Category: content

Top Web Books of 2010

“It’s been a great year for web design books; the best we can remember for a while, in fact!” So begins Goburo’s review of the Top Web Books of 2010. The list is extremely selective, containing only four books. But what books! They are: Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design (Five Simple Steps); Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); Dan Cederholm’s CSS3 For Web Designers (A Book Apart); and Eric Meyer’s Smashing CSS (Wiley and Sons).

I’m thrilled to have had a hand in three of the books, and to be a friend and business partner to the author of the fourth. It may also be worth noting that three of the four books were published by scrappy, indie startup publishing houses.

Congratulations, all. And to you, good reading (and holiday nerd gifting).

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Awesome web apps in 10k or less

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 16 November 2010

The 10K Apart Challenge had a simple premise: Could you build a complete web application using less than 10 kilobytes? … A joint effort between An Event Apart and MIX Online, the 10K Apart reaped 367 web applications in 28 days—everything from casual games to RIAs—that demonstrate, even with their tiny footprints, what is truly possible with modern [web] standards.

Read about the winning entries: 10K Apart – IEBlog.

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Gary Vaynerchuk on The Big Web Show Episode 26

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 3 November 2010
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GARY VAYNERCHUK is our guest on Episode #26 of The Big Web Show, taped live before an internet audience at 1:00 PM ET Thursday 4 November at live.5by5.tv. Gary is the creator of Wine Library TV, the author of the New York Times bestselling book Crush It!, and the co-founder with his brother AJ of VaynerMedia, a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is recorded live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

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Cognition: Behind the Music

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 12 October 2010

Happy Cog president Greg Storey describes the thinking behind our latest little experiment in online publishing and community:

Last week we launched Cognition, a studio blog, that replaced the traditional open-mic text area commenting system with two options: Either post a response via your own Twitter account or link to a post on your own blog.

As the primary instigator, Mr. Storey explains his and the agency’s rationale for doing away with traditional comments:

The problem with most comment threads is that they can reach that useless tipping point very quickly. Without having an active moderator to keep up with all of the various threads it’s practically impossible to provide any sort of conversational value.

Meanwhile we have also informally noticed a decline in blog usage since the wider adoption of Twitter within our community. … Happy Cog loves blogs. … What if we could help bring some life back into the old network by encouraging people to write blog posts when they have more to say than what can fit into one-hundred-and-forty characters?

Read more and comment if you wish: Airbag: Babylon.

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An Event Apart, The Musical

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 20 September 2010
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? See more: An Event Apart, The Musical

Community content editorial

It’s a wonderful life

When you write “This post has earned one meager response,” meager describes the quality of the response received when, I think, your intent is to describe quantity of responses received. Recast?

Thomas Osborne

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ALA 313: CS, CMS, H&J, OK!

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 7 September 2010

In Issue No. 313 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Better content management systems start with content strategy; typographically beauteous web pages may benefit from hyphenation and justification.

Strategic Content Management

by JONATHAN KAHN

Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?

Published in: Content Strategy

The Look That Says Book

by RICHARD FINK

Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.

Published in: Layout, Typography

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

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Announcing Lanyrd

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 31 August 2010

No, it isn’t a Happy Cog project (it’s by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe) but we couldn’t love Lanyrd, the social conference directory any more if we’d created it ourselves.

Lanyrd uses Twitter to tell you which conferences, workshops and such your friends are attending or speaking at. You can add and track events, and soon you’ll be able to export your events as iCal or into your Google calendar (the site is powered by microformats). Soon, too, you’ll be able to add sessions, slides, and videos.

The site’s not for everyone. It’s for people who attend web/UX conferences, and as it was created by inhabitants of the UK, it presently focuses mainly on Western European and North American events, but that will change as more people use it.

Congratulations and thank you, Natalie and Simon.

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Minneapolis Remembered

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 29 July 2010

The show’s over but the photos linger on. An Event Apart Minneapolis was two days of nonstop brilliance and inspiration. In an environment more than one attendee likened to a “TED of web design,” a dozen of the most exciting speakers and visionaries in our industry explained why this moment in web design is like no other.

If you were there, relive the memories; if you couldn’t attend, steal a glance at some of what you missed: An Event Apart Minneapolis: the photo pool at Flickr.

Next up: An Event Apart DC and San Diego. These shows will not be streamed, simulcast, or repackaged in DVD format. To experience them, you must attend. Tickets are first-come, first-served, and every show this year has sold out. Forewarned is forearmed; we’d love to turn you on.

Photo: Jared Mehle.

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Episode 12: Web Conferences

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 14 July 2010

Andy McMillan of Build conference.

Thursday 15 July 2010 at 1:00 PM ET, Dan Benjamin and I will try to find out what makes web design conferences tick by interviewing the founders of two of the best. During the live taping of Episode 12 of The Big Web Show, the weekly podcast on everything web that matters, our guests will be Andy McMillan, founder of Build, an annual “hand-crafted web design conference” located in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and CSS godfather Eric Meyer, co-founder of An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites.

Andy (@goodonpaper) is a six foot tall ape descendant who enjoys working on the internet, organizing @buildconf (a small, yet perfectly formed, design conference taking place this November in Belfast, Northern Ireland), cowering in @corebelfast, and drinking tea.

Eric (@meyerweb) needs no introduction to readers of this website, but we’ll provide one anyway: He has worked with the web since late 1993 and is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Eric coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C’s CSS Test Suite, and in 1998–1999 was a member of the WaSP CSS Samurai, an elite team within The Web Standards Project that helped the engineers at Opera and Microsoft improve the CSS support in their browsers.

Eric co-founded the css-discuss mailing list, and has written numerous historically important books on web design, including Eric Meyer on CSS (New Riders), Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly & Associates), and CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference (Osborne/McGraw-Hill).

The Big Web Show is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards (often within hours of taping) via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Community content

Improving Comments

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 17 June 2010

In 2008, Derek Powazek, who knows more about community on the web than just about anyone, shared 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments. It was a great read then, and still is, distilling of 15 years of online community experience into a brief, punchy list. If comments on your site aren’t where you want them to be, give it a look.

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Whitney Hess, Ethan Marcotte, and Jason Fried on The Big Web Show

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 15 June 2010
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Update! Episode 8, featuring Whitney Hess, is now available for your listening and viewing pleasure at 5by5.tv.

Whitney Hess

This Thursday 17 June at 1:00 PM EDT, join Dan Benjamin and me live on The Big Web Show as we interview Whitney Hess (bio | blog | Twitter) on on the ins and outs of user experience design—from research to wireframes to testing and beyond. Just what goes into making stuff online easier and more pleasurable to use? What kinds of projects (and clients) enable great user experiences, and which have bad UI written all over them? If a tree falls in the forest, will Whitney tweet about it? Join us for these topics and more.

24 June: Ethan Marcotte

Then on Thursday 24 June at 1:00 PM EDT, join us live as we interview Ethan Marcotte (bio | blog | Twitter), co-author of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition with me and Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design with Dan Cederholm. We’ll talk about designing and coding for the likes of the Sundance Film Festival and New York Magazine, and the joys of responsive web design, working remotely, and swearing profusely on Twitter.

1 July: Jason Fried

And then on Thursday, 1 July, join us as we coax 37signals CEO Jason Fried (tiny bio | book | book | book | blog | Twitter) into telling us how he really feels about bells and whistles, contracts, meetings, buzzwords, software that requires training, and startups that need investors. The controversial Mr Fried is a true rebel and innovator and one of our favorite people on the internet. Tune in and find out why.

Turn on, Tune in

The Big Web Show is taped live in front of an internet audience Thursdays at live.5by5.tv and can be watched afterwards via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

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A Feed Apart 2.0

As promised, a super-hot update to A Feed Apart, the official feed aggregator for An Event Apart, is up and running for your web design conference pleasure. You can now tweet from inside the application, and can even arrange meet-ups and make other social connections there.

Must-read: Designer Ali M. Ali talks about the interface design.

Steve Losh did back-end programming.

Nick Sergeant and Pete Karl created the original A Feed Apart and led the redesign effort.

If you can’t attend the sold-out show, which begins Monday, May 24, you can follow the live Tweetage from the comfort of your cubicle.

Enjoy An Event Apart Boston 2010 on A Feed Apart.

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Boston Bound

Morning finds me bound by train for Boston, capital of Massachusetts, land of Puritans, patriots, and host of the original Tea Party. Center of high technology and higher education. Where the John Hancock Tower signs its name in the clouds, and the sky-scraping Prudential Tower adds a whole new meaning to the term, “high finance.” Beantown. Cradle of liberty, Athens of America, the walking city, and five-time host to An Event Apart, which may be America’s leading web design conference. (You see what I did there?)

Over 500 advanced web design professionals will join co-host Eric Meyer and me in Boston’s beautiful Back Bay for two jam-packed days of learning and inspiration with Dan Cederholm, Andy Clarke, Kristina Halvorson, Jeremy Keith, Ethan Marcotte, Jared Spool, Nicole Sullivan, Jeff Veen, Aarron Walter, and Luke Wroblewski.

If you can’t attend the sold-out show, which begins Monday, May 24, you can follow the live Tweetage via the souped-up, socially-enriched, aesthetically tricked out new version of A Feed Apart, whose lights go on this Sunday, May 23. Our thanks to developers Nick Sergeant, Pete Karl II, and their expanded creative team including Steve Losh and Ali M. Ali. We and they will have more to say about the project soon. For now, you can always read our 2009 interview with Nick and Pete or sneak a peek on Dribbble.

There’s also a Flickr photo group and an interstitial playlist, so you can ogle and hum along from your favorite cubicle or armchair.

See you around The Hub or right here on the world wide internets.

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More Mod on the Digital Book

Post author By L. Jeffrey Zeldman
Post date 26 April 2010
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A Reading Heatmap: Key passages illuminated by layering all readers’ highlights for the same text.

LAST MONTH, he wowed us with Books in the Age of the iPad, a call to make digital books as beautiful as printed ones. This month, Craig Mod is back with Embracing the Digital Book, an article (or blog post if you must) that begins as a critique of iBooks and Kindle and moves on to discuss the e-reader of our dreams, complete with reasoned social features:

I’m excited about digital books for a number of reasons. Their proclivity towards multimedia is not one of them. I’m excited about digital books for their meta potential. The illumination of, in the words of Richard Nash, that commonality between two people who have read the same book.

We need to step back for a moment and stop acting purely on style. There is no style store. Retire those half-realized metaphors while they’re still young.

Instead, let’s focus on the fundamentals. Improve e-reader typography and page balance. Integrate well considered networked (social) features. Respect the rights of the reader and then — only then — will we be in a position to further explore our new canvas.

Embracing the digital book — Craig Mod