Tools

Software and such, plus helpful sites and gadgets.

CSS Menu Writer debuts

Launched today, WebAssist Professional’s CSS Menu Writer™ for Dreamweaver takes the pain out of creating standards-compliant horizontal or vertical navigation menus with nested fly-outs.
I got to spend an hour with the program prior to its release, and was impressed with its flexibility and extreme ease of use. For instance, creating primary and secondary menu [...]

The vanishing personal site

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional [...]

ALA 256: map rolling & data viz

In Issue No. 256 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Wilson Miner shares three techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based web navigation patterns, and Paul Smith shows how to replicate Google Maps’ functionality with open source software to produce high-quality mapping applications tailored to your design goals.

WordPress 2.5 unleashed

WordPress 2.5, designed by Happy Cog and built by Automattic, is now available for your downloading pleasure.

Books of Luke and Aarron

In Issue No. 255 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Sign Up Forms Must Die – Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design at Yahoo! and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008), calls for the abolition of sign-up forms where web services are concerned. Via “gradual engagement,” says Luke, we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them with forms. And in Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008), provides an overview of this essential web discipline, explains how it is like SEO but different, and tells how every member of your team can contribute to your site’s content’s findability. You can see Luke and Aarron live at upcoming An Event Apart design conferences in Boston and New Orleans. Plus: they’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace (and staff at ALA). I’m verklempt!

Monday links

Chopsticks by Segura. A greener LA via Boston. Stealing patterns, making models. Samurai errata and SXSW bowling.

Version targeting, take two

In Issue No. 253 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Jeremy Keith says version targeting in IE8 is all right but its default is all wrong. I argue that the default seems wrong but is actually right and necessary. Read, discuss, decide.

Happy fourth birthday, real world semantics

Four years ago today, Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks gave a presentation on real-world semantics. Working backwards from HTML extensions like XFN (created by Tantek, Matt Mullenweg, and Eric Meyer), the paper showed how designers and developers could add semantics to today’s web rather than starting from scratch or waiting for a “purer” markup language.

ALA 252: New library, long hallway

Keep your markup clean with DOM scripting and learn to play nice in the long hallway.

Self-publishing is the new blogging

When you’ve flown this far from Gutenberg, the only place to travel is back.