Blogging and all that Malarkey

For about the last five years, my wallet’s been a big Lakeland travel wallet. It was designed to carry a passport and boarding cards, not for everyday use, but I used it everyday. It was big enough to hold all my stuff; credit cards, plenty of cash and the pile of train tickets and receipts that I collect when I’m out and about. When I say it was big, I mean big. I couldn’t mistake when I had it in my pocket and I could easily dig into my bag to find it in my bag without looking. I loved it and was very upset when it was lost.

I’d intended to go to The Digital Barn this weekend, but having just come back from Freiburg, I couldn’t make it. My main reason for attending was Harry Roberts and his talk about Big CSS. I’ve linked to Harry a lot recently. I’m a big fan of his work, so I was disappointed I wouldn’t hear his talk. That’s why I was so pleased to find a rehearsal run through on YouTube. It’s great when conference organisers record audio or video, but speakers shouldn’t rely on that. Like Harry, more people, particularly younger or newer speakers, should record their talks. It makes them more widely available, spreading the word about what you have to say and about you. It’s exactly what conference organisers are looking for when seeking out new speakers.

Responsive Measure is a simple script that allows you to pass in a selector (ideally the container where your primary content will go) which generates the ideal font size needed to produce the ideal measure for your text. Josh brings my proportional leading idea to life.

I’ve been asked quite a bit recently, “Do I regret devoting a good sized section of Hardboiled Web Design to microformats when authors and browsers have largely ignored them?” My answer’s always been “no”, although microformats haven’t been adopted as much as I’d hoped they would be, if nothing else they provide some great naming conventions for our attribute values. Out in Lisbon, at the end of a pretty packed week for European conferences, Tantek gave a talk on ‘ microformats2 and bits of HTML5 ’. I’d missed what Tantek and others have been working on for microformats2. It’s worth your time running through his presentation and then following up on the microformats2 wiki.

Brad Frost mentioned Mobitest during his talk last week at Smashing Conference. I’ve becoming more aware of performance issues these last few months, and tools like Mobitest can only help me do better. (This site’s home page, crammed full of retina quality bitmaps, weighs in at 649.36kb and 10.22s average load time. I need to halve that. At least.

A couple of months ago, Smashing Magazine’s Vitaly Friedman, Marc Thiele and I were talking over email when he asked if I’d fill an open speaking slot at Smashing Conference. I was already hosting two ‘Fashionably Flexible Responsive Design’ workshops there, so I hesitated because, as you might remember, I’m cutting down the number of conferences I speak at and I’d planned to speak at only An Event Apart in Austin this year.

It was January, 2011 and an email arrived from a name I recognised. Would you be available for me to phone you to discuss a potential project? I’ve attached an NDA. Could you sign a printed copy, scan and send it back to me? John Jones Jones Olson

[Chief Superintendent David] Duckenfield, in charge of his first big football match had given the order to open the gate without ensuring the thousands who entered Leppings Lane would be funnelled into the outside pens. He had seen the over- crowding and suffering on the terraces on CCTV cameras with zoom facilities and done nothing. And when asked for an explanation he mouthed something he believed outsiders would buy. A hooligan mob had stormed the stadium and killed their own. It was a lie which would travel all the way around the world before it was corrected. A calculated slur that would never go away. Maybe today.

The responsive pattern library is meant to be a comprehensive collection of responsive interface patterns created by and collected for the community. Here’s more from Brad Frost. I want his dog. So badly.

Here’s something personal I wrote for the Pastry Box Project today: