Blogging and all that Malarkey

I’ve always had a soft spot for the people at Smashing Magazine and I loved being at their Smashing Conference last September, so when they asked me if I’d like to be a part of their workshop programme, I didn’t hesitate to say “yes.” This coming June my wife and I will be heading back to beautiful Freiburg where I’ll host a ‘ CSS3 for Responsive Web Design’workshop.

Back in 2009, I took what I thought would be a trip of a lifetime to Japan to speak and host a workshop at Web Directions East. I spent a hectic few days in Tokyo then set off for a place I never thought I visit, Hiroshima. I’ll never forget standing, in tears in front of the A-Bomb dome, or visiting the shrines on Miyajima Island. I met new friends and went home with stories to tell.

If you listen to Unfinished Business, you’ll know that I’m a big, big fan of Hammer For Mac, the app its developers say lets you create HTML builds & templates quicker, more efficiently & more conveniently. Hammer works for us because these days we mostly deliver static HTML and CSS templates, instead of static visuals, and we rarely develop complete sites.

In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about Anna’s new limited company, why she needed to set up a company and how she went about doing it. Andy moans about not understanding GitHub (again) and why developer tools often make him feel stupid. After hours, they talk about an episode of Anna’s favourite cartoon, Adventure Time. (I’d like to apologise for the scratchy audio in this week’s episode. It was entirely my fault. It’s a still a great show this week and I hope the audio quality does’t spoil it too much.)

Jessica Hische made Quotes & accents (& Dashes). Remembering keystrokes for these characters is hard, but for me remembering character entities is downright impossible. So I made TextExpander do the remembering for me. Here’s how I did it:

In no particular order:

I’d always admired the work of, and the people behind the Web Standards Project. What they had achieved in only a few short years in bringing browser vendors and tool authors together behind open standards was nothing short of magnificent, so when I was asked to join the project on March 31st 2005 it was an ambition fulfilled.

I can remember the first cigarette I ever smoked. It was 1983 and on my way to art foundation one day, I stopped my car at Kettering railway station and bought a packet of ten Benson & Hedges and a box of Swan matches. I pulled on the cellophane band, tore off the top and flipped open the golden box. I’ll never forget the smell of tobacco that rises from a freshly opened pack or the bitter smell of a match. I slipped a cigarette between my lips, struck a match and lit it.

Handheld is “the conference for all things mobile” that’s happening in Cardiff, Wales on 27th – 28th November 2013 at the Wales Millennium Centre. Handheld has a fabulous line-up of speakers and tickets go on sale on March 1st, St. David’s Day. (You can get get 10% off your ticket with the offer code unfinishedbz.) If you needed another reason to head to beautiful Cardiff Bay, I’m hosting a new workshop, “CSS3 for Responsive Web Design.”

I decided that this year I would spend more time in universities and with students than I would at conferences. Maybe that’s because my son’s a student and I’d like to think that he’d appreciate a visiting lecturer. Maybe it’s because I’m not ready for the pressure of larger events yet. Whatever the reason, this week was all about students and my visits to Winchester School Of Art and Manchester Metropolitan University.