If you’re reading this, the patient survived the surgery, and I successfully migrated this website and all its many parts from its old Statamic CMS to a brand new Eleventy installation.

I’ve been quietly working on a side project called sho!io, and I’m opening it up to a few people. It’s meant to be a quiet place where you can share one thing you’re making each day, without the usual social noise. It’s early and very much still in progress, but I’d really value your honest feedback if you’re up for trying it.

My earliest blog posts date back to 2004. There’s very little in them which is relevant today, and they’re full of dead links, which, I’m told, is bad for my site’s SEO. So recently, I’ve done two things to hide these posts from search engines.

Jon posted about his icon design for ShareOpenly, so I decided to add it to my blog too.

Dan Cederholm has been designing a stylish interrobang (‽) for his next new typeface and tweeted that he needs to learn how to type one. John Gruber replied with his suggestion using text replacement in MacOS. I use a similar solution using aText to make typing these unusual characters easier.

For the past six months, I’ve been designing, writing, and presenting a series of Inspired Design Decisions articles and webinars for Smashing Magazine. These have been brilliantly well received and I wanted a regular project to experiment with new designs.

Looking back, I’ve redesigned this website roughly every three years. Today I’m proud to show you the new Stuff & Nonsense.

The Official Movie site for Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes has launched and, chattering chimpanzees, is it a piece of work! As if I weren’t excited enough about the film. It’s not released until July 2014 but the site gives fans a taste of what’s happened since the end of Rise.

I know I’ve talked about Ghostlab a lot on Unfinished Business and mentioned it a fair few times on Twitter. This isn’t just because its makers Vanamco have sponsored the show. No, I use Ghostlab almost everyday and it’s really made my designing responsive websites much more convenient. As Ghostlab is an app for the Mac, often when I tweet about it I see people complaining that it’s not available for Windows. Well quit your whining Windows users, because today Vanamco have launched Ghostlab for Windows! Ghostlab for Windows has a new interface and is available in both 32 and 64 bit versions. There’s even a free seven day trial and a licence costs just $49 US. Ghostlab for Windows may be just what you were ho, ho, hoping for.

My Responsive Web Design workshop at Smashing Magazine is getting closer and some tickets are still available. In the meantime, here are three useful new resources for responsive layout using CSS3:

I’ve been using Emmet these last few months in Espresso and find it incredibly useful. I suppose between this and Sass, I write half the code I used to. (Now I just need to write the Emmet shortcuts reminder sheet I’ve been planning for months too.)

We know that it’s only web designers who habitually resize a browser window to see if a site’s responsive. But why not reward their dedication with a little something special? Add this to your stylesheet: @media only screen and (min-width: 960px) and (max-width: 970px) { body { -webkit-transform: rotate(180deg); -moz-transform: rotate(180deg); -o-transform: rotate(180deg); transform: rotate(180deg); } } This could be the most essential CSS3 media query you’ll need today.

This couldn’t have come at a better time (for me.)

Jessica Hische made Quotes & accents (& Dashes). Remembering keystrokes for these characters is hard, but for me remembering character entities is downright impossible. So I made TextExpander do the remembering for me. Here’s how I did it:

You should know by now that I’m a huge fan of Hammer For Mac. I couldn’t and wouldn’t start a project without it as I’d miss its variables and partials and includes too much. I like Hammer so much I moved from LESS to Sass because of it. If you’re a CodeKit user — and many are — you can get some of Hammer’s functionality in that too. I haven’t had the need to try CodeKit and The Kit Language myself yet, so I’d be keen to know if you have and what you think? Let me know on Twitter @malarkey.

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.

Good work by Brett Jankord: You can replace, the min–moz-device-pixel-ratio, the -o-min-device-pixel-ratio with a resolution media query. You can also just remove the unprefixed min-device-pixel-ratio.

After I boasted how nice my site looks in IE10 on a Microsoft Surface tablet (it really does), Grant Hutchinson thought he’d put it through its paces on an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. Turns out it’s not too shabby.

Speaking of proprietary Apple meta elements, here’s a little gem for labelling a site’s home screen icon on iOS.

You might think — because all the talk at the moment is about seven inch tablets, in particular the iPad mini vs Google’s Nexus 7 vs Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD — that a seven inch tablet was a seven inch tablet was a… Right? Wrong.

There’s been a lot written about device testing over the last year. Jeremy instigating open device testing labs has rightly generated a lot of column inches like Smashing Magazine’s Establishing An Open Device Lab. However, I think we need to be clear just what we mean by testing.

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.

Thank-you to everyone who tweeted and emailed about the site. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. More than I’d hoped for. And I’d hoped for a lot. Some of the comments came with bugs I need to fix and suggestions for improving the site and its performance overall. I’m really grateful for that. A little bit of follow up from yesterday’s site launch.

