RSSMix.com Mix ID 16755

adactio: Slept. Shopped. Now attempting to cook.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:50:49 -0400

adactio: Slept. Shopped. Now attempting to cook.

Tattnrdla saga: If Star Wars Were an Icelandic Saga Tattnrdla saga

The nerdgasmic result of a collision between linguistics and Star Wars.

adactio: I get back to Brighton, tired and jetlagged, and then find out that Alex Chilton is dead. I'm going to sleep.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:05:09 -0400

adactio: I get back to Brighton, tired and jetlagged, and then find out that Alex Chilton is dead. I'm going to sleep.

adactio: This is my luggage; there are many like it but this one is mine.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:42:40 -0400

adactio: This is my luggage; there are many like it but this one is mine.

adactio: Saying goodbye to @wordridden as she begins her road trip to Florida.

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:09:24 -0400

adactio: Saying goodbye to @wordridden as she begins her road trip to Florida.

adactio: A tasty mmmmmpanada before bed.

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:03:00 -0400

adactio: A tasty mmmmmpanada before bed.

adactio: Having a nightcap at The Driskill after an enjoyable set from We Are Scientists at the Media Temple party.

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:32:46 -0400

adactio: Having a nightcap at The Driskill after an enjoyable set from We Are Scientists at the Media Temple party.

adactio: Having a beer at The Hampton, thinking about what to do for dinner.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:38:00 -0400

adactio: Having a beer at The Hampton, thinking about what to do for dinner.

adactio: @funkybrownchick How did it go? I bet you killed 'em.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:35:42 -0400

adactio: @funkybrownchick How did it go? I bet you killed 'em.

adactio: @stuntbox You're not the first person to point that out.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:15:37 -0400

adactio: @stuntbox You're not the first person to point that out.

adactio: Ready for post-digital post-Bruce Sterling beer. Mine's a Shiner Bock.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:14:49 -0400

adactio: Ready for post-digital post-Bruce Sterling beer. Mine's a Shiner Bock.

adactio: Loving that @bruces loves @mickipedia's Neighborgoods.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:39:20 -0400

adactio: Loving that @bruces loves @mickipedia's Neighborgoods.

adactio: At an audience with the spimepope, with a Newspaper Club paper on my lap.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:10:13 -0400

adactio: At an audience with the spimepope, with a Newspaper Club paper on my lap.

adactio: Sitting in the post-digital panel, realising that I've my analogue Twitter input device back at the hotel.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:22:23 -0400

adactio: Sitting in the post-digital panel, realising that I've my analogue Twitter input device back at the hotel.

adactio: Going to forage for food. Probably something barbecued. Certainly something meaty.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:31:28 -0400

adactio: Going to forage for food. Probably something barbecued. Certainly something meaty.

adactio: Channelling my SXSW enthusiasm into a blog post. http://adactio.com/journal/1649/ Hands up who wants a Science Hack Day?

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:29:16 -0400

adactio: Channelling my SXSW enthusiasm into a blog post. http://adactio.com/journal/1649/ Hands up who wants a Science Hack Day?

Get excited and make things with science

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:25:34 -0400

There are many reasons to go to South by Southwest Interactive: meeting up with friends old and new being the primary one. Then theres the motivational factor. I always end up feeling very inspired by what I see.

This year, that feeling of inspiration was front and centre. First off, I tried to impart some of it on the How to Rawk SXSW panel, which was a lot of fun. Mind you, I did throw some shit at the fan by demonstrating how wasteful the overstuffed schwag bags are. I hope I didnt get MJ into trouble.

My other public appearance was on The Heather Gold Show which was bags of fun. With a theme of Get Excited and Make Things, the topic of inspiration was bandied about a lot. It was a blast. Heather is a superb host and the other guests were truly inspirational. I discovered a kindred spirit in fellow excitable geek, Gina Trapani.

The actual panels and presentations at SXSW are the usual mixture of hit and miss, although the Cooking For Geeks presentation was really terrific. Any presenter who hacks the audiences taste buds during a presentation is alright with me.

But by far the most inspirational thing Ive seen was a panel hosted by Tantek on Open Science. The subject matter was utterly compelling and the panelists were ludicrously articulate and knowledgeable:

The URLs were flying thick and fast: the Signtific thought experiment game, the collaborative Galaxy Zoonow joined by Moon Zooand the excellent Spacehack directory.

I was struck by the sheer volume of scientific data and APIs out there now. And yet, we arent really making use of it. Why we arent we making mashups using Google Mars? Why havent I built a Farmville-style game with Google Moon?

Halfway through the panel, I turned to Riccardo and whispered, We should organise a Science Hack Day.

Im serious. It would probably be somewhere in London. I have no idea where or when. I have no idea how to get a venue or sponsors. But maybe you do.

