Interesting Links 5.30.08

TimesMachine – New York Times – TimesMachine can take you back to any issue from Volume 1, Number 1 of The New-York Daily Times, on September 18, 1851, through The New York Times of December 30, 1922.
SuperLame! Comic Word Balloon Engine – Simply add speech bubbles to photos you upload. Useless? Sure, but fun.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 4: User Interface – CSS3 brings some great new properties relating to resizing elements, cursors, outlining, box layout and more.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 5: Multiple Columns – CSS3 introduces a new module known, appropriately, as multi-column layout. It allows you to specify how many columns text should be split down into and how they should appear.
Design Critique: Blog Platforms – Most designers are familiar with the relative pros and cons of different publishing tools â€“ but what about the websites of the blog platforms themselves?
TinySong – type a song, get a link, share the full song with your friends. It’s really that simple. Works great for those “have you heard this song?” moments.
Adobe Labs – Adobe has released the first betas for Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Soundbooth CS4. Note: betas only work for 2 days unless you have an existing CS3 serial number.
Fixing Twitter – I am getting sick of talk about twitter and itâ€™s scalability problems and also frankly unqualified people slagging the service for itâ€™s unreliability and also coming up with stupid ignorant answers to how it should be fixed.
Read at Work – it looks like you’re being productive, but you’re definitely not. Kind of funny, but I can’t imagine actually using it.

Interesting Links 5.16.08

picasa2flickr – A simple “plugin” that allows Picasa users to upload their photos to Flickr.
Pimp my Outlook Today – I’m a big fan of TiddlyWiki so it seemed an ideal candidate for integration with the Outlook Today screen.
CSS Attribute Selectors: Built-In Classes – Classes and IDs arenâ€™t the only ways you can describe the elements in your website in order to style them. You can also make use of attribute selectors.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 1: What is it? – This first tutorial will give you a very basic introduction to the new possibilities created by the standard.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 2: Borders – CSS3 takes borders to a new level with the ability to use gradients, rounded corners, shadows and border images.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 3: Text Effects – CSS is already reasonably versatile in the way in which text can be displayed, but still constricts design in quite a few areas. CSS3 goes some way towards removing those limitations.
15 Great Examples of Web Typography – It may be that not all the sites listed here are to your taste, but itâ€™s hoped that something will inspire you.
Web Based Workflow: Tale of the $0 Studio – In the past few years weâ€™ve seen an explosion of free, web and open source alternatives to popular, often expensive, design programs. With this workflow itâ€™s all pure profit!
10 Things I Learned from Mental Detox Week – Getting rid of technology (or most of it) for one week.
5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed – A number of psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions about the subjects.
Ad*Access – The Ad*Access Project presents images and information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.

Interesting Links 4.4.08

An interesting collections of links, primarily aimed at CSS this time. I can’t wait for this semester to be over with so I can get back to some web design. I am so behind in terms of things I want/need to read at this point.

Twitter Posts for 2008-03-23

@Matthom Twordy just links to the longer conversation then (at Twordy’s site)? …interesting idea, though slightly clumsy. #
I like the idea. I understand the occasional need/desire for longer conversations, but I feel like p http://twordy.com/statuses/12 #
http://is.gd/2C8 "Painful Things Hillary Clinton Knows â€” Or Should Know" …essentially "Why Hillary Should Give Up" #
actually slept in a bit for the first time in a few months…now bad. #
happy bunny day everyone #
Watching SportsCenter, and generally not being very productive today. #
coffee and watching some horrible tv/movies. #
watching all kinds of NCAA games. Georgetown just lost. Tennessee just won. North Carolina on next. #

Interesting Links 3.7.08

I apologize, but I am far too lazy to write a blurb about each one of those links. I’ll just leave it at this: IE8 Beta 1 is a step in the right direction, TeamViewer kicks ass for remote computer support, and the 6 animals that can destroy you is hilarious to read.

Interesting Links 1.25.08

PDF Hammer – PDF Hammer is a website that allows you to edit your PDF files online for free.
Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 – When a new version of that browser comes along and fixes bugs or misinterpretations of the spec (or introduces new ones) or in any way changes behavior, sites break and our clients, bosses, and users get very unhappy.
From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey -This actually makes browser vendors more susceptible to pressure to fix their bugs, and less fearful of doing so. Thatâ€™s huge, as fundamentally game changing as was DOCTYPE switching, but on an ongoing basis.
Better Email Links: Featuring CSS Attribute Selectors – We can use this similarity between links to our advantage, so that we can apply CSS styling to only email links.
Understanding CSS Colour modes – CSS 2 and 3 offer a number of different ways to pick colours. While everyone knows the hexadecimal notation, fewer people know the RGB notation and colour keywords, and the new colour modes that CSS3 introduces are still a riddle to most.
Draft of HTML 5 Hints at a Brave New Web – HTML 5 presents a major change from HTML 4, and it will still be a long time before youâ€™re likely to see HTML 5 markup in your browser.
HTML 5 – W3C Working Draft 22 January 2008. This is the draft straight from the W3C. Not the easiest thing to read/understand, but certainly a great resource (obviously).
HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 – HTML 5 defines the fifth major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. This article describes the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides some of the rationale for the changes.
HTML5 Shiv – Assuming that it’ll be a while before most browsers attempt to implement most of HTML 5 we need to start thinking of ways to tackle the creation and rendering of HTML 5 components in the meantime.

Perhaps you figured out the pattern for these links (except for the PDF hammer link)? The HTML 5 draft was finally released on the 22nd of January. The web has been a twitter with this and the fact that Microsoft has said that Internet Explorer 8 will include a “super standards” mode. The key is that this standards mode will require a particular META tag to enable this type of rendering. This has also sent the web into a frenzy because people are claiming that this will destroy progressive enhancement. The truth of the matter, as Eric Meyer points out, is that this will not be a detrimental change. The key moving forward will be that your websites will theoretically continue to work exactly how you coded them for the foreseeable future. In theory, even if we’re all using IE10 your website that was designed for IE6 will still render just fine. The other point that Eric makes is that browser vendors will be able to implement new web standards much more quickly now that they’d no longer need to fear breaking millions of websites. Essentially current websites would remain untouched by new changes to IE’s rendering engine. Unless the developer specifically codes the website to use the new render engine, which we can assume means that the developer has tested the page for issues, it would default to the legacy rendering engine that has proven to work. This is really a good thing for web designers, web standards supporters, and browser vendors.