Blogging and all that Malarkey

A little over a week ago, but what seems like much, much, longer, my wife and I made the long trip from home to Australia to host three Visual Web Design Masterclasses in partnership with our good friends at Web Directions. It proved to be quite a week.

It’s always a pleasure to have the opportunity to build on work that I have done in the past, so a few weeks ago I jumped at the chance to work on a small visual design realign for my friend Richard Rubin of Really Worried fame.

I've got a Honda CRV. It's eleven years old. It's rusty around the bonnet, the electric windows are sticky and the exhaust is noisy. That's OK. It's been reliable, hardly serviced and as I only drive it a few miles about twice a week, it does everything that I need it to do. I'll probably drive it until I can't drive it anymore.

You might have noticed already, things are looking a little different around here. Over the Easter weekend, I took some time away from the pressing matter of eating chocolate to work on a redesign, specifically to address (justifiable) concerns over the previous design’s readability but also to prepare bringing For A Beautiful Web visually in line with a coming redesign of the Transcending CSS book site.

If you follow me on Twitter, you might know that I've spent the last couple of weeks in San Francisco, recording several DVD titles for New Riders. Most will be available in around three months, but I'm pleased to announce that one, I Can Make You A CSS Zen Master, is available today. Watch the trailer below to find out more.

The Internet Explorer team today posted details that IE8’s Compatibility Mode (replicating IE7) will not render sites exactly as IE7 does.

In just a few short weeks, in the middle of April, I’ll be squeezing myself into an airline seat and flying the 9500 miles from home to Australia. This will be the third time that I’ve made the trip in four years, the last two times to speak in Sydney at Web Directions.

A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Taylor interviewed me for the Boag World bodcast on the subject of Internet Explorer 8 and the state of CSS in browsers generally.

This week Brian Suda and I launched tweetCC, a Twitter micro-app that allows Twitter users to declare a Creative Commons license for their tweeted content. I’ll be writing more about why we decided to make tweetCC and why licensing you tweets is important in a future entry, but as several people have commented on my design and CSS implementation, first a few words about them.

I’m sorry for posting twice on the same day about tweetCC, but it’s not everyday that something that I have worked on and feel super passionate about is picked up by, and hits the homepage of Wired.