Blogging and all that Malarkey

I’ve always enjoyed attending the Shropgeek (R)Evolution events in the past and been slightly jealous of the people that Kirsty’s asked to speak. This year, I couldn’t be happier that she’s asked me to do the final talk of the final (R)Evolution conference on September 25th in beautiful Shrewsbury.

If you’re not sick of the sight of me in video by now, WP Elevation’s Troy Dean has published a short interview that we recorded on my visit to Melbourne in March.

This week is a special Mad Men episode of Unfinished Business and I’m joined live from New York by Jen Simmons –the incredible host of The Web Ahead podcast –and our very special guest, the actor and comedian who plays Lou Avery on TV’s Mad Men, Allan Havey.

Last week, Creative Bloq published Noah Stokes’article on “ Why web design is losing its soul.” It’s a good read on exactly the same subject that I’ve been talking about since I spoke at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin last year.

I imagine if I told people in advance that I was talking to director of UX at MailChimp Aarron Walter and Founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool on Unfinished Business this week, they’d imagine we’d talk about user experience design and possibly education. Instead, they and I talk about action figures and Action Man and whether fighting Nazis is cooler than fighting aliens.

Fresh from our adventures at Smashing Conference in Santa Monica, on this week’s Unfinished Business I’m joined by user-experience professional, author (of some CSS book or another) and director at ClearLeft, Andy Budd. Joining us was one of my favourite people; designer, author and founder of Authentic Jobs, Cameron Moll.

On this week’s Unfinished Business, I’m joined by designers’ designer Dan Edwards and, one of my favourite people, designer Veerle Pieters. We start by talking about magazines, including 8faces and the new edition of Lagom.

I know very few people who curate better conference line-ups than Marc Thiele and I was proud to speak at his first event in Berlin last year. It’s great that he’s written up how he thinks about conference schedules so that hopefully others can learn from him.

It’s amazing to think that John Allsopp’s oft-quoted article, A Dao of Web Design was published fifteen years ago today. A List Apart asked me what John’s article means to me now, but rather than focus on Dao’s flexible design principles, I wanted to talk about a passage that never seems to get a mention.

I’ve been enjoying—and a little jealous of how he can write every day— Jeremy Keith’s 100 words series. Today he wrote about A List Apart’s 15 Years of Dao and I could not agree more with what he said here: I fear that today we run the risk of treating web development no different to other kinds of software development, ignoring the strengths of the web that John highlighted for us. Flexibility, ubiquity, and uncertainty: don’t fight them as bugs; embrace them as features. Substitute ‘software development’ with ‘digital product design’ and you have what Dan and Jeffrey were talking about on Unfinished Business this week. Also, as I said in 2006 at John’s Web Directions conference, “the web is not a power drill.”