Blogging and all that Malarkey

The Duke of Lancaster — a landlocked former cruise ship — is about a twenty minute drive away from our house on the North Wales coast. I must’ve driven past it hundreds of times, but have never parked up and walked the quarter mile from the road down to the old boy. Recently, the Duke has become a (huge) canvas for artists. Although I’m personally not a fan of street art, I’m somehow glad that the ship’s been getting some love, even with a spray can. One of these mornings I must take a walk and say hello to the old Duke.

Notes from Nathan Ford’s talk on grids and Gridset from what looks like an excellent evening at Port80 localhost in Newport, Wales. You should design a grid based on your content’s constraints, not design your content based on a grid’s constraints.

Exactly one year ago, I linked to slides from a short talk I’d heard in Brisbane, Luke Brooker’s Future Friendly Style Guides. Again today, poking around SpeakerDeck I found slides from a more recent talk by Luke, Improving Your Responsive Workflow with Style Guides. It expands on his earlier thoughts and is well worth your time. (Changing the subject slightly, it occurs to me that if you’re looking to get into speaking, writing a talk and sharing your slides even before you’ve given it is a great way to make conference organisers aware of what you have to say. Even better, give the talk as a screencast in the privacy of your own home and share the audio/video on YouTube or Vimeo. Everyone loves to find new talent, attendees, organisers and speakers.)

Bruce Lawson on Opera Developer News: The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what's already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. And their CTO Håkon Wium Lie on the [webkit-dev] mailing list: The first contributions from our side will be in multi-column layout. We have experimented with combining multicol layout with page floats and column spans; in 10 lines of CSS code one can create amazingly beautiful, scaleable and responsive paged presentations. This really is great news. I wish Opera every success with this.

In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and special guest co-host Rachel Andrew — web developer and Director of edgeofmyseat.com — the company that makes Perch CMS. They answer listener questions about working with clients, customers, insurance, work/life balance and subcontracting. I want to say a huge thank-you to Rachel for stepping in, how much I enjoyed this week’s episode as a listener and to the fabulous Anna who just gets better and better each week.

In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about our experiences when we’ve lost out on business and not got a dream job, doing a bad pitch (I have done plenty of those), learning from those mistakes and how not to take it personally when a client moves on.

Dan Mall, following up on Brad Frost: As an industry, we sell websites like paintings. Instead, we should be selling beautiful and easy access to content, agnostic of device, screen size, or context. Reminds me of: Worse still are the expectations that static visuals set in the minds of clients, particularly when designers use these visuals as a method to get sign-off for a design. Is the fact that so many web pages are fixed width and centered a direct result of clients signing off fixed width design visuals? Funny how things come around.

After last week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Laura Kalbag wrote two good posts on mentoring.

Would you offer a stranger a loan of £4,000 without any agreement in place? That is exactly what you are doing if you do £4,000 worth of work on the promise of payment. Wise words.

Testing on all versions of Internet Explorer will be much easier from now on thanks to their new suite of testing tools, modern.ie. The included tools look impressive on their own, but the website is also full of helpful information. Scanning this site revealed not only that I’m running an outdated version of jQuery but that I can help Windows 8 touch users simply by adding canvas { -ms-touch-action: double-tap-zoom;}. Handy. If you don’t develop on Windows (I don’t) Microsoft are offering three months BrowserStack virtual testing free. I’m baffled by the fact that to get the free offer I have to login using a Facebook account (that I don’t have,) but BrowserStack have their own (shorter, I think) free trial. Hats off to Microsoft. modern.IE may just let me ditch the 63Gb of virtual machines I use just to test Internet Explorer.