After missing it last year, I’ll be back at SxSW Interactive this year. I’ll be flying into town Friday and flying out the following Wednesday. If you’re in town, hit me up and let’s get a beer. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and I’ll try to stay up to date with where I’m heading.
I’m looking forward to regrouping with friends I met last time, and meeting a lot of new folks this year as well!
So I haven’t posted anything here for quite a while. I’ve been researching hosting companies as I want to get this up on a real host. I’ll probably end up switching blog engines to Wordpress as well, as most hosts I’m looking at have one click installs for it, and it seems to have a much more active community than Nucleus. I’ve had this for about 2 years now, and it’s upgraded from v3.22 to v3.24. Disappointing to say the least.
So with any luck I’ll get off my ass and find a good host soon (I’m looking at Dreamhost - any other suggestions?) and I’ll have a fancy new site. Goal is to get it up and running before the new year.
There’s some other stuff going on in life lately, but we’ll leave that for another time. I’ll leave you with a recent photo from my Flickr stream.
Thanks to the crazy New England weather
I had some server issues and had to take the site down the past day. However, the worst of the storm seems to have passed and we are back in business for a few more hours. Enjoy the rain.
That’s right, it’s here again….CSS Naked Day! It’s the second annual naked day this year, and according to Dustin’s list, there are about 1500 sites losing their CSS for the day.
So have a drink, get some courage, take it off, and come on in! The water’s great!
So last week I had the privilege of attending An Event Apart Boston. Aside from the traffic driving into Boston both mornings, the event was definitely a success. While I had seen a few of the speakers at SxSWi ‘06, I got to see quite a few new speakers as well.
While I was familiar with much of the content presented, there were a few new tidbits that came out over the course of the two days, and some nice refresher stuff as well.
I did get a chance to talk to Eric Meyer after his presentation about the future of CSS with IE7. He had shown a new hack to target CSS for IE7 only:
*+html body {}
This is similar to the hack which targeted IE6:
* html body {}
While the IE6 hack made it seem like there was another element wrapped around the tag, the hack for IE7 makes it seem that there is an element before the tag. This made a bit more sense to me, as there would generally be a DOCTYPE first thing in the code. I asked Eric his thoughts on this, and while he said that it certainly shouldn’t be the DOCTYPE that triggers the hack (because it’s SGML, not an HTML element), he really wasn’t sure.
I did finally get a chance to test my theory, and sure enough, if you remove the DOCTYPE the new *+html hack no longer works in IE7. Gotta love MS bugs!
Anyway, I would certainly recommend checking out An Event Apart if it comes to your city, or even if it just comes to a city you’d like an excuse to go see.
We’ve been having some fantastic sunsets here in New Hampshire lately, I had to share one.
That’s the question of the day - I finally managed to get my website back online after a few weeks (at least) of server issues. I still don’t have much to share….it doesn’t look like I’ll be making it to SxSW this year, which I’m very disappointed over. I was really looking forward to Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design with Cameron, Sally, Jon and Dustin.
I AM however, going to be going to An Event Apart, Boston - which happens to be the same month as SxSW, and one of the reason it’ll be hard for me to make Austin this year. The other is that I’m planning on heading to Universal Orlando in May for my one year wedding anniversary.
Hope everyone is having a good 2007 so far, and if I can my server situation straighted out (and reliable) maybe we can get a bit more activity around here.
So, it’s official - BarCamp Manchester has been officially scheduled for Saturday, November 18th.
We were expecting around 50 people, and we already have 65 registered people. If you are interested, head over the BarCamp Manchester page and register quick, as space will be limited.
We are still looking for one or two more sponsors to finalize some items, so if you are interested, please check out the sponsorship page.
I came across a fantastic article by Jeff Croft recently, regarding his feelings about accessibility on the web. He states:
More and more, I’m feeling like taking a hard-assed approach. “What’s that? You’re complaining because you can’t scale the text of my site in Internet Explorer 6?” That’s your problem. Get glasses. Get a better browser. I can’t account for the fact that you have low vision and have chosen a shitty browser. The tools are out there to make your experience better, so use them.
He’s simply proving a point there, and obviously folks should take that with a grain of salt, but I believe it’s a valid point to make. Browser makers are starting to include better tools (see Opera’s awesome Page Zoom feature). Maybe soon we can get back to using what we should be (like px)!
Read the full article: Has accessibility been taken too far?
So I’ve been at my new job for about 5 months now, and I’ve had the opportunity to finally use a lot of the fun things out on the web that I should have used a long time ago. Some of my new favorites:
sIFR
Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is a tool to provide rich typography on the web. It’s a simple Javascript & Flash based tool to replace semantic text with a Flash alternative. Takes a few minutes to learn how to tweak it properly, but once you do it works fantasticly. Also, version 3 is coming with some great new features as well!
fleXcroll
fleXcroll is a script that provides custom scrollbars for your web sites. I went into this with a lot of trepidation, but this guy has really done a great job with this script. Since I first used it a few months ago, he’s released a few updates with some very needed functionality. It’s not perfect (I think it still has a few memory leaks) but it’s definitely one of the best options out there for custom scroll bars that I could find. If JS isn’t available, it defaults back to normal OS scrollbars, and the script can even handle dynamic additions or removal of content from the scrollable area.
S5
S5 is Eric Meyers Simple Standards Based Slide Show System. I was able to utilize this at work to do a small presentation.
Dustin Diaz’s Sweet Titles
A nice unobtrusive script to add customized tooltips to just about any element you can think of, I got to use them in a UI project for…..links. Not very exciting, but they worked wonderfully.
Yahoo’s UI Library
We’ve been able to utilize Yahoo’s new UI library a lot in some of the recent UI projects at work as well, especially the animation and drag & drop utilities, and the slider control.
Custom Form Fields
This was something I really wasn’t too excited about, but after starting with Aaron Gustafson’s faux select, I realized that custom form fields might not be QUITE as bad as I had thought they would be. Aaron’s script had some issues that I fixed in my version, and I hope to get the time soon to go back and document my version as well.