Categories
A List Apart Blogs and Blogging Design development Publishing Standards Tools

Better community through printing

Readers read web pages. Readers print web pages. In 1999, the way to help readers print web pages was obvious to every major site owner: buy a proprietary, multi-million-dollar content management system avec service contract to generate multiple versions of every page. After all, you needed seven versions of every page to handle all the browsers out there; you might as well treat print the same.

In 2001, A List Apart started promoting print style sheets, and by 2003, all the cool kids were doing it. They were also mostly using free or low-cost, generally open-source, content management systems. Yay, open source! Yay, web standards!

But a problem remains: all those ponderous 1999 websites have trained readers to expect a “print this page” button and subsequent in-browser preview. How can you satisfy this basic user expectation while still enjoying all the benefits of web standards?

In Issue 226 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, Pete McVicar shows one very good way to do it. His “Print to Preview” combines alternate stylesheets and scripting to…

show how the page will look when it’s printed, perhaps display a preview message explaining what this new view is about, and then automatically print the page.

McVicar’s method isn’t the only way to do this—others will likely be mentioned in the comments—but his technique is straightforward and clean, and it takes care of users without making the mistake of trying to educate them about something in which they’re profoundly uninterested (namely, web development).

Also in this issue: “How to be a Great Host,” by John Gladding. These days, many people’s web business plan looks something like this: “Ajaxy goodness + ???? = Profits!” Other straw men seem to think five blog posts plus text ads by Google plus discussion board software guarantees a buyout by Google. It doesn’t.

Building a community takes time and work. No amount of social bookmarking and tagging can rush that process. But you can learn to avoid mistakes. And you can save time by following time-tested approaches. (Learning from your mistakes is overrated.) Gladding’s article is filled with smart, “first do this, then do that” tips that can help you grow your site’s audience with discussion that works.

Better printing. Better community-building. Better read A List Apart 226!

[tags]alistapart, webstandards, community, forum, printing, stylesheets[/tags]

Categories
industry Marketing Memes

Web 2.0 Thinking Game

The most telling detail in The Economist‘s coverage of Google and YouTube was the subhead: “Google’s acquisition of YouTube shows that ‘Web 2.0’ has come of age.” A few weeks back, The Economist was calling “Web 2.0” a trend. Their phrase was, “hot Web 2.0 trend.” The magazine now intends “Web 2.0” to be understood as a sort of second edition:

This week’s pairing of Google and YouTube may come to be remembered as the moment “Web 2.0″—ie, the web, version two—came of age.

Clearly “Web 2.0” means different things to different journalists on different days. Mostly it means nothing—except a bigger paycheck. But let’s simplify what The Economist is saying:

Web 1.0: AOL buys Time Warner.
Web 2.0: Google buys YouTube.

Put another way:

Web 1.0: New media company buys old media company.
Web 2.0: New media company buys new media company.

If we’re stuck with this meaningless Web 2.0 label, let’s at least have some fun with it. Here’s my new game. I’ll start, you finish:

Web 1.0: Joshua Davis on the cover of Art News.
Web 2.0: 37signals on the cover of Forbes.

Web 1.0: Users create the content (Slashdot).
Web 2.0: Users create the content (Flickr).

Web 1.0: Crap sites on Geocities.
Web 2.0: Crap sites on MySpace.

Web 1.0: Writing.
Web 2.0: Rating.

Web 1.0: Karma Points.
Web 2.0: Diggs.

Web 1.0: Cool Site of the Day.
Web 2.0: Technorati.com.

Web 1.0: Tags.
Web 2.0: “Tags.”

Web 1.0: Bookmarking.
Web 2.0: Bookmark sharing.

Web 1.0: Pointless Flash widgets.
Web 2.0: Pointless “Ajax” widgets.

Now you try it!

[tags]web2.0, games, economist[/tags]

Categories
family glamorous

A Jewish King

We’ve begun asking our two-year-old daughter how she’d feel about acquiring a sister or brother. Last night while I was diapering her, she said, “I want a baby.”

“You want a baby?” I said.

“I want a baby!” she said.

“What kind of baby?”

“A Jewish baby,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d gotten that.

“You want a what?”

“I want a Jewish baby,” she said. Then amended it: “A Jewish king.”

Now I was sure of what I was hearing, but I wasn’t sure I was awake.

My wife entered as I finished snapping the child’s hippo jammies.

My wife said, “Did I just hear what I think I heard?”

“Uh huh,” I said.

Our attentiveness pleased our daughter.

“I want a Jewish king,” she said.

“Okay, honey,” I said to our daughter, “you’re freaking us out a little bit, now.”

She grinned to show she understood. “Jewish king!” she said.

Children say strange things, many of them meaningless. No doubt that’s the case here. Still, this morning I started checking real estate listings in Bethlehem. Just to be on the safe side.

Categories
Blogs and Blogging Community Publishing

Birth Announcement

The Missus (aka the Rogue Librarian) has been laboring for some time on a new community site. Today it launched.

Things I Learned the Hard Way is a place where women can share life lessons about home, family, friendship and work. Our contributors write well and they want to share their experience with others.

The new site is a place for women of different ages, situations, and life experiences to share hard-won knowledge, from the maternal to the Machiavellian (how do some female bosses use “advice” and “compliments” to keep female employees down?), the silly to the sublime. Participation is encouraged; writers are sought.

[tags]thingsilearnedthehardway, roguelibrarian, publishing, blogs, women[/tags]

Categories
37signals Design industry Standards war, peace, and justice Zeldman

Crash Boom Bop

The path the plane took
Interactive graphic shows path taken by single-engine plane registered to New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle that crashed into a residential high-rise on East 72nd Street, yesterday, killing Lidle and his flight instructor. It’s amazing how disasters lend themselves to the creation of cool infographics.
Subtraction + Zeldman
Khoi Vinh (AIGA/New York board of directors, design director for nytimes.com) should interview himself, but instead he interviews me on the cusp of my AIGA New York talk next week. As previewed in the interview, my talk will focus on how to build relationships that let you sell clients good work.
Web 2.0 Validator
Hilarious. (The score for 37signals.com is 7 out of 52.)
Meyerweb: W3C Change
The third (and most radical) of Eric Meyer’s proposals to save the W3C from irrelevance: “Transform the W3C from a member-funded organization to a financially independent entity.”
Fireside Chat
Cederholm, Sims, Santa Maria, and Storey tell 37signals what they think of the state of web design. (Things I did not know before: no boxes, grids, or columns were used in web design until web standards came along to ruin everything.)
Daring Fireball: Qualcomm ends Eudora development
I’ll stop using Eudora when they pry it from my cold, dead, one-button-mouse-clutching fingers. Oops, maybe sooner than that.
UsedWigs Radio Podcast 18
He could have been a radio star: Greg Hoy of Happy Cog Philadelphia is interviewed.
0sil8
Jason Kottke’s first website. Take that, Ze Frank!
Class Critique
Jason Santa Maria takes it on the chin.

[tags]design, AIGA, webstandards, happycog, jasons[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility Design Publishing Tools

ALA 225: tested premises, proven resources

In fall-hued Issue 225 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites, Maurizio Boscarol argues that a greater emphasis on user testing is needed to make accessibility guidelines and practices work better (Working With Others: Acessibility and User Research). And in part two of a series for beginning web designers, Erin Lynch and the ALA staff list a slew of useful third-party sites, and encourage you to add your favorites (The ALA Primer Part Two: Resources For Beginners). All this plus the illustrational genius of Mr Kevin Cornell.

[tags]alistapart, accessibility, design[/tags]

Categories
Design

Black box

Installed Mac OS X 10.4.8 on my Intel MacBook. Result: a big black box surrounds my cursor, rendering said Mac semi-useless. Screen shots: 1, 2, 3, 4. Uninstalling Keyspan and trashing com.apple.universalaccess.plist (remedies that worked for some Macintouch users) did not fix the problem. Thanks, Steve!

Anyone know a solution? Delete all preferences? Uninstall all Adobe software? Remove tonsils with pliers?

Update: The pleasant site red-sweater.com explains the problem and solution, as does an Apple technote. Many thanks to those who commented or wrote in soon after I posted my query. Eric Peacock’s comment also nicely summarizes what the black box is about.

Categories
cities Design Happy Cog™ industry people Philadelphia

Happy Cog Philadelphia

Our letterhead isn’t finished. Our aging website doesn’t provide a clue. Ordinarily an announcement like this one would wait until a site redesign was complete, new business cards were slipped into wallets, and expertly prepared press materials had been carefully seeded in the fields of journalism and the lonely rooms of the blogosphere. But for reasons which will become apparent soon, we can’t wait to relate the news that Happy Cog™ is expanding.

In addition to its original New York flavor, Happy Cog now also comes in a delicious new Philadelphia blend, under the leadership of Happy Cog Philadelphia president Greg Hoy. Both offices provide high-level design and user experience consulting services. They share a vision. They share methods. They even share team members (some Cog personnel divide their time between New York and Philly).

More detailed and more meaningful announcements—not to mention an expanded and redesigned site—will come soon. Meanwhile, welcome, Jason, Rob, Daniel, Heather, Jon, Mark, and Robert Roberts-Jolly.

[tags]happycog, design, philadelphia, nyc, newyork[/tags]

Categories
Blogs and Blogging

Blahg

Gee, was I thrilled when I first realized that, by learning some HTML and buying a modem, I could publish anything I wanted to. Not only could I publish it, but people would see it and respond. My God, those were heady days.

Eleven years I’ve been pecking away at this page, and boy are my frontal lobes tired.

Every day I think about you and what I want to tell you. There’s so much I still want you to know. But work and family enfold me in an octopus grip. When I finally put two free hours together, updating zeldman.com is not necessarily how I want to spend them.

How about you? Still blogging? Still all fired up about it?

[tags]blogs, blogging, inspiration, publishing[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Design Standards

ALA 224: Krista, Q tags & trench wisdom

In Issue 224 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, we welcome to our staff someone we’ve long admired.

Krista Stevens brought a strong voice and vision to Digital Web as that magazine’s editor-in-chief. In addition to her editorial and managerial gifts, Krista has a fab eye for fresh writing talent. It thrills us to welcome her as A List Apart‘s acquisitions editor.

We also have two fine new articles:

12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards

by Ben Henick

Slick tips and life lessons for the standards-challenged—which, on any given day, includes practically all of us. Semantic markup and CSS layout bring wondrous benefits, but at a cost of frayed nerves and bitten fingernails. Read this article and get fewer headaches. Author Henick last wrote for us in Issue 100. Here’s hoping we hear more from him, sooner.

Long Live the Q Tag

by Stacey Cordoni

“The Q tag has been around for nearly nine years, ever since the first version of HTML 4.0. Its purpose is to handle short, inline quotations that don’t require paragraph breaks.” For instance, the text I just quoted belongs inside Q tags. Trouble is, in all these long nine years, Internet Explorer for Windows (it’s awesome!) has never supported the Q tag. New ALA author Stacey Cordoni crafts a workaround.

Edited by Erin Kissane. Illustrations by Kevin Cornell.

[tags]alistapart, design, webdesign, semantics, qtag, css, webstandards[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart cities events

Show Pix, Seattle stylie

Code Critique

Photos from An Event Apart Seattle 2006.

[tags]aneventapart, seattle, design, webdesign[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart cities people

Cruising Seattle with Eric Meyer

Pike Place Market, Sep 17, 2006.

