News from December 2008
Memories and articles from back in the day
Shiny CSS buttons
Drew McLellan and Brian Suda, curators of the now traditional “24 Ways” web developers advent calendar kindly asked me to write something for the 2008 edition.
So, having been playing around a lot with CSS3 and experimental CSS currently supported in various browsers, I put together a proof of … Read more »
State of the web survey closes today
Today’s your last chance to do the first “State of the web” survey for web designers and developers. If you can find a few minutes to take the anonymous survey about web design and development practices, it will definitely help gain a better understanding about current best practice in … Read more »
Adrian Holovaty featured in the Chicago Tribune
While these days Chicago might have an even bigger “local boy makes good” story than Adrian Holovaty, I’m happy to say that I consider Adrian one of the most incentive, and nicest people doing stuff on the web. We’ve had the great privilege to have him speak at both … Read more »
Cartoon characters and pornography
Last week, I drafted an article on a NSW Supreme Court decision, finding a man guilty of possessing child pornography, in the form of a cartoon depicting various members of the Simpsons family in sexual acts. But I didn’t publish it. I censored myself, because frankly in the current climate, … Read more »
Job — Online Director at GetUp
A job that will appeal to quite a few of our readers, Online Director at GetUp, just popped up at our jobs board.
We are looking for a dynamic, self-motivated individual to direct the overall growth and strategic direction of GetUp’s online presence.
As the leader of our online … Read more »
Dan Saffer on touchscreen desktops
Via the ever excellent core77, a great place to keep up with design trends and events beyond the web, Dan Saffer who’ll be doing both a presentation and workshop at Web Directions North talks about whether “pure” touchscreen systems really are a great interface for desktop … Read more »
State of the Web Survey — a few days to go
There’s still a few days to go to complete our State of the Web Survey — along with the well over 1,000 people who’ve done so so far.
If you’ve not done so, please think about finding the time — it should only take a few minutes.
And remember, we’ll be … Read more »
Google Chrome exits beta
In what might be some sort of record for Google, Chrome, their webkit based browser, has gone 1.0 today.
In our survey of web developers and designers, we asked what browsers people use, and what they test for, and we’ll be interested to see whether early adopter web types are … Read more »
Donate to the W3C’s Validator project
OK folks,
you’ve used them many many times, so now’s your chance to contribute to the W3C’s validator project to help keep these vitally important tools for us web people going strong.
Print and Web Designer/Develop Job at IMMEDIA!
With our Jobs site up and running, we don’t post too many job ads here on the blog, but from time to time we want to draw attention to ones that turn up.
IMMEDIA!, legendary in the Australian music scene, is looking for someone to replace their long standing, and … Read more »
Australian Bureau of Statistics new creative commons license
In what is excellent news (via the Open Knowledge Foundation), and hopefully a model for other government agencies in Australia, the ABS has just announced that their soon to be released site update will be licensed under the liberal Create Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia Licence.
Here’s hoping that we’ll … Read more »
Ignite Sydney coming January 22nd
After the great success of the recent GeoSpatial Ignite, bringing together folks from the world of Geo Sciences and the Web, Stephen Lead is putting together Ignite Sydney, to be held Thursday January 22nd, at the Shelbourne Hotel (scene of the last two closing night parties for Web Directions … Read more »
Shoot your inspiration photo competition
Core77, one of our daily reads for keeping up with the wider design world, along with Braun, have just announced the “Shoot your inspiration” photographic competition.
Photos can be of objects, people, or environments; they can be artistic gestures or graphic messages. Use your camera as a lens or … Read more »
Introducing Soap Jr.
We’ll let you in on a little secret — well, it might come as little surprise, I’m actually wearing my fabulous Moltn: I Like Code t-shirt as I type this, but here at Web Directions we are geeks. We love code, coding, and all manner of technical stuff. So, … Read more »
Scroll Magazine — the Design Process
The super talented Veerle Pieters, responsible for the design of both the Scroll Magazine logotype, and Scroll Magazine, has a detailed article on the design process for Scroll today.
Australian Government net censorship plans in trouble
In what appears to be a triumph of common sense, the much maligned plans by the Australian government to create a mandatory, secret black list or sites that all ISPs must filter looks to be in considerable trouble. With little support from any quarter, even many child welfare groups … Read more »
Chumby — now available in Australia!
You may not know, but we here at Web Directions are big fans of Chumby — but it’s not been available in Australia, until now.
That’s right, Chumby is now available thorough ISP Internode.
And they have even got a competition to create Australian flavoured Chumby widgets.
So, if … Read more »
Advice for freelance web designers/developers
Over at Slashdot, a discussion of best practices for freelance web designers and developers. There’s a lot of you folks out there (and doubtless many thinking about making the move), so head over and participate, or soak in the wisdom (and otherwise) of the slashdot crowd.
Bert Bos summarizes the issues around Webfonts
Bert Bos, co-inventor of CSS, has a detailed summary of the issues around font embedding and standardization from a couple of months back.
Why so much on this of late here? We feel at web directions that this is a development ultimately as significant as the rise of CSS for … Read more »
Webfonts — an excellent article by Jon Tan
If you want to get up to speed with the who, what, where how and when of Web fonts, this recent article by Jon Tan is the place to start.
Web fonts — great news with Opera 10 Alpha
Opera had just announced an Alpha of Opera 10, with some excellent support for new and emerging standards, including one of my favorites, font linking.
Currently, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.1, and now Opera 10 support font linking via the @font-face mechanism. Internet Explorer has in fact supported this feature … Read more »
Surface article in Desktop Magazine
Matt Magain, from our media partners SitePoint, has an article in this month’s Desktop Magazine (another Media Partner) about Microsoft Surface, along with an interview with Web Directions keynote speaker and chief Surface guy August de los Reyes (and a lovely person to boot).
The full article … Read more »
UX Book Club
This is a great idea — and indeed one that other disciplines in the web industry could think about. UX Book Club is a get-together in which people interested in the area of user experience come to discuss a book relevant to the discipline. Take a look at the … Read more »
Screen resolutions
Ben Buchanan, Web Directions speaker and long time friend has a very detailed discussion of the issues around screen resolution. Long gone are the days where you could reasonably safely rely on a small number of possible screen resolutions. Now, we might be designing for screen sizes from 240x320 … Read more »
The State of the Web 2008 — a Survey of Web Designers and Developers
Update
The results of the survey have now been published.
At Web Directions and Westciv, we’ve been strongly focussed on the standards based web, and best practices in web design and development for well over ten years. Over that period, we’ve seen the rise of CSS, along with the … Read more »
Web Directions North — “cyber-monday” super special
For those on the edge of registering for the conference, here’s something that might just help you make up your mind.
For today (Monday December 1st) only, register for the conference, and we’ll give you either
- a half day workshop of your choice or
- a day’s skiing or boarding at Breckenridge (return … Read more »
Help stop the draconian and ignorant federal government proposed internet censorship regime
We’ve not said anything as yet about the Australian Federal Government’s draconian and ignorant mandatory internet censorship regime, in part due to a combination of incredulity and anger. But, luckily someone is on the case. Action group Getup has an online petition that you should sign, and get anyone … Read more »