Blogging and all that Malarkey

This week at Smashing Conference in New York, I had the very great pleasure of meeting Chris Lilley. I recognised Chris’ name, but it took me a day to remember that he had been the chairman of the ‘Style and Formatting Properties Working Group’ at the W3C, a precursor to the CSS Working Group. Chris is a hugely important person in the history of the web.

When we were in Australia earlier this year, we stopped in Sydney to speak at John Allsopp’s Respond Conference and to teach a workshop. A few weeks before those events, John emailed me: The folks at SydCSS are fantastic supporters of our events, and last year we did a couple of shared events with them. I’ve dobbed you and I to do a short presentation (it will be the night of Respond.)

Last week was Jeffrey Zeldman’s website’s 20th birthday, so this week he joins me and Jeremy Keith on Unfinished Business 110 to talk about the anniversary. We start by discussing Jeremy’s 100 words for 100 days writing project and how it’s inspired me to change the way that I think about writing on our blog and posting to our portfolio. We talk about the importance of writing for yourself as well as for others and why writing on your own website is important. With it being the twentieth anniversary of Jeffrey’s own site, we also talk about whether it’s important to archive older designs for posterity. Oh, and please don’t skip this week’s after show segment as boy-oh-boy (girl-oh-girl, man-oh-man, woman-oh-woman) do the sparks fly! We discuss Mad Men, Mad Max and whether advertising can ever be considered as important as a book or a film and, let’s just say, things get very heated.

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.