MY GLAMOROUS LIFE: Tragicomic fodder from the life of Zeldman. A LIST APART: Design, code, content. For people who make websites. LES MISC: Articles, essays, and miscellanies. TAKING YOUR TALENT TO THE WEB: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer.
DAILY REPORT: Web design news for your pleasure.
STEAL THESE GRAPHICS: Free art for your desktop or personal site. FUN HOUSE: Entertainment for you. ASK DR WEB: Tips for web designers. Since 1995. 15 MINUTES: Interviews with movie stars and cyberstars, 1996-1999.
STEAL THESE GRAPHICS: Desktop images for your pleasure.

Current ALA: Double issue on Flash MX
Current Project: getAccess
Current Interview: SitePoint

8 May 2002
[noon | 9 am]
Tom Cruise, ’zine publishing tips, and lucky little vessels: SitePoint interviews Mister Zeldman. Interview sparkingly conducted by Jeremy Wright, based on questions submitted by SitePoint readers.

Hope.

Bookmark this: the House of Style updates its CSS Browser Support grid, detailing which browsers support which parts of the Cascading Style Sheets standard. Separately, some independent designers have begun a CSS bug ring, documenting CSS support flaws in current browsers. Some day it will all just work.

Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands: Hillman Curtis makes a movie, with nods to D.A. Pennebaker and e.e. cummings.

Digital Web presents an interview with Gabe Kean, art director and publisher of Born Magazine. Must be indie web publisher interview day. Gabe is a thoughtful gent, and interviewer Meryl K. Evans asks the right questions.

We’ve updated numerous pages here today. See if you can guess which ones.

So yesterday, we wrote the outline for our next book and prepared Friday’s issue of A List Apart, featuring geek superstar Eric Meyer; then wandered through downtown Manhattan, accompanied by a female angel.
        Today we meet with our publishers and get a pair of nice pants for our Dad’s wedding on Sunday. Nothing fancy. Two legs, pockets, that kind of thing. Tomorrow we dine with our publishers, install two club chairs in the fortress, and attend BD4D, a sort of live Flash Tennis that floats from city to city around the world, recasting web design as a competitive sport.
        Friday we publish the 144th commercial-free issue of A List Apart Magazine, submit to brutal intimacy with a powerful and indifferent stranger (also known as “having an annual medical checkup”), and fly to Pittsburgh for the wedding, accompanied by a female angel.
        We share these fragments to assuage readers who wish we’d update My Glamorous Life more frequently. Heartbreaking entries of breathtaking complexity are coming soon. Just not today. The fierce intermingling of joy and grief that has driven our soul for, oh, some time now, defies quick capture. Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. :::

7 May 2002
[5 pm]
Launched today, getAccess is a member site for people who love live entertainment. The site is customized by region; multiple versions serve various marketing partners. The Sam Goody version shown here enables members to buy tickets to the Stones before they go on sale to the public.
        Divine built the back end, we designed the front. Clear Channel Entertainment conceived and maintains the service. A few kinks (unescaped amperands, disappearing DOCTYPEs) should be worked out in a day or two. :::

6 May 2002
[5 pm | 2 pm | noon]

Fun facts about zeldman.com:

  1. Billing itself as “Jeffrey Zeldman Presents” (a none-too-subtle nod to “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”) this site premiered in May 1995.
  2. The site was initially conceived as a series of visual entertainments, though these were primitive by today’s standards. Animated gifs and table layouts were the bleeding-edge technology of the time. Both had plenty of detractors who felt that these innovations would destroy the purity of the web.
  3. The site always included daily text on a root-level page called coming.html, though visitors mostly ignored that page until the late 1990s.
  4. Alexa currently ranks zeldman.com 70,741 out of about five billion sites. Its offspring, A List Apart, is ranked 68,886.
  5. Icon searches at Google and Yahoo generate 21% of this site’s traffic.
  6. Neither zeldman.com nor alistapart.com accepts advertising.
  7. This site was launched at a tilde address. The zeldman.com domain did not come ’til June of ’96.
  8. By the time it moved to zeldman.com, the site had already established a growing readership and significant linkage in the major portals of the day, of which only Yahoo survives.
  9. Zeldman.com continued to be mirrored at the tilde site for over two years, to avoid breaking personal bookmarks and web links while gently easing readers through the transition to the new domain.
  10. Out of habit, zeldman.com and A List Apart are hand coded in a text editor, despite the ready availability of visual editors and publishing tools, many of which are quite good.
  11. On 31 May, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents will begin its eighth year online.

Elsewhere on the web...

CodeBitch’s The Brain Upgrade Initiative raises excellent points. We’ve thought the same things ourselves.

The Basefield Project supports children’s charities through the sale of posters by web artists like Future Farmers and Presstube. Good art, good cause, fine site by Jade Palmer of Design is Kinky.

Nasty, “the world’s brattiest online academic journal,” is holding a design competition for the cover of its next issue. Submissions, due 15 May, should be in HTML or Flash format, and must make use of stock photography found on iStockphoto.com. More info on Nasty’s submissions page.

Readers constantly ask how to create a print style sheet like the one we use at A List Apart. Eric Meyer’s Print Different, originally published in January 2000, tells all.

New at {fray}: Homecoming, a story by Kate Cunningham, designed by Briana Bolger.

The Mount Saint Vincent University Library has posted a collection of lesbian pulp fiction cover art. (Link care of Pixelsurgeon.) :::

3 May 2002
[5 pm | 3 pm | 10 am | 3 am]
An earlier situation mentioned here involving SpamCop, a web artist, and a popular hosting company has been amiably resolved.

One swell thing about designing with CSS: it’s easy to make changes. No text gifs to retool in Photoshop, no Rollovers to code, no nested tables to debug, no complex Flash files to edit. (Reflection prompted by this morning’s sidebar redesign.)

Web pages look different to every visitor. We all know this, but we forget how different “different” can be. This morning a professional web designer of some renown complimented us on the blue text in our redesigned sidebar. There is, of course, no blue text in our sidebar, but our grey text looks blue on his monitor.

By popular demand, A List Apart No. 143, a double issue on Flash MX, has been held over for a second week.

Thirty-two web artists expose their visitor logs and browser histories: Lab 404’s Traffic Report.

Stereotypography and 5inch are sponsoring a CD design contest judged by the artists behind some of your favorite sites.

Today’s Photoshop Tennis pits 5pieces against Pixelfury with host Jim Coudal himself in the booth. (Seems Herr Coudal is taking no chances after the debacle of 19 April.) Today’s live match begins 11a Chicago, 10a NYC, 5p London.

Adobe has won its “tabbed palette” patent infringement suit against arch-rival Macromedia. The court awarded Adobe close to $3 million in damages and could issue an injunction forcing Macromedia to remove tabbed palettes from its software. How would that work? Would Macromedia have to recall its latest products? We’re not giving ours back.

Meanwhile, Apple is suing Sorenson over video compression software in Flash MX.

Pixelsurgeon seeks “a UK based games reviewer for Microsoft Xbox and Playstation 2 sports titles (and other PS 2 titles at a later date). Although Pixelsurgeon.com is non-profit and therefore unable to pay, this is an excellent opportunity for serious applicants to add to their CV and to be read by a large audience. Email review samples and full contact details.”

Reader David Weingart corrects an item in yesterday’s Report about the SpamCop mail abuse reporting service: “Once Spamcop has processed the email, the user uses the information Spamcop has gathered to submit spam reports to the appropriate network administrators. Abuse complaints are not sent automatically. A human has to make the choice to send the spam report.” :::
The author and his opinions.
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