What do you think? Everyone Ive mentioned the idea to so far seems pretty excited about the idea. Ill try to set up a wiki for brainstorming venues, sponsors, APIs, datasets and all that stuff. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment here.

I got excited. Now I want to make things with science! Are you with me?

Tagged withscience hackday sxsw sxswi sxsw10 sxswi10 conference apis

Placehold.it - Quick and simple image placeholders

This will be very, very handy for my day-to-day front end development work.

adactio: Powering up and blogging at the Schelling point under the escalator.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:58:04 -0400

adactio: Powering up and blogging at the Schelling point under the escalator.

adactio: Still giggling about the conversation I had with @t about RFCs for interplanetary first contact. Carl Sagan is such a n00b!

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:54:48 -0400

adactio: Still giggling about the conversation I had with @t about RFCs for interplanetary first contact. Carl Sagan is such a n00b!

adactio: Glad I can finally talk about IE9. I hate NDAs.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:56:28 -0400

adactio: Glad I can finally talk about IE9. I hate NDAs.

adactio: Dang! Looks like I missed @cindyli and co.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:46:51 -0400

adactio: Dang! Looks like I missed @cindyli and co.

adactio: Going to Jo's for breakfast tacos with @t.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:48:38 -0400

adactio: Going to Jo's for breakfast tacos with @t.

Microformats has a posse

Designing for the Web: A book by Mark Boulton

Mark's superb book is available in HTML for free. Read it now but be warned: it will only make you want to buy the real deal.

South by Twenty Ten

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:15:11 -0500

I’m about to head off to Austin for South by Southwest, the annual Bacchanalian geek festival. I’m speaking on a panel again, but this year, the emphasis is very squarely on having fun. MJ very kindly asked me to represent the British contingent on her How to Rawk SXSW panel.

It will be a fun, if somewhat bittersweet affair: Brad Graham was also going to be on the panel. Ol’ bastard Death has put paid to that. Southby won’t be quite the same without him. But while there won’t be a Break Bread with Brad, there will be Break Bread for Brad, shortly after the panel on Friday afternoon.

Given my recent musings on the transience of domains, I can’t help but wonder what will happen to the bradlands.com domain. I hope it doesn’t go the way of Leslie Harpold’s online legacy at smug.com and harpold.com.

Anyway, I’ll be taking a break from my doom-laden predictions of the disappearance of our collective online culture to drink beer and eat barbecue in Texas. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Oh, and I’ll be having a good ol’ chinwag on The Heather Gold Show on Saturday. Come along if you’re around.

As is now traditional, I’ve updated Adactio Austin with a selection of hCalendared, hCarded hand-picked parties that I’ll be checking out. Compared with the whizz-banginess of location-aware real-time iPhone apps, it seems positively quaint.

If you’re going to Austin too and you spot me amongst the heaving throngs of geeks, say hello. We can have a Shiner Bock together.

Tagged withconference travel austin sxsw sxswi sxsw10 sxswi10

Colosseo Letterpress Poster: Reimagining the Roman Coliseum with type

The most beautiful piece of letterpress art from Cameron thus far.

CSS3 Please! The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator

Edit some CSS rules and this in-browser code editor will automatically update related browser-specific declarations.

SXSW 2010: Fieldnotes | booktwo.org

James Bridle's lovely notebook for his first visit to South by Southwest.

QuirksBlog: HTML5 apps

PPK proposes a new buzzword for standards-based mobile development: HTML5 Apps. Definition: "an iPhone app that works on several other platforms, too, and doesnt have to go through the app store approval process."

SXSW Design Workshop - Friday, March 12, 2010 from 2-6pm

Three back-to-back talks on web design at South by Southwest.

8-Bit NYC

Nifty old-school 8-bit tiles superimposed on OpenStreetMap data.

Linkrot

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:03:40 -0500

The geeks of the UK have been enjoying a prime-time television show dedicated to the all things webby. Virtual Revoltution is a rare thing: a television programme about the web made by someone who actually understands the web (Aleks, to be precise).

Still, the four-part series does rely on the usual television documentary trope of presenting its subject matter as a series of yin and yang possibilities. The web: blessing or curse? The web: force for democracy or tool of oppression? Rhetorical questions: a necessary evil or an evil necessity?

The third episode tackles one of the most serious of societys concerns about our brave new online world, namely the increasing amount of information available to commercial interests and the associated fear that technology is having a negative effect on privacy. Personally, Im with Matt when he says:

If the end of privacy comes about, its because we misunderstand the current changes as the end of privacy, and make the mistake of encoding this misunderstanding into technology. Its not the end of privacy because of these new visibilities, but it may be the end of privacy because it looks like the end of privacy because of these new visibilities*.

Inevitably, whenever theres a moral panic about the web, a truism that raises its head is the assertion that The Internets Never Forget:

On the one hand, the Internet can freeze youthful folly and a small transgressions can stick with you for life. So that picture of you drunk and passed out in a skip, or that heated argument you had on a mailing list when you were twenty can come back and haunt you.

Citation needed.

We seem to have a collective fundamental attribution error when it comes to the longevity of data on the web. While we are very quick to recall the instances when a resource remains addressable for a long enough time period to cause embarrassment or shame later on, we completely ignore all the link rot and 404s that is the fate of most data on the web.

There is an inverse relationship between the age of a resource and its longevity. You are one hundred times more likely to find an embarrassing picture of you on the web uploaded in the last year than to find an embarrassing picture of you uploaded ten years ago.

If a potential boss finds a ten-year old picture of you drunk and passed out at a party, thats certainly a cause for concern. But such an event would be extraordinary rather than commonplace. If that situation ever happened to me, I would probably feel outrage and indignation like anybody else, but I bet that I would also wonder Hmmm, wheres that picture being hosted? Sounds like a good place for off-site backups.

The majority of data uploaded to the web will disappear. But we dont pay attention to the disappearances. We pay attention to the minority of instances when data survives.

This isnt anything specific to the web; this is just the way we human beings operate. It doesnt matter if the national statistics show a decrease in crime; if someone is mugged on your street, youll probably be worried about increased crime. It doesnt matter how many airplanes successfully take off and land; one airplane crash in ten thousand is enough to make us very worried about dying on a plane trip. It makes sense that weve taken this cognitive bias with us onto the web.

As for why resources on the web tend to disappear over time, there are two possible reasons:

The resource is being hosted on a third-party site or
The resource is being hosted on an independent site.

The problem with the first instance is obvious. A commercial third-party responsible for hosting someone elses hopes and dreams will pull the plug as soon as the finances stop adding up.

Im sure youve seen the famous chart of Web 2.0 logos but have seen Meg Pickards updated version, adjusted for dead companies?

You cannot rely on a third-party service for data longevity, whether its Geocities, Magnolia, Pownce, or anything else.

That leaves you with The Pemberton Option: host your own data.

This is where the web excels: distributed and decentralised data linked together with hypertext. You can still ping third-party sites and allow them access to your data, but crucially, you are in control of the canonical copy (Tantek is currently doing just that, microblogging on his own site and sending copies to Twitter).

Distributed HTML, addressable by URL and available through HTTP: its a beautiful ballet that creates the network effects that makes the web such a wonderful creation. Theres just one problem and it lies with the URL portion of the equation.

Domain names arent bought, they are rented. Nobody owns domain names, except ICANN. While you get to decide the relative structure of URLs on your site, everything between the colon slash slash and the subsequent slash belongs to ICANN. Centralised. Not distributed.

Cool URIs dont change but even with the best will in the world, theres only so much we can do when we are tenants rather than owners of our domains.

In his book Weaving The Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee mentions that exposing URLs in the browser interface was a throwaway decision, a feature that would probably only be of interest to power users. Its strange to imagine what the web would be like if we used IP numbers rather than domain namesmore like a phone system than a postal system.

But in the age of Google, perhaps domain names arent quite as important as they once were. In Japanese advertising, URLs are totally out. Instead they show search boxes with recommended search terms.

Im not saying that we should ditch domain names. But theres something fundamentally flawed about a system that thinks about domain names in time periods as short as a year or two. It doesnt bode well for the long-term stability of our data on the web.

On the plus side, that embarrassing picture of you passed out at a party will inevitably disappear along with almost everything else on the web.

Tagged withdata preservation icann domains linkrot

Books in the Age of the iPad

A detailed look at traditional and digital publishing, considered from the content out.

Design discussions: Paul Shaw and the NYC Subway: idsgn (a design blog)

"There is a common misbelief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system. In this Design discussions, we talk to the author who has uncovered the truth (maybe) behind the story."

CSS Border Radius

A handy shortcut for when you just can't recall the exact syntax of border-radius.

Aegirscopic

Aegir "two blogs" Hallmundur.

Godzilla Haiku

Loving Godzilla 17 syllables at a time.

ride, rise, roar :: premiering in march at sxsw

Hillman Curtis's new film about David Byrne and Brian Eno will be premiering at Southby. Should be fun.

Testing Huffduffers sign-up

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:08:19 -0500

Ever since I launched Huffduffer, one of the features that really caught people’s attention was the sign up form.

I have to admit, I didn’t really think it was that revolutionary an idea. All I was trying to do was make the sign-up process a little friendlier and if web standards have taught us anything, it’s that there’s nothing inherent in the presentation of any element, much less forms. So I made the form more conversational and less blocky and rigid.

Well, it turns out that people love it. I’ve received bucketloads of Twitter messages and emails from people telling me how much they enjoyed the sign-up process.

