of CSS, has written several more technical books about CSS for O’Reilly, but this book, as well as its sequel, are intended as a more practical, hands-on set of tutorials. In both books, he presents a series of common scenarios such as adding a calendar [...]
How to Use a Mac and a PC with a Single Keyboard and Mouse
As a web developer who prefers to use a Macintosh, I struggled to find the least painful way to test my work on a PC. Dual-booting was a possibility, but having to reboot every time I want to check IE was a pain. A KVM Switch was a little better, but it was still inconvenient, [...]
October Accomplishments
SelecTrucks We're nearing the end of the SelecTrucks project, and only launched one site this month: Tampa. I really like the water in the design, with the little diver swimming through. Carrier We did some small projects for Carrier this month, mostly SEM tweaks. The cool part is that we added a media center, which will be going [...]
Tim Berners-Lee on the shift to XHTML
"The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. …It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed [...]
I Work With A Bunch Of Smart-Asses III
Valerie: Can someone go to Kinko’s? Andrew: Yeah, I can. …Is this billable time? Valerie: [laughing] Actually, it is! [everyone laughs] Dave: [just walking in] What’s going on? Justin: Andrew just got some billable work. Dave: [starts slow clapping - entire company joins in]
Google Could Save Bandwidth with Web Standards
I've heard the story that Google uses non-standard markup on their site to save bandwidth many times, but Roger Johansson from 456 Berea Street shows us that's just a myth.
IE7 has ClearType
Dave Shea pointed out back in August that IE7 will ship with ClearType enabled, even on XP!
Layout Grids and Rulers
I recently wrote about Greg Storey's idea to use a ruler as a background image to assist in CSS layouts. Shortly afterwards, there were two followups I saw related to the technique. First, Christian Watson from Smiley Cat Design took Greg's ruler to its logical conclusion, and created an entire grid image for the page [...]
It’s Just an Error Message
Raymond from The Old New Thing has written a great article to remind us that "The Default Answer to Every Dialog Box is 'Cancel'." He includes many examples, but what it boils down to is that average users are frequently intimidated by dialog boxes, and if given the choice, will avoid them. The solution is [...]
Nine Misconceptions About Standards
Phillip Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped has written a fantastic article, titled "9 Ways to Misunderstand Web Standards." In it, he outlines some common misconceptions that people have about standards. These are the kinds of things you hear from people who know just enough about standards to be dangerous. All of the items in his list [...]
Twelve Lessons at A List Apart
There's a fantastic article up at A List Apart, titled "12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Web Standards." This is not a how-to article, or an in-depth report on the latest browser hacks. Instead, this is a set of guidelines intended for newcomers to the realm of CSS and web standards. The guidelines [...]
September Accomplishments
SelecTrucks We launched two sites this month, Detroit and Jacksonville. Detroit is a SWEET design, and one of the ones I was most excited to see go out the door. Jacksonville is also cool, and has a neat suprise in the form of a gator at the bottom of the page. We worked on several other [...]
An Event Apart Seattle
"It's a myth that you need a great client. It's possible to do great work for a terrible client — if you're willing to extend the scope of the project indefinitely." – Jeffrey Zeldman I already blogged about An Event Apart over on my personal blog, but I figured I should at least mention it here. Pop [...]
August Accomplishments
SelecTrucks We launched four SelecTrucks sites this month, and all four feature landscape shots. Denver has a nice big mountain, and lots of wet-floor reflections on their photos. Cleveland has several landmarks in a photomontage, Twin Cities has a great landscape shot at sunset, while Seattle has a very nice cityscape, including the space needle. All [...]
July Accomplishments
SelecTrucks Three SelecTrucks sites launched this month: Las Vegas, Charlotte, and Springfield. Vegas is a funny design, kinda dirty like a worksite, Charlotte is obviously Nascar-themed, and Springfield… Well, let's just say that Springfield is special. Dave, the designer, said that it was something he comped up for fun, and was suprised when the client went [...]
An Event Apart Seattle: The After-Party
After dropping off our laptops at the hotel, we headed to the after-party at the Alibi Bar in Pike Place Market, thrown by Blue Flavor. It’s a tiny, dark little bar, and it was really loud inside. It seemed like everyone was there, but since there were something like 200 people at the event, it [...]
An Event Apart Seattle: Liveblogging the Event!
We’re here! It’s 8:50, and the big screen is showing a slideshow of photos that they guys must have taken yesterday when they got into town. The conference room is really nice – slightly elevated rows as you move back in the room, with Aeron chairs at the desks for each row (no power for [...]
