Finally we are doing the last reviews for the new book by Norm and me published by Friends of Ed called “Web Development Solutions – Ajax, APIs and Hosted Services Made Easy”. It has been quite a task to get this one out, with the first technical reviewer never showing up and Norm having to stop his contributions halfway through. However, I can’t wait to see this on the shelves of Foyle’s :-)

Just found this gem by Gareth Dart on the WebAim mailing list:

There seems to be a belief common to designers of captchas that, as soon as their form goes live, a small red LED will start flashing at the board meeting of the World Evil Hacker Organisation. Shady figures will exchange nods and evil cackles, temporarily cease their endless stroking of long haired white cats whilst they direct their minions to do their worst, and then the combined resources of the world hacking community will be targeted solely upon the objective of cracking their form. If they have not made that image as hard to read as is humanly possible, then earthquakes will strike in Japan, lightning will flash down from the sky and ignite the world’s rainforests, aliens will invade and Bob the website boss will be mildly peeved about all the spamming.

On the second day of the Yahoo! internal Frontend Engineering summit in Sunnyvale I’ve been talking about the interplay of CSS and JavaScript. You can download the CSS vs. JS presentation in PDF format – 865KB.

Here is the presentation teaser:

One of the big discussion topics right now is where CSS ends and JavaScript begins. “CSS only” menus advertise themselves as being more accessible and cleaner than JavaScript solutions whereas a lot of pure JavaScript solutions are hard to style. This short course introduces you to ways of how CSS can benefit from JS and vice versa. It’s not a battle – it is a matter of mutualism.

Today I gave a talk at the Yahoo! internal Front End Engineering Summit in the Sunnyvale office. You can download the presentation in PDF format and get the workshop files and my solution for the task representing the best practices talked about in the presentation.

The conference is pretty amazing and it is a lot of fun to see the amount of skill accumulated in the company you work for. Tomorrow I’ll be talking about the differences between CSS and JavaScript and how to make them work together.

I’ve been tagged by Ann Arbor of 3.7designs to talk about the top five reasons I blog. Oh well, normally I don’t play the tagging game, but why not?

Reason 1: I wanted to keep a repository of what I do and feedback I get for it

This is actually how that started. I created a lot of scripts and stuff at onlinetools and got lots of emails (amongst the avalanche of spam) asking for add-ons, reporting bugs and asking me how much a commercial implementation would cost. As my email servers were not the most stable and the spam got very annoying (gmail wasn’t out yet) I started to blog instead.

Reason 2: I am constantly tinkering away with ideas

With new jobs I got less free time and didn’t want to write full scripts any longer but sometimes just jot down a nice thought or a half-baked idea. What better place to use than a blog?

Reason 3: I want to keep people updated of changes I did to products already released

In the past I played with mailing lists and of course these also got spammed quickly enough. Hence a blog with an RSS feed was the best option.

Reason 4: Networking

There is nothing better to connect to other people