The dl tag is my new best friend. I've been using this guy, and his friends dt and dd, all over the place lately. I was inspired by Dan Cederholm's new book, Web Standards Solutions. Even if you don't buy the book, you can read the chapter on forms, including the part about using definition lists to layout forms. Via Signal vs. Noise.
Here's an innovative approach to a common web-design issue: Resolution dependent layout. Cameron Adams uses javascript to tell the size of the browser window, then changes styles accordingly. His example shows going from a 3 column layout to stacking those columns vertically. But, it would be easy enough to change the approach to show/hide sidebars or other content depending on the width. Worth checking out, at the least.
I've been working through a month+ of links. This list represents only about half of the links I've collected. The rest I haven't had a chance to work through yet. So, here's your chance to follow along and get caught up on a month's worth of reading in one sitting:
That's all. I'll get to the others...well...sometime. Oh, and I should say that the above links really are the good stuff out of my list 'o links. I did trash a bunch of stuff that just didn't seem so interesting anymore.
But, I always keep two things in mind when hiring, no matter how desperate I feel. 1. a bad employee does far more damage than no employee, no matter the issue. 2. A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers. Let your standards slip once and you're only two generations away from death.
Here's another riff by Evelyn Rodriguez on the topic of open source knowledge:
A big part of the letting go of hoarding actually occurred when I started having faith that there was an endless supply to ideas and information and stuff available when and if I needed it. I didn't have to have a warehouse-full stocked up...you know, just in case it all dried up overnight. But you have to have absolute certainty that you can keep tapping into the ether as Arden puts it. If you believe that ideas and imagination and possiblity is finite and this may be your last brilliant idea ever - it well may be.
John Gruber's detailed article on BBEdit 8 makes me miss having a mac. Anybody have a favorite text editor for Windows that comes close?
Famed blogger Dave Winer just moved to my fair city, Seattle (for at least a couple of months). It sounds like he moved in just up the street from me (Harbor Steps?). Should be interesting to get an outsider's perspective on the town. He's already ranted a bit about the roads. Anyway, welcome to Seattle, Dave.
Update: I noticed that Dave pointed to some of the things he's near, including restaurants. Here's a few of my favorites, in the downtown region:
I could mention a few places to avoid, but I'd hate to slander folks on the blog...
Eric Sink has started to write a very interesting series on source/version control software. Eric works for SourceControl, a vendor of source control tools, but he's made the articles fairly tool agnositic.
The articles are worth a read, I think, especially if you're not that familar with the concepts involved with doing source control. I'll confess that I'm not up to speed on many of the concepts. Mostly because I have the impression that these tools work better when you're creating more traditional software, not websites. I could be wrong, and I'd love for someone to tell me how to do version control with a (data-driven) website.
Off the top of my head, here are my main points of confusion:
The code-upload-test cycle of web development doesn't seem to fit well with the use of one of these tools. I get the impression that the idea is to work on a local copy, get it right, then commit it to the repository. But, it is often hard to have a local development environment that matches the production server. In my case, not only is the server a very different platform from the dev. machines (AIX vs. a mix of WinXP and Macs), but there is a rather complicated database to contend with. Where does the development actually take place? Under the conditions I described, how do the developers interact with the source control system?
The second issue is the database. In my current situation, we a good number of pages rely on information from a database. Can the database schema be source controlled? What about the data? How would you commit or rollback changes?
The benefits of source control are clear to me. I just don't know how to get there without a decent amount of trouble, that is.
I've always been a bit annoyed by the lack of a standard XSLT processor in Python. Here's one approach:
Do an XSL transformation in Jython:
Since Python standard library doesn't have (to my knowledge, at least) an XSL transformer, and if you happen to have Jython installed, here's how you can do an XSL transformation with Java SDK's libraries
(via Daily Python-URL)
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." -- Daniel H. Burnham (Director of Works for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, in Erik Larson's Devil in the White City.)
Organization in the Way: How decentralization hobbles the user experience by Peter Merholz:
What we have seen is that small, multidisciplinary teams create the best products. These teams eschew departmental hand-offs and reviews. Instead, product managers, marketers, designers, engineers, and user advocates work closely on a single project. In order to succeed, it’s essential that, in this collaborative mold, the different parties are no longer bound to their departments’ distinct measures of success, but share a common goal.
I wonder how Merholz would apply these ideas to distributed content creation. Putting, for example, web publishing capabilities in the hands of many de-centralized units within a business is the goal of many Content Mgt projects. But, without strong central leadership, organizations often lose site of the goals and audience. So, how best to structure web content creation, especially given that this role is often an add-on in many organizations?