Archive: June, 2011

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Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Mobilism 2011 Mobile Browser Panel

A panel I moderated at the Mobilism conference in Amsterdam featuring representatives from Nokia, Opera and RIM.

The Elements of Fucking Style

Use strong, definite language in your writing. Make that sentence your bitch.

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Ampersand Conference 2011 Focuses on Web Typography | The FontFeed

An incredibly detailed write-up of Ampersand.

Quoting and citing with blockquote, q, cite, and the cite attribute | HTML5 Doctor

An excellent article from Oli on markup patterns for quotations …though I still think that the cite element can be used for people’s names.

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - The Reith Lectures

The entire archive of the Reith lectures is now online for your huffduffing pleasure.

Friday, June 24th, 2011

An Ear for Science: The Particle Physics Windchime | SLAC News Center

The story of the particle windchime—it turns subatomic particle collisions into sound—created at Science Hack Day San Francisco.

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

Markdownify: The HTML to Markdown converter for PHP

This could be handy for the editing process in my home-grown blogging system: a PHP script to convert HTML back to Markdown.

Ampersand, the Aftermath — Jon Tan 陳

Jon’s glowing write-up of Ampersand. Feel the love!

Namespacing fragment identifiers — CSS Wizardry—CSS, Web Standards, Typography, and Grids by Harry Roberts

Well, here’s something I didn’t know: fragment identifiers can use the colon to add another level of addressability.

Notes from Ampersand conference — My Digest — Laura Kalbag

Excellent notes from Ampersand by Laura. Rather than describing each talk individually, she has documented the emergent themes.

Book of Speed

An online book about website performance by Stoyan Steganov, released into the public domain. Excellent!

Persona - a set on Flickr

A voyeuristically fascinating photoset that puts faces to the “here’s whats in my bag” meme.

GitHub for Mac

This Mac desktop GUI should go some way to making designers less fearful of getting stuck in with GitHub.

Get Ratio

A handy little tool for quickly generating ratios (like the golden section) from a number.

Make Your Own Pick Using Recycled Credit Cards » Design You Trust – Social design inspiration!

This is rather brilliant: recycle your old credit cards into plectrums.

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Will Wright working on game based off Bruce Sterling short story, Maneki Neko | Joystiq

One of the greatest games designers in the world is making a game based on one of my favourite science fiction stories. I hope this turns out as well as I’m fantasising it could.

ISS-Notify by Nathan Bergey — Kickstarter

I want one! An ambient signifier (in lamp form) to let you know when the ISS is flying overhead. Geekgasm!

Red Pop - the big red button for your iPhone camera!

Brendan’s latest product looks like it’ll be a thing of beauty. But he needs help getting it funded on Kickstarter. If you like taking pictures with your iPhone, I suggest you back this project.

Setistars

Would you like SETI to resume sweeping the skies in search of extraterrestrial life? Now you can put your money behind re-kickstarting that noble mission.

10,000 Year Clock

Jeff Bezos has put together a little site to give some background on The Clock Of The Long Now: soon to be open to visitors.

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Ampersanded

Remember when I said that the Ampersand conference was going to be great? Yeah, well, I wasn’t wrong. If anything, I underestimated how great it would be.

Make a venn diagram of web nerds and type nerds; Ampersand was all about the intersection of those two circles. There was something special about having so many domain-specific nerds in one place at one time. It made for a very special atmosphere. It also helped that all the speakers were excellent. I particularly liked the fact that Ethan’s book was pimped in four different talks.

You can read more about the individual talks in an article over at Eye Magazine called Web typography comes of age at Brighton’s Ampersand conference.

All in all, it was an excellent day. The only bittersweet note came from the fact that it marked Sophie’s last day at Clearleft—she’s off to Lanyrd. But Sophie left us on a high note: she and Rich put together one hell of an event.

Monday, June 20th, 2011

To hell with bad devices: Responsive web design and web standards | Marc Drummond

An excellent summation of one web developer’s journey with responsive web design.

Frank Chimero’s Blog - The Storm and The Line

A beautiful dose of perspective from Frank.

Web Typography – The Book

Mark, Richard and Jon are writing a book together (on web typography, of course). It will undoubtedly be excellent.

Sunday, June 19th, 2011

Eye blog » Andmoreagain. Web typography comes of age at Brighton’s Ampersand conference

A nice write-up of the Ampersand conference. Such a great day.

Friday, June 17th, 2011

only human « delicious juice dot com: unapologetically inappropriate

Rioting in the age of Facebook.

Accessibility and HTML5 Block Links — Simply Accessible

Derek runs some tests on how screenreaders behave when block-level elements are wrapped in links, which is now legal in HTML5.

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

CSS Lint

Nicholas and Nicole have unveiled the CSS companion to JS Lint. And yes, it will your hurt your feelings.

“Six-Penny Anthems II” - A classic Bearskinrug Article.

Rejoice! For Kevin Cornell’s new book is available to you through the power of print on demand. I’ve ordered mine. And should you.

Yes! It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub

Testing James Joyce: this is like the Seven Bridges of Königsberg puzzle but with Guinness.

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Latin Text Generator for Mac OS X - LittleIpsum

A cute little lorem ipusm generator for the mac.

Fillerama: A Filler Text Generator

One more alternative to lorem ipsum.

LukeW | An Event Apart: Design Principles

Luke’s notes from my talk at An Event Apart in Atlanta.

Vegan Ipsum

A veggie alternative to bacon ipsum.

resizeMyBrowser

A handy little tool for testing responsive designs by automatically changing your browser viewport size.

Responsive Data Tables | CSS-Tricks

Some good ideas for formatting tabular data for small screens.

Monday, June 13th, 2011

웹디자이너를 위한 HTML5 - a set on Flickr

A peek behind the scenes of the printing of the Korean version of HTML5 For Web Designers.

Calling all UK Makers to Brighton’s First Mini Maker Faire | Brighton Mini Maker Faire

Hardware hackers, you’ve got until June 30th to submit something for Maker Faire in Brighton this September (the day after dConstruct).

creding/That-s-Awesome - GitHub

A handy little applescript that takes care of the automation of creating localhost sites on the mac.

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

The Song

Matt is wearing his musical heart on the sleeve of the web.

Unqualified and unabashedly personal remarks on those bits of sound that make it all worthwhile.

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Two Years — Paul Robert Lloyd

On the two-year anniversary of his arrival at Clearleft, Paul takes a look at where the craft of web design is today and where it’s heading tomorrow.

Newcastling

Usually when I go to a conference it involves crossing a body of water to arrive on foreign shores, often in Europe or America. But the last two events I attended were much closer to home.

Two weeks ago there was Web Directions @media in London. Thank you to everyone who provided questions for the Hot Topics Panel. It went swimmingly, thanks to the eloquence and knowledge of the panelists: Brian, Relly, Bruce and Douglas Fucking Crockford. There was a surprising lack of contentiousness on the panel but I made up for it by arguing with the audience instead. Once the audio is available I’ll be sure to get it transcribed like I did last year.

I just got back from another conference that didn’t involve crossing any international boundaries: DIBI in Newcastle.

It was an excellent event …with just one exception. It bills itself as “the two-track web conference” and that’s the problem. As with Web Directions, I found myself torn between the “design” and “development” talks (a fairly arbitrary distinction for me). The first thing I had to do was choose between Yaili in one room and Jake in another. An impossible choice! I went for Jake in the end and he was absolutely bloody brilliant (as usual) but I’m sure Yaili’s talk was also excellent …and I missed it.

Apart from that heavy dose of FOMO it really was superb. The venue was gorgeous, the quality of the talks was really, really high, the attendees were super friendly and the organisers did a fantastic job of looking after everyone and making sure everything ran like clockwork. I doff my hat to Gavin and his gang.

I was nervous about my talk. It was material I hadn’t presented before. But once I got on stage I just reverted to ranting, which people seemed to enjoy. I had fun anyway. Again, once the audio or video is available I’ll be sure to get it transcribed.