But amongst all the positive comments I saw about the sign-up form when Huffduffer launched, I saw some armchair UX practitioners wondering about the usability of this somewhat unorthodox approach to forms. Fair point. Without user testing, how can I really know if the mad-libs approach is really working?

Now, it happens that Luke W. likes the Huffduffer sign-up form, as evidenced by a recent chat he had with Jared.

SpoolCast: Moving Beyond Static Forms with Luke Wroblewski on Huffduffer

If anyone knows anything about the usability of web forms, it’s Luke. He literally wrote the book on it.

Not content with simply expressing a liking for the Huffduffer-style of human-friendly form presentation, he decided to put it to the test with Vast.com:

After seeing the Huffduffer form in action, I was curious how it would perform against a traditional form. Would people be more inclined to complete it because of the narrative format? Or would the unfamiliar presentation format confuse people? Thanks to Ron Kurti and the team at Vast.com, I now have some early answers.

Ron and his team ran some A/B testing online that compared a traditional Web form layout with a narrative “Mad Libs” format. In Vast.com’s testing, Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%.

That seems to be a statistically-significant result, even accounting for Cennydd’s reality-check on A/B testing.

It’ll be interesting to see if this is the start of a trend. If nothing else, it’s a way of getting designers to think about the presentation of common human-computer interactions, such as signing up to a new website.

Tagged withhuffduffer signup form research

Music::Business

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:46:42 -0500

The past

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boyin front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

John Philip Sousa

The present

Mark Thomas talks about the Digital economy Bill

The future

The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a demonstration that they mean business, two software engineers in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.
On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right of perform music in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States. But the music bizs position isnt strengthened by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry, which has been accelerating ever since the nasty noughties.

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Tagged withcopyright law music culture creativity

The iPad and the web

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:43:21 -0500

Before Apple launched the iPad, I managed to refrain from adding to the deluge of speculation and rumour. Now that the much-anticipated tablet has been unveiled, I cant resist jotting down my thoughts.

Now, this is just my reaction to a piece of technology. I feel a need to clarify that because discourse on the internet has a strange way of getting warped. Someone says I like Italian food, and someone else responds with Why do you hate Mexican food? Someone says I enjoyed watching Avatar, and someone else hears Everyone should enjoy watching Avatar. So bear in mind that this is just my personal reaction. Im not saying that everyone should share my feelings. Twould be a very dull world indeed in which we all felt the same.

I didnt watch Steve Jobs unveiling the iPadI was busy learning at a Skillswap eventbut when I was reading up about it afterwards, I thought to myself Im probably going to get an iPad

Actually, at this point I need to take care of something:

Mum, if youre reading this, could you stop now please? Thanks. Love you.

Anyway, as I was saying, I thought to myself Im probably going to get an iPad for my mother.

Honestly, there isnt much on offer in the iPad that I dont already have in my Macbook. I dont think it is the device for me. But it is most definitely the device for my mother. I dont mean a theoretical persona such as ones mother, I mean my mother.

My mother is currently using a G3 Ruby iMac that used to belong to me. When she started using this machine, she had never used a keyboard, much less a computer. I am very, very glad that her first computer was a Mac and that shes never had to deal with the world of pain that is Windows, but even a Mac has a learning curve for someone whos never used a computer before.

I remember explaining what the cursor was and how the mouse controlled it. When I said move it up, she lifted up the mouse off the table. Thinking about it, the mouse isnt as straightforward as we think: moving the mouse left and right does map to moving the cursor left and right, but moving the mouse forward and backward maps to moving the cursor up and down. Both the cursor and the mouse move on two-dimensional surfaces but only half the movements of the mouse correspond directly to movements of the cursor.

In computer years, a G3 iMac is ancient. Its amazing that it still runs at all. Ive been thinking for a while now about what would make a suitable replacement. A newer iMac would be good but theyre a little pricey for something thats going to be used for web surfing, email, some digital photography and little else. A laptop would be nice. Now that my mother has WiFi, theres no need for her to have to remain in one place to use her computer. But laptops are fiddly things with fiddly trackpads.

The iPad strikes me as the Goldilocks solution. Its just right. If the European pricing follows the general Apple conversion rate, the iPad should be pretty darn affordable. It would be nice if it came with an iSight for iChatting; that might well get added in a later version. Web surfing, email and photo browsing are all not just possible, but likely to be pleasurable. Thats because the multitouch control mechanism is likely to feel far more intuitive than either a mouse or a trackpad. (Caveat: I havent used an iPad. Take my opinion, and the opinions of anyone else who hasnt actually used one, with a heaped tablespoon of salt.)

So Im probably going to get an iPad, but for someone else. If it came with nothing more than a WiFi connection and a web browser, it would still be a worthwhile device for my mother. In fact, the idea of using a computing device based around a browser is whats driving the Google Chrome OS. Googles vision is one wherein the file system and the hard drive are far less important than the web browser and the web server.