[tags]aneventapart, seattle, pikeplacemarket, flickr, design, webdesign[/tags]

Categories
An Event Apart cities family glamorous Zeldman

Kiss the sky

Rose 4:30 am. Wife and Kid in car service 5:30 am—off to airport, then Michigan. The Kid, not yet two, gets airplanes. On Fire Island, during a vacation which ended weeks ago but seems to have taken place in a separate century, she flew a toy airplane “to Jamaica” for several afternoons running. Not only that, she pointed out the real airplanes and helicopters occasionally flying over the island, and distinguished correctly between the two types of airborne vehicle.

Before this same vacation was halfway over, a mini-tornado touched down in nearby Queens, New York, initiating a week of hard rain. To find out if we needed to evacuate the island, we turned on the beach cottage’s small TV and watched the local news broadcasts, which were only slightly less operatic than The Sopranos. Panting TV journalists interrupted their Katrina-like reportage of the weather event to hype airline terror threats that turned out to be pranks or mistakes. When the TV showed three airplanes in a row as part of its “terror in the skies” coverage, The Kid pointed, clapped, and cried, “Airplane! Airplane!”

And when The Wife was called to her ancestral home last week, The Kid, not yet two, understood that Mommy was taking an airplane to give Grandma an all-better kiss.

Now they are both flying to the ancestral home to see Grandma. As I write this, they must be nearing their landing place. But I am not with them. I go to Seattle.

My grandfather, for whom I was named, died in a plane crash when my mother was eleven. The incident colored every moment of her life. I grew up afraid of flying in consequence—convinced I would die like my namesake. I don’t know when I stopped being afraid. I do a lot of flying, and my main worry, when traveling solo, is to be sure I’ve packed a book I love. (When traveling with The Kid, my anxieties revolve around liquids, snacks, diapers, and naps.)

I do a lot of flying, but not nearly as much as I could. I could speak in a different place every week if I said yes. These days I am careful about yes. Not because I fear, but because I love.

Today it’s Seattle. The book I’ve packed is The History of Love.

Categories
An Event Apart Blogs and Blogging Design development industry work

Black and Brown and 960 all over

En route to An Event Apart Seattle, I leave you with these:

Optimal Width for 1024 Resolution?
Spoiler: Turns out to be 960px.
Brown University homepage
It’s HTML! (Don’t let the smooth taste fool ya.)
Rogerblack.com
Black’s back! Black blogs! Site design by Rob Hunter. Love the “simplify” button. Red-and-black visual joke works, but shade of red needs fine-tuning. Having to employ drop-shadows on every character of body text (only Safari supports this) should be clue, if one were needed, that the background color doesn’t work.
Reflections are the new drop-shadows.
Yup.
RSS 2.0 & Atom compared
I finally get this.
Netscape 4-ever!
Scott Andrew’s back pages.

[tags]design, webdesign, 1024, rogerblack, brown university, rss, atom, standards, browsers, aneventapart[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility Design development Publishing Standards

ALA 223: tricks, guides, and giggles

A guide for the first-timer. A new trick for the size-conscious designer. And a bit of a giggle. Three pleasures await you in triple-thick Issue 223 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

The ALA Primer: A Guide for New Readers

by Erin Lynch

New to A List Apart? Welcome! ALA’s own Erin Lynch has picked out a selection of articles that you may want to start with.

Text-Resize Detection

by Lawrence Carvalho and Christian Heilmann

It’s still hard to create page layouts that don’t break if the user increases the type size by more than a few settings. Chris Heilmann and Lawrence Carvalho serve up a way to detect your visitor’s font size settings using JavaScript.

A Standardista’s Alphabet

by Jack Pickard

“A is for Aaron, who fell down the stairs. K is for Kevin, menaced by bears.” No wait, those are just the notes from our last staff meeting. Jack Pickard offers a lighter look at the world of web standards.

[tags]design, a list apart, alistapart, textsize[/tags]