David John Mead

Looking back…

Its the end of the year and I’ve been thinking a bit about the things that shaped me to get where I am today.  By no means is this an exhaustive list of people, books, or events that have influenced or helped me, but more the 5 main points that spring to mind time and time again.

Web sites!

David Siegel’s Creating Killer Web Sites was the first real book I got about building web sites. Thoroughly outdated now, but back in ‘96 this was a true eye-opener for me and just made me hungry to learn more.

Floats? What the heck are those for?

I’d been trying to figure out CSS for a while with little to no success.  That was until I plowed through Eric Meyer’s Eric Meyer on CSS.  It give me a real glimpse of the web we have now. Added bonus: I ended up moving to Cleveland and meeting a very cool guy at a web design meet-up, turned out to be Eric.

Staying in touch

Keeping up with the ever changing landscape of the web is a daunting task but  Nick Fink and Digital Web Magazine made it easier. I devoured every article published in it’s 10 year run. It was my “go-to” site and I used to print off many articles to read on the bus ride home. I got to see Nick speak at SXSW as well as share a beer with him. When I think “web professional”, I think Nick Fink.

STANDARDS!

After reading Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards (now in its 3rd edition) I  made the next big leap in how I saw the web as a whole.  It was that orange book that shaped my coding and approach to building sites.

South by…

Attending SXSW for the first time kicked me up to 11!  I came back from there completely energized and re-engaged.  Its more than spotting & rubbing shoulders with the “stars” of the web. Its actually talking with them as colleagues and finding out you all share similar problems and goals. Returning the next year with Paul and representing the agency we worked for as a finalist in the Web Awards was a fantastic feeling.  If you ever get to choose a web conference to attend I recommend SXSW.

Here’s to 2010 and all that it will bring.

Technorati tags: digitalwebmagazine, web, ericmeyer, orangebook, sxsw, davidsiegel, zeldman, fink

Strangers in my Twitter feed

Twitter has been going into overdrive recently, updating their online experience to (I assume) catch up with the plethora of apps that make use of the service.

Since the site has become my only way to interact with the service I’ve liked a lot of the subtle improvements. Having the site update with new tweets has been meant I don’t have to continually hit F5. Lists offer a way to organize and share, similar to Facebook’s feeds.

The latest is re-tweeting on the site, something apps like twirl and tweetdeck have offered for sometime.  Even on those apps I prefer to pass the tweet along with a little tinkering instead of just hitting the re-tweet button – that’s just me.  But the way Twitter is implementing it on the site doesn’t sit great with me (see screenshot). It feels like strangers are popping up in my feed. Names and faces that I don’t know and my initial reaction is “I’m getting SPAM” until I’ve looked a little closer.

I applaud the efforts that developers are doing, and maybe I’ll get used to it, but for now I’d like a way to turn it off.

Brad Colbow on how “not making the logo bigger”…

Lean Dog opened the doors to their office (which is really a boat) to the CWSA tonight, letting us hear Brad Colbow’s presentation titled “Don’t make the logo bigger! Happiness for you and your clients”.

Giving us a whirlwind tour through his early steps in web design, which included some of his first concepts, Brad then stepped us through some of the pointers he’s picked up along the way.

“Design should never say ‘Look at me’. It should always say ‘Look at this’”.
David Craib

Sharing stories that we’ve all had to stumble through from time to time, like the ever changing background color and lack of content or client direction, Brad then laid out some tips that he’s gained by confronting the problems head-on.  These have now helped his freelance career, securing work for Starbucks, NationBuilder, and working with Jeremy Keith on an upcoming project.

It was a great presentation, and gave me a chance to meet up with some familiar faces in a cool space, exactly the kind of thing that the CWSA excels at. Brad also writes and draws an online comic strip called ‘The Brads‘.

Technorati tags: bradcolbow, presentation, cwsa, web, design, freelance, cleveland, ohio, july

How do you solve a problem like IE6?

A recent article on Ajaxian.com looked at Digg’s survey about IE6 use.  I think it really just validates what we already know, which is…

• Most IE6 users are at work and cannot upgrade
• Some user just don’t care to upgrade

So how should you address this?  The one solution that I personally feel most comfortable with is Andy Clarke’s Universal IE6 stylesheet.  This lets the visitor access all the content as well as releasing the designer/developer from a spiraling descent into madness, trying to make pages look the same. I’ve recently added it to my freelance site.

One IE6 solution I cannot get behind is proposed at http://ie6update.com/.  This displays a bar designed to mimic IE’s own information bar.  When the user clicks on it they get directed to the IE download page.  This is so open to misuse and, even with the best intentions, still smacks of trickery.

As to that old chestnut of ’supporting IE6′, well I’m not Microsoft, so I don’t have to “support” anything they make. Same goes for supporting Apple, Mozilla, or Opera products.  What I do have to do however, is make sure that any visitor, using any method, can access information and perform transactions on a site I’ve built.

Should it look graphically the same for a seven year old browser as it does for the latest & greatest? No. Should it prevent the seven year old browser from entrance? Certainly not.

So here’s to IE6 slowly going away but, in the meantime, lets not make the visitors who have no choice in using it feel alienated.

Technorati tags: ie6, css, solution, support, web, design

HTML5 is not a big deal, really.

I’ve always been a big proponent of web standards.  Use semantic markup and validate your code are two things I always adhere too.

That’s why, I guess, I’m none too engaged by the wailing and gnashing of teeth around the current HTML5/XHTML2 conversation taking place across the web at the moment. Because whatever flavour of mark-up you use, you should always do those two things and there are still a ton of developers who don’t.

I switched from HTML4 to XHTML some time ago because I felt it gave me the structure I wanted in my coding.  It was virtually always served using a text/html MIME type so it was pretty much HTML4, but with XML syntax.  It just seemed cleaner and more structured and helped hone my trade.

There are still very few websites out there that are using XHTML properly (with an application/xhtml+xml MIME type) compared to the thousands of sites created by WYSIWYG tools that are barely proper HTML, let alone semantic or validated.  I would rather concentrate on cleaning those up and educating developers to code sematically and validate their code correctly going forward, before lameting XHTML2, which seemed on a hiding to nowhere from the get go.

The next freelance web site I build will probably be in HTML4, just to brush up. All subsequent ones will be HTML5.

Jeremy Keith has a great post outling the basics you need to know, as does Jeffrey Zeldman.  Both posts have links to various other sources if you want to dig deeper.

Technorati tags: html5, xhtml2, standards, web

Goodbye Pownce

The news came today that Pownce has been acquired by Six Apart, and will shut it’s doors on December 15th 2008.

Coming on the day that the USA confirms its in a recession can’t be great news, but I don’t think this move is solely economy driven, though Six Apart recently laid off some folks.

Pownce came on the scene and offered more than Twitter, by letting its users share links, files, and calendar events.  Though for me it never really had a sense of community that I could tap into, like Twitter. At least they are letting people know early and are offering a way to export your posts.

I’m glad to see some of the team go over to Six Apart and it reads as though they are taking the technology with them, but I wonder is this the next step for some of the other messaging services?

Twitter still has not defined a real way to make money (Pownce offered inline ads) and the name-of-the-game is increasingly aggregation for a way to navigate the current social web.  Will Twitter buy, or be bought by, some blogging software or possibly one of the search engines?

As is so often the case I think the thing on most peoples lips is “pity. what’s next?”

Technorati tags: pownce, six apart, closing, social, web