Thats why Im slightly mystified about the App Store grumblings. Yes, its a closed system that Apple controls completely. But the same devices that support the App Store also come with a very advanced web browser. Personally, I think that if a device is capable of running HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I dont think it can be described as closed.

Dont like the closed nature of the App Store? Dont use it. Use the web instead. Thats the point that PPK was making, albeit a bit stridently. Admittedly, if you want to make money directly from an app, you might have a harder time of it on the web than on the App Store. Make your app distribution bed and lie in it.

Ive already seen people on Twitter sharing some ideas for the uses to which the iPad could be put:

displaying sheet music on a music stand,
showing recipes on a kitchen worktop,
playing scrabble, sudoku and crosswords,
reading comics,
reading magazines a la Mag+,
reading books in a way that doesnt involve the silly page-turning visual metaphor built into the iBooks app.

All of those are great ideas and all of them can be implemented on the web. Remember that Mobile Safari already has excellent support for canvas, audio, video and offline storage. No App Store required. As Simon St. Laurent puts it, web developers can rule the iPad.

I understand the concerns of my fellow geeks who see the read-only nature of the iPad as restrictive compared to the read-write nature of laptop and desktop computers. Rafe Colburn asks Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?:

I think that its a real possibility that in 10 years, general purpose computers will be seen as being strictly for developers and hobbyists.

Alex Payne foresees a tinkerers sunset:

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, Id never be a programmer today.

While I understand and to a certain extent, share these forebodings, Im cautiously optimistic that these fears wont be realised. The iPad isnt going to replace laptop or desktop computers; its a different kind of machine for a different kind of user.

Frasier Spiers welcomes the glimpse that the iPad offers us of information processing dissolving into behaviour when he writes:

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change peoples perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isnt a price worth paying to have a computer that isnt frightening anymore.

Nik agrees:

Yes, its an entirely prescriptive way of computing - one that the hackers, tinkerers and geeks will find alien and protest about its lack of openness. But heres the thing: for the people who the iPad is aimed at it really doesnt matter that this experience is prescriptive.

I think hes right. The iPad isnt for geeks but I can foresee geeks, like me, buying iPads for members of their family if for no other reason than to reverse the trend of the holiday season becoming the tech support season.

Im not usually one for predictions, but I think Ill try my hand at one now. The iPad will be the best-selling device to be purchased as a gift for Christmas 2010.

Tagged withapple ipad

Approval

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:45:56 -0500

This is the last week during which you can grab a ticket for UX London at the early bird price. From February 1st, the price goes up by a hundred squid (and from April 1st, the price goes up by another hundred squid—no joke).

In case you’re wondering whether or not you should go, wonder no more. Just check out the line-up of speakers and imagine three solid days of inspirational talks and hands-on workshops in their company. If attended last year’s event, you know what a great gathering it is. If you didn’t attend last year, talk to someone who did.

Of course, it could be that even if you want to go, you still need to convince somebody in your company to send you. Let’s face it, UX London is a very different beast from dConstruct.

dConstruct is deliberately low in price and a more rough’n’ready one-day affair. One of the reasons why we try to keep the price of dConstruct down is so that just about anybody can afford to come: freelancers, students, whatever. If that means we can’t afford to feed everyone or hand out goodies, then so be it—everyone fends for themselves at lunchtime and there’s no schwag.

The audience for UX London is a bit different. It’s almost exclusively attended by people who have been sent by their company. With one day of presentations and two full days of workshops, and all three days fully catered, the price is, of course, far higher than dConstruct …although if you go to dConstruct and attend both days of workshops beforehand, then it works out at much the same price as UX London’s early bird ticket.

Anyway, if you are in that situation—working at a company where you have to convince someone to send you to training events like UX London—Kimberly Blessing has written a guide to getting your conference or training request approved. She shares her three-step strategy:

Build a strong case.
Request funding.
Negotiate!
- Try before you buy.
- Strength in numbers.
- Volunteer.
- Ask for partial funding.
- Finally, if you must: send yourself.

If you’ve got any other techniques, share them in the comments to Kimberly’s post.

Tagged withuxlondon conference

Trajectory

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:00:47 -0500

Dan came down to Brighton for a visit, so naturally a bunch of us ended up singing in a karaoke pod together.

I think Brian Eno is on to something; getting together with a group of friends to holler your lungs out is quite life-affirming. Of course Dan had to ruin it all by being really, really good. The bastard.

There was a preponderance of songs with love” in the title because Andy insisted that every instance of that word be substituted for lunch”: Addicted to Lunch, It Must Be Lunch and, best of all, Tainted Lunchdedicated to Paul who couldnt be with us due to probable food poisoning.

One of the non-lunch related songs that somebody queued up was The Final Countdown by Europe. This is a crap karaoke song for two reasons:

its crap and
the catchiest part of the song is the bit where no-one is singing.

However, it is one of the few songs written about generation starships leaving a dying Earth. The only other such song I can think of offhand is After The Goldrush by Neil Young: flying mother natures silver seed to a new home in the sun and let us hope that this is the last time that Neil Young and Europe are ever mentioned together in any kind of context.

Something bothered me about the lyrics of The Final Countdown that confronted me on the karaoke screen. Presumably the interstellar ark is heading out of the solar system and yet the narrator tells us this about the plotted course: Were heading for Venus.

Really? Surely thats in the completely wrong directiontowards the sun. But then I realised that, although it remains unsaid in the song, the craft is probably going to carry out a gravitational slingshot manoeuvre around our star.

Knowing that, I can rest easy or at least, I would be able to rest easy if I didnt have that damn song stuck in my head.

Tagged withmusic astrophyics

One point four

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:58:14 -0500

The latest version of jQuery has been released, just in time for the framework’s fourth birthday. Version 1.4 looks like a speedy improvement on its predecessors.

If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, be sure to check out this very nifty jQuery reference app. It doesn’t take long to install and, best of all, it doesn’t involve the app store at all—the whole thing is built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript using HTML5’s offline storage. Now, no matter where you are, you’ll always have access to jQuery documentation …as long as the battery in your phone lasts, anyway.

The audio of place

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:15:25 -0500

Last year, the good people at Web Directions asked me if I would like to write an article for the second issue of their Scroll magazine—an honest-to-goodness dead-tree publication. I told them I would be delighted.

The theme of the issue was “place.” I took the word and ran with it, delivering an over-the-top pretentious piece about language, wormholes and virtual worlds. An edited version appeared in the magazine as Disrupting the conceptual metaphors of the web.

I’ve published the raw, unedited version here in the articles section under its original title of There Is No There There. I also recorded an audio version, which clocks in at just over eight and a half minutes.

There Is No There There on Huffduffer

Feel free to huffduff it. Feel free to anything you like with it: it’s licenced under a Creative Commons attribution license.

Tagged withaudio article scroll

Making Workshops for the Web

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:00:41 -0500

The latest Clearleft offering is Workshops for the Web. It made sense to move our workshop offerings out of the Clearleft sitewhere they were kind of distracting from the main message of the companyand give them their own home, just like our other events, dConstruct and UX London.

As well as the range of workshops that can be booked privately at any time, theres a schedule of upcoming public workshops for 2010:

CSS3 Wizardry on January 29th,
Copywriting for the Web on March 5th,
HTML5 for Web Designers on April 23rd,
UX Fundamentals on June 11th and
Usability Testing on July 16th.

The next workshop, CSS3 Wizardry with Rich and Nat, promises to be packed full of cutting-edge front-end techniques. Book a place if you want to have CSS3 kung-fu injected into your brainstem.

Visual Design

Im pretty pleased with how the site turned out. When I began designing it initially, I thought I would give it a sort of Russian constructivist feeling: the title Workshops for the Web made me think of an international workers movement. I started researching political propaganda posters, beginning with the book Revolutionary Tides.

Theres also some fantastic propaganda material in The National Archives (and I just love the modern twist of World War Three propaganda posters). I found a treasure trove of images of American working life in the Flickr Commons collection from The Library of Congress. I started gathering these sources together and distilling some of the common components such as bold colours and diagonal lines.

This was when Jon was working as an intern at Clearleft. I enlisted his help in brainstorming some ideas and he came up with some great stufflike using Soviet space-race imageryand we played around with proof-of-concept ideas for creating diagonal backgrounds using CSS3 transforms.

But it never really came together for me. Much as I loved the Russian constructivist propaganda angle, I ditched it and started from scratch.

IA

I scribbled down a page description diagram describing what the site needed to communicate in order of importance:

The name of the site.
A positioning statement.
The next workshop.
Other upcoming workshops.
A list of all workshops available.
A way of getting in touch.

The hierarchy for an individual workshop page looked pretty similar:

The title of the workshop.
The date of the workshop.
The location of the workshop.
The price of the workshop.
Details of the workshop.

It was clear that the page needed to quickly answer some basic questions: what? where? how much?

I started marking up the answers to those questions from top to bottom. Thats when it started to come together. Working with markup and CSS in the browser felt more productive than any of the sketching I had done in Photoshop. I started really sweating the typography to the extent that I decided that even the logotype should be created with live text rather than an image.

Build

From the start, I knew that I wanted the site to be a self-describing example of the technologies taught in the workshops. The site is built in HTML5, making good use of the new structural elements and the powerful outline algorithm. Marking up an events site with the hCalendar microformat was a no-brainer. There are hCards a-plenty too.

CSS3 nth-child selectors came in very handy and media queries are, quite simply, the bees knees when it comes to building a flexible site: just a few declarations allowed me to make sure the liquid layout could be optimised for different ranges of viewport size.

Given the audience of the site, I could be fairly certain that Internet Explorer 6 wouldnt be much of a hindrance. As it turns out, everything looks more or less okay even in that crappy browser. It looks different, of course, but then do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?

Right before launch, Paul took a shot at tweaking the visual design, adding a bit more contrast and separation on the homepage with some horizontal banding. Thats a visual element that I had been subconsciously avoiding, probably because its already used on some of our other sites, but once it was added, it helped to emphasise the next upcoming workshopthe main purpose of the homepage.

Just because the site is live now doesnt mean that Ill stop working on it. Id like to keep tweaking and evolving it. Maybe Ill finally figure out a way of incorporating some elements of those great propaganda posters.

Tagged withclearleft design markup css3 html5 microformats events

Fully Frontalled

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:22:15 -0500

Last Friday, the Full Frontal conference took place here in Brighton. It was like having the circus come to town …but with fewer acrobatics and more closures.

In short, it was superb. I’ve been to quite a few conferences in my time so I can get pretty jaded but this was a textbook lesson in how to put on a great event.

The content was top-notch. The fact that the whole day was focused on a single technology gave it a very cohesive feel. That said, there was still a wide variety of topics covered: mobile, accessibility, performance, and even server-side JavaScript. The intensity and complexity increased as the day went on, finishing with Simon blowing everyone’s minds.

All the speakers were great but special mention must go to Jake Archibald from the BBC. His talk on JavaScript performance was thoroughly entertaining and informative —a very tricky combination to do successfully. He made the presentation look effortless but there must have been months of preparation involved. That kind of spontaneity takes years of practice.

If you weren’t lucky enough to make it to Full Frontal, you can check out the speakers’ slides on the website but really, you should have been there.

Congratulations and kudos to Remy for putting together such a world-class event. I sincerely hope there’ll be a Full Frontal 2010, but it’ll be hard to match the standard set by this year’s conference.

November spawned a monster

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:16:26 -0400

November is shaping up to be a very busy month for JavaScript.

Fronteers 2009 is a two-day event in Amsterdam on November 5th and 6th. John Resig and Douglas Crockfordthat alone makes it worth the price of admission.

Straight after that, JSConf.eu takes place in Berlin on November 7th and 8th. Its a tight squeeze but it would possible to go to both events with a train ride in-between. I wonder if thats what John is going to do; hes speaking at both conferences.

But the highlight of the month still looks like being Full Frontal on November 20th. Thatll be held right here in Brighton which probably explains why Im kind of biased. But seriously, check out the line-up:

and more.

You can still grab tickets for the early-price of just one hundred squid.

Full Frontal

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:09:11 -0400

I remember when I spoke at the first @media conference in London in 2005, mine was the only talk related to JavaScript. Just a few short years later, there was an entire @media spin-off conference devoted to JavaScript: the slightly-inaccurately named @media Ajax. JavaScript has come a long way in the past few years.

This years be-there-or-be-square JavaScript event is the newly-announced Full Frontal conference to be held at the fantastic Duke Of Yorks Picturehouse in Brighton on November 20th:

full-frontal (JavaScript):
with nothing concealed or held back.

Its being organised by Remy Sharp. Doesnt this guy ever sleep? Not content with creating JS Bin and the JQuery API browser, and writing a book on jQuery for Designers, now hes going to organise a conference too.

It looks like being an absolute bargain. A mere 100 will get you a ticket to a day of serious JavaScript talks from some of the smartest people in the business: Christian Heilmann, Peter-Paul Koch, Stuart Langridge, Simon Willison, and more.

Best of all, I dont have to travel anywhere for this conference as its being held in my adopted hometown of Brighton. But if you do have to travel, I can think of now better place to travel to. Come along and Ill make sure the geeks of Brighton welcome you.

Tickets are on sale now.

Unobtrusify

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:23:47 -0500

A little while back, Phil Hawksworth, a very smart web developer at Osmosoft, created Unobtrusify.com. It’s a self-describing and rather lovely-looking ode to semantic markup, appropriate CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript.

You can read all about how it was made or you can simply go and play around with it …go ahead; click on stuff.

Phil’s co-worker Paul Downey is responsible for such printed masterpieces as The Web Is Agreement and The URI Is The Thing. He has now created a printable version of Unobtrusify. Head on over to archive.org, download and print to your heart’s content.

Now I just need to find some sticky material so I can slap my copy up next to my desk.

Happy birthday, jQuery!

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:55:25 -0500

jQuery was first released on January 14th, 2006. Now, precisely three revolutions of planet Earth later, jQuery 1.3 is out.

This release features some significant changes and improvements. Theres all the usual speed improvements, of course, but what I like in particular is the way that jQuery is ditching browser sniffing in favour of feature detection. Thats the way to do it.

The way the community is developing is as interesting as the code. Sizzle, the CSS selector engine inside jQuery, has been spun off into its own standalone project so that it can be used by other libraries and frameworks. Meanwhile, the jQuery project itself is coming under the banner of the Software Freedom Conservancy to formalise its standing as free and open software.

Congratulations to John and the rest of the team. Congratulations also to fellow Brightonian Remy Sharp for putting together the very handy jQuery API browser. The boy done good.

Pasty

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:22:35 -0400

A paste bin is a very handy tool when you’re working as part of a team, especially if there’s any remote work involved. Basically, they’re web-based clipboards where you can paste in snippets of text—JavaScript, CSS, markup or whatever—and then share the URL in an email or a chat message (a lot cleaner than pasting code straight into an email or chat window). Often you can specify a life span for the snippet so, for example, if nobody visits the page for a three month period, the URL rots.

At Clearleft, we often use pastebin.com though I’ve also used dpaste in the past. I like the way that pastebin allows you to create subdomains on the fly: just type in the URL to create it.

These services are great for collaborative debugging but they have one slight flaw when it comes to client-side work. JavaScript and CSS don’t exist in isolation; they are used to enhance an existing HTML document. So passing around a snippet of JavaScript or CSS might not be much good unless it is accompanied by the corresponding markup.

Enter JS Bin from Brighton’s own Remy Sharp, the man behind the superb microformats bookmarklet. This is a paste bin with a twist. As well as being able to share a snippet of JavaScript, you provide the markup that the JavaScript is acting on as well. If you’ve been sent a JS Bin URL, you can play around with the JavaScript and/or the markup, saving as you go.

There are some other nice touches too, like the ability to include a JavaScript library at the flick of a dropdown. For a proper explanation, be sure to watch the screencast that Remy has recorded.

Standalone selector

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:44:28 -0400

John Resig is a machine. Not content with dividing his time between working on jQuery and working on Firebug, he’s also got another few irons in the fire.

Just for kicks, John has created a standalone selector engine called Sizzle. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet but it looks very promising. It uses the CSS syntax that has helped make jQuery such a popular library. Right now, the code is coming in at less than 4K!

I really, really like this modular approach to writing JavaScript. Instead of bloating a library with more features, the components of the library are instead being split into separate standalone pieces. I wonder if the same thing will happen with event handling and effects. Those three actions (selector, event, effect) probably make up 80% of jQuery use cases:

jQuery(selector).event(function() { effect();});

For an event of a different kind, there’s a jQuery Camp scheduled for September 28th, the day before The Ajax Experience in Boston. The exact location has yet to be determined but given the number of jQuery fanboys out there, I’m guessing it won’t be ‘round at John’s house. There’s a nominal registration fee of $50 to cover lunch. If you use jQuery and you find yourself anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States at the end of September, you should probably register now.

In his spare time, John likes to relax by porting the Processing visualisation language to JavaScript. Freak.

The need for speed

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:57:54 -0400

Another day, another incremental release of jQuery. This one is sporting 13% faster CSS selectors and 103% faster event handlers.

Meanwhile, as the JavaScript libraries continue to evolve and improve, the browser engines are also focusing on speed improvements. Dave Hyatt and the WebKit gang have announced a brand new JavaScript engine called SquirrelFish. This looks like being about 60% faster than the previous WebKit interpreter so you can expect quite a speed boost in the next version of Safari.

If you’re interested in what happens under the hood with Squirrel Engine, Dave shares some of the philosophical underpinnings:

SquirrelFish owes a lot of its design to some of the latest research in the field of efficient virtual machines, including research done by Professor M. Anton Ertl, et al, Professor David Gregg, et al, and the developers of the Lua programming language.

You can find plenty of gory details on the Surfin’ Safari blog.

Radio on the TV

Sun, 11 May 2008 11:06:14 -0400

I was in the illustrious surroundings of Rissington last week to deliver a DOM Scripting workshop. My good friend Ann was in attendance. During the latter part of the workshop which was deliberately more loosely structured than the rest of the day she pointed me to a really lovely bit of JavaScript form enhancement.

Take a look at the UK and Ireland TV and radio listings on Yahoo. See that search form in the upper right corner? Its using the standard design pattern of allowing you to specify exactly where youre searching. But unlike most implementations, this one is built on a rock-solid foundation of semantic markup.

Steve Marshall has the lowdown. Under the hood the form is using radio buttons for choosing where to search. Then, using a combination of JavaScript and CSS, this default representation is augmented to look and behave as desired. Switch off JavaScript and you can still use the search form perfectly well.

What impresses me about this isnt so much the code (although Im sure its top-notch), its the thinking behind the implementation: start with solid semantic markup with good ol fashioned form elements for interaction; then think about how it can be enhanced. Nice one, Steve.