It was also my first time in Newcastle …or Gateshead, whichever. It was certainly showing its best side. It really is quite a lovely place.

My next destination is bit further afield. I’m off to Atlanta for An Event Apart which kicks off on Monday. If you’re going too, be sure to say hello.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: TripAdvisor.com Reviews for the Overlook Hotel.

I look forward to seeing Eyes Wide Shut as a series of Foursquare check-ins.

L33t ski11z

Here are three life skills I have learned from the internet:

How to fold a T-shirt in 2 seconds.
How to peel a banana like a monkey. (Thanks, Kyle!)
How to tie my shoelaces correctly.

You’re welcome.

Camptown News Greasemonkey Script — doo-dah, doo-dah « Tom Scott

Tom’s Greasemonkey script turns any seven-syllable headline into a verse of Camptown Races.

Accessibility. You’re doing it wrong. | nicepaul.com

Ignoring the awful misleading title, this is a really good post from Paul on his personal experiences dealing with accessibility on one or two projects.

Bacon Ipsum | A Meatier Lorem Ipsum Generator

A meatier alternative to lorem ipsum placeholder text.

Designing the Wider Web

The dominance of the desktop browser is over – the web has become wider. After so long painting in a tiny corner of the canvas, it’s time to broaden our approach.

It’s understandable that the community is somewhat nervous about the changes ahead. So far, we’ve mostly responded by scratching around for device-specific tips, but this isn’t sustainable or scalable. We should transcend “platformism” and instead learn to design for diverse contexts, displays, connectivity, and inputs by breaking devices down into first principles. Instead of the defective dichotomy of the “desktop” and “mobile” web, designers should aim to create great user experiences using the truly fluid nature of the web.

Tips, Tricks and Best Practices for Responsive Design | Webmonkey | Wired.com

A nice round-up of responsive design techniques, with a particular focus on content first.

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Why Preserve Books? The New Physical Archive of the Internet Archive | Internet Archive Blogs

Brewster Kahle explains how and why the Internet Archive is keeping physical copies of the books it digitises.

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

Ethan

Jeffrey, Mandy and Jason have created something very special with A Book Apart. This lovely video from the good folks at Mailchimp does a nice job of capturing the spirit of this publishing enterprise:

Needless to say, I was incredibly honoured to write the first book they released. But my little contribution was but a harbinger of what was yet to come. I am John The Baptist to Ethan’s Jesus Christ.

As of today, you can buy Responsive Web Design from A Book Apart. I urge you to do so. And don’t skimp on the electronic versions either—the ePub has been crafted with a wonderful level of care and attention.

I could try explain what it is about this book that makes it so special, but I’ve already tried once to do that. Ethan very kindly asked me to write the foreword to his book. I was—once again—honoured.

This was the best I could come up with:

Language has magical properties. The word “glamour”— which was originally a synonym for magic or spell-casting— has its origins in the word “grammar.” Of all the capabilities of language, the act of naming is the most magical and powerful of all.

The short history of web design has already shown us the transformative power of language. Jeffrey Zeldman gave us the term “web standards” to rally behind. Jesse James Garrett changed the nature of interaction on the web by minting the word “Ajax.”

When Ethan Marcotte coined the term “responsive web design” he conjured up something special. The technologies existed already: fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. But Ethan united these techniques under a single banner, and in so doing changed the way we think about web design.

Ethan has a way with words. He is, of course, the perfect person to write a book on responsive web design. But he has done one better than that: he has written the book on responsive web design.

If you’re hoping for a collection of tricks and tips for adding a little bit of superficial flair to the websites that you build, then keep looking, my friend. This little beauty operates at a deeper level.

When you’ve finished reading this book (and that won’t take very long) take note of how you approach your next project. It’s possible that you won’t even notice the mind-altering powers of Ethan’s words, delivered, as they are, in his light-hearted, entertaining, sometimes downright hilarious style; but I guarantee that your work will benefit from the prestidigitation he is about to perform on your neural pathways.

Ethan Marcotte is a magician. Prepare to be spellbound.