Packed: Passport, toothbrush, Mac, pants, socks, toasted sandwich maker iPod. I think I’m ready: Web Directions North here I come. I’m heading out on Sunday.

Coming back to a site made a while ago, it can be common to scratch your head and wonder how (and why) you made certain decisions. Coming back to a site that you made six years ago can be enough to make you break down and sob like a little girl.

This morning I returned from a (literally) flying visit to New York where I had the very real pleasure of visiting my friends at AOL and speaking at their Design and Programming Offsite event.

With Web Directions South and Fundamentos Web now both done and dusted, I have only one public event left before the end of this year. You might think that attending conferences regularly would mean that I have heard what is on offer from speakers.

As I’ve just been invited to speak at a web conference in Canada next year, I thought that it was about time that I updated my biography. Looking back at what I have written before, it all seemed a little bland; designer this, accessibility that.

I invited thirty celebrity CSS chefs to collaborate in baking a single stylesheet. Now the bell has rung, the oven mitts are at the ready and our Too Many Cooks (Dvorak special) is ready to come out of the oven. But first, an open letter to Mr. Dvorak.

After his altogether brilliant article Why CSS Bugs Me, I’m officially designating this week to be John C. Dvorak week. To help Mr.

Bert Bos man Bos has informed me that those boffins (Ed says Oxford English Dictionary: Brit, colloq, a person engaged in scientific research ) at the W3C are offering places at a W3C Webinar on Mobile Web Design.

Hicks’ (justifiable) excitement about his logo design article appearing in.net magazine (#152 August) has brought back memories for Malarkey.

Driving around Engerlaaand, it’s hard to miss the flags of Saint George flying from buildings and cars. Every second person is sporting a replica shirt and petrol stations are doing a roaring trade in everything from Ferdinand fragrance air-fresheners to…

I’m not a user of many web 2.0 applications, although the few that I have bonded with, including Basecamp, Blinksale, Flickr and Ma.gnolia, I use pretty extensively.

A dissertation evaluating the awareness of web accessibility amongst UK small businesses. Student Andy Higgs has written an excellent dissertation on ‘ Web Accessibility In UK Small Businesses ’.

Being the proud owner of a new PowerMac Book ProMac Book BookPro Mac MacBook Pro with its dinky Apple Remote, I wondered what fun or naughtiness could be had with this (where the hell does the battery go) IR doofer.

Today I opened my email to find a passionate plea for help from a web designer looking to find good books or articles on web design.

Recent conversations over at 456 Berea Street on the subject of whether a new solution for clearing floats without structural markup is needed, required an answer. So at MIX06 I sat down with s e ven’s developers to find a recommended answer to the question.

With blue suede shoes on his feet and Viva Las Vegas ringing in his ears, Malarkey can’t help falling in love with Vegas as he reports from Microsoft’s MIX06 conference.

SXSWi, The Web Standards Project is changing, entering a new time in its history, opening the hive up to better include the communities and issues we’ve done our black and gold best to represent since 1998.

I am so pleased today to announce that a new beta build of IE7 (I call it the MIX 06 release) will be available from MIX 06, March 20th to 22nd. The new browser will be handed out at MIX and will then hopefully be available from MSDN.

Back in October 2005, the Internet Explorer team urged developers to begin removing CSS hacks in favour of conditional comments.

My good friend (and evil genius) Brothercake has today released an update to Invasion of the Body Switchers. Updating the classic ALA Style Switcher to accommodate multiple users and devices, including some that are not even traditional browsers, all from a…

Mickey Spillane, Frank Miller, Hakon Wium Lie: Three of my favourite thriller writers. No really, because alongside Spillane’s’My Gun Is Quick’ and Miller’s’The Hard Goodbye’, another thriller hit the book stores web just in time for Christmas; Lie’s CSS3…

I’ve alluded to it recently, and now after not much blood but one or two tears I’m ready to show and tell. The new design for Karova.com is out there. The new site is geared towards promoting Karova’s development framework).

At the beginning of last month I advocated a quiet revolution and wrote, Fighting a solitary campaign for standards within any organisation must lead inevitably to frustration if the responses are either negative or apathetic.

Many thanks for all the kind birthday wishes over the weekend, it’s not everyday that you reach […];). By way of a thank-you to all the kind people that I have met and others who occassionally stumble drunk across my site, here is a layout experiment which I…

Ian Lloyd has today published an email interview over at Accessify, Accessibility, the gloves come off. There are now so many web sites, blogs or publications devoted to helping people learn standards and accessible techniques that there are now no excuses…

Over recent days I have recieved a number of emails from people asking for my reaction to Disney Store UK’s decision to move from valid and semantic XHTML and AA-AAA WAI compliance to an invalid HTML site which fails to meet Priority 1 accessibility…

With Molly and I in session for Carson Workshops in only a few weeks and our presentation materials near completion, I have become interested in what audiences need or expect from presentation slides.

As standards enthusiasts, I think that we are often guilty of a little navel gazing when it comes to web design. In many open discussions on WSA or Style Gala, the conversation can often turn to the importance of semantics and validation and sometimes (not…

I’ve been aching to write about Measure Map, the first product from those cool hombres over at Adaptive Path. Now that Jeff Veen has written about Measure Map today, I can hopefully prevent my sides from splitting with gleeful excitement by writing about this…

NB: First published in 2005. Read the up-to-date version and see the latest demo. Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and geeks!

(This one sneaked out while I was teaching in Cupertino) As a studio we work on a number of e-commerce projects each year.

I love my Nano, I want to keep it close, keep it safe. My Nano is so precious, I can’t bear to think of it getting scratched.

A major brand name redesigning and implementing their web site with web standards can still be big news. When that brand belongs to one of the most influential sites of modern web design, the news is bigger.

My copy of Professional CSS arrived on my desk this morning and I was very proud to read chapter eight in which Ethan discusses stylesheet switching and Invasion of the Body Switchers.

I’m very lucky. I get to work with some great clients and I’m currently working with a very cool consultancy company. Part of the brief was to do something which no one in his industry had done before and I wanted this to involve code as well as design.

Well, it’s a wrap. @media2005 has drawn to a close tonight and a four hour train journey back to Wales has given me not only the chance for a bit of a snooze, watch Mona Lisa on my iBook but gather my thoughts about the last couple of days of what I hope…

Dateline London. Later this month, Waterloo in South London will be the place to be as the great and the good gather and @media 2005 rolls into town.

Working with other designers or developers on any project can often be tricky. But imagine what it would be like if there were 29 other people working on the same CSS file!

I want to say a huge thank-you for all the kind comments about my new design. As you can imagine, a lot of time goes into making a total redesign, and often designing for yourself is harder than designing for client projects.

Applying id and (multiple) class attributes to the element is a fantastic way to turn the same XHTML configuration into multiple design layouts without the need for adding different attributes to div elements.

It’s here. I’ve been meaning to redesign this site for a little while now and since I have emerged from my black, depressive state, the urge was getting too strong to ignore. I just had to do it.

Whereas many have already publicly switched from MovableType to other brands of blogging software, some for technical and others for economic reasons, I am sticking to MT.

Evil genius Brothercake has been busy in his secret laboratory and the result is a chicken with eight legs massive update to IOTBS - a full new version 2 release entitled’IOTBS: Look Who’s Switching Too’.

Spending five minutes exploring Google Labs today, I came across Mr. Google’s Site-Flavored Google Search, not by any means a new Lab experiment (6/17/04) but one which was tantalisingly labelled Improved!. To quote Mr.

This is neither a permanent redesign, nor to be a regular event, I just fancied a bit of fun as it’s the day for it. Go on, hit’refresh’, I dare yer! (No markup was injured during the making of this site.)

Drive through most towns in the UK (and probably elsewhere in the world) and you’ll see a hairdresser in the main street.

Image replacement is a topic which keeps reappearing on websites and in books. There are whole sections devoted to the pros and cons of each method in books such as Web Standards Solutions and The Zen of CSS Design.

Almost once a week during meetings with clients or prospective clients, I need to explain the concept of web standards. Sometimes it’s during a pitch, and always to a non-technical person who knows little or nothing about anything remotely ‘webby.’ I have…

Some of you may recall that way back in June last year, Stuff and Nonsense grew up, moved away from home and got a place of its own. I wasn’t so sure about the move at the time, but (happily) I was proved wrong and it’s been a good move.

I’ve been experimenting with a’magazine contents’ or news style page for a current project and thought I’d give it a whirl here.

An open apology to all sales-people adversely affected by recent columns. Please accept my heart-felt apologies for potentially causing you so many wasted sales calls.

Oh my kiddy aunt, it’s started already. Driving through Warrington yesterday, I caught my first glimpse of the UK Labour Party’s first campaign posters for the up-and-coming (to a church hall near you) General Election.

As a company, we give each member of the team a ’25.00 per month allowance to spend at Amazon on anything they think will benefit the company. We don’t vet what people buy, it’s a way of encouraging them to expand their knowledge (and our range of skills).

It seems to be the season for discussion on rips, with Shaun Inman and Dave Shea both again highlighting design theft and the most professional methods for dealing with such occurrances. I’m not interested in going over old ground.

IOTBS: The Director’s Cut has been improved in the latest release resulting in a far more sophisticated tool, with better accessibility, and a greater range of possible uses. For links to the latest files, see the IOTBS resources page.

Well, it’s time for me to head off to the Stuff and Nonsense office Christmas party. It’s the same every year… I have too many drinks, then chat up the gorgeous girl from accounts, before heading off to her place for…;) Thing is, I never regret it in the…

We are in the final stages of completing our project for Young Flintshire, an initiative for young people in the county. And the process of design has taken many things from the stuff that I have talked about this week.

Saturday afternoon was spent in pleasant company at Tate Modern, walking the galleries and thumbing through hefty books in the shop. Conversations were often focussed on the arts and there were some very thought provoking works to see.

it made me sit back and wonder if’we’ in the web-standards’community’ have anything left to say about standards. It’s been a short, but busy few years since deploying standards for day-to-day, commercial web ventures became practical.

I’ve been thinking about making a CSS Zen Garden entry for a little while now, but before I think about design, I wanted to understand the Garden’s XHTML structure.

Day four: I couldn’t say thank-you enough to all the people who left kind comments about the 2004 Disney Store UK project, here, at CSS Beauty, CSS Vault, and Style Gala.

Day three: I ran through how the 2004 Disney Store UK was developed, looking specifically at XSLT. The 2004 Disney Store UK website was developed using an ecommerce platform called Karova Store.

It’s been a very busy few months in Malarkey world. (I’ve got a big announcement to make tomorrow.) Anyway, as our American cousins have been splashing blood around their sites in the run up to Halloween, I thought that I would splash a little colour around…

When awarding the latest version of the Mozilla site a WSA Silver Star, Johan pointed to the mozilla.org Markup Reference.

In 2004—after eight weeks, 1,600 cups of coffee, 1,920 cigarettes, 16 pork sausages and one instant BBQ—I was pleased to announce the launch of a new online store for WWF UK.

In a recent conversation with Swedish web accessibility advocate Tommy Olsson, Tommy impressed on me again the importance of fluid, rather than the more commonly used fixed-width design techniques that I and so many others designers favour.

A discussion at Accessify got me thinking about the usefulness of compliance badges or icons. What purpose do they serve the public who have little knowledge or interest in accessibility or code validity?

Web forms often ask users for both essential and non-essential (marketing purposes and research) information. Long and complicated forms can often slow down the progress through a web site and in the case of e-commerce, can seriously hinder the sales process.

Time travel. It’s a subject that often keeps me awake at night, pondering… So I thought I’d interview a bunch of bloggers to help me out. Thanks to Brit Packers Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Jon Hicks, Gordon Mackay, Tim Parkin and Richard Rutter.

Eric Meyer’s recent comments about my original What’s in a name column have prompted me draw some conclusions from the comments and suggestions made on And All That Malarkey and elsewhere. First I want to lay a few ghosts to rest.

In the first of an occassional column on one of my favourite graphics applications (the largely under-rated) Macromedia Fireworks, I thought I’d write about how I often use a combination of Fireworks MX and XML to create a site-full of graphical text headers…

I love you. I have loved you as far back as I can remember. I think I have always loved you. I visit you many times every day and sometimes when I am sleeping, I dream that you come to visit me too.

A number of designers and developers have asked me for recommendations on how to layout product range pages using semantic mark-up and CSS. So I decided to write a mini tutorial for our training manual and try it out here first.

I have been pondering whether or not to replace my personal design machine with a shiny new Apple PowerBook. A new Mac will certainly give me the power and flexibility that I need and looks sooooo sexy too!

Andy Budd wrote about Semantic Coding and said, This got me thinking about the benefits of naming conventions and I began to realise that these conventions matter, not just for the sake of web designers (and easier site redesigns), but for users too!

I can’t think of many web sites that don’t include at least one form, and I can’t think how many times I have compromised on a form’s visual design because of looming deadlines, leaving a Must get around to styling this form properly comment in the code.

Over the weekend, I installed iTunes on all the computers in the design studio and centralised our entire CD collection on the server.

Standards-based designers often appear to loath Microsoft’s behemoth browser, sometimes for good reasons. Internet Explorer’s patchy support for W3C CSS (particularly attribute selectors), its non support for the abbr tag or PNG transparency on the Windows…

Way back when the web was young and active volcanos spewed molten rock into the sea just north of Morecambe, I dodged falling boulders and lava flows and headed into my local bookcave.

Along with so many others, And All That Malarkey has gone naked today, swept away on a tide of mass hypnosis. How did this happen to me?

Read the original hCup column. Group stage Group A Germany Poland Costa Rica Equador Group B England Sweden Paraguay Trinidad & Tobago Group C Argentina Holland Serbia & Montenegro Ivory Coast Group D Mexico Portugal Iran Angola Group E Italy Czech Republic…

I was very pleased to have been invited by Bert Bos to briefly speak alongside him and AOL’s Kevin Lawver at WWW2006 in Edinburgh.