Blogging and all that malarkey

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

In this week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Anna and I talk about deposits and down-payments, getting paid regularly and what you can do if the unthinkable happens and you have to fight for your money.

On Monday evening I had the pleasure to speak with Tim Smith on his show The East Wing. We talk about book authoring, business podcasts and how better to manage client relationships. The East Wing is a great show and I thoroughly enjoyed speaking to Tim.

I thoroughly enjoyed hosting another Fashionably flexible responsive web design workshop at New Adventures on Wednesday. I got the feeling that everyone enjoyed the day. I know that I did.

Throughout my career, I’ve watched immensely talented designers waste a shitload of time creating fully fleshed-out comps of what a website could look like.

Brian Suda’s post is the perfect compliment to episode two of Unfinished Business, out today. I may come back to add my take on Brian’s advice another day, time permitting

In this new episode of Unfinished Business, the often taboo subject of how to decide what to charge for what you do. Getting the balance between too cheap and too pricey can be tricky, so Andy and Anna share their experiences — including Andy’s infamous ‘double your rate Fridays’ — and how to handle uncomfortable conversations about money.

Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, visited North Korea and wrote a fascinating account of what she saw along with a few photos. Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by totalitarian, propaganda art and North Korea is one of the few places left in the world to see it.

I know how hard it can be, waiting a whole week for a new episode of Unfinished Business. To make things easier, here are two more creative business related podcasts for you to try.

A fun interview about contracts, client relationships, debt collection and men with big dogs. All topics we will be talking about over the coming weeks on Unfinished Business.

Late last year, Anna Debenham and I were talking on the phone. It was one of those easy conversations where we talked about the good and bad of the work we were doing and how to solve a business problem we both had. Before we knew it, an hour had gone by and one of us (I don’t remember who) said, half jokingly, “we should do a podcast about the business side of working on the web.” So we did.

Britain’s first independent television channel, ITV, unveiled both its new logo and a responsive new home page today. I’m a fan of the curvy new logo and how it changes to match a backdrop. The home page is full of thoughtful details too, made all the more interesting to me because my work at STV (the Scottish franchise for ITV) over the last year has tackled many of the same problems.

In Monkey Business, the first episode of our new show Unfinished Business, Anna Debenham and I talk about why a show about business is important and why one needn’t be boring. We chat about last week’s CES and if and when designers and developers might need to buy new devices. And of course, I talk about Planet Of The Apes while Anna nods politely.

Thanks once again to all the folks from Smashing Conference for making my son and I so welcome during our visit. One, if not both, of us will be back to sit in the audience next year. Thanks also to Marc Thiele for his hard work to make these videos available.

I’m not sure that fat fella at the top deserves to be there.

Yesterday, when I appeared on The Web Ahead, I issued this challenge to anyone who complains about hearing familiar faces speak at web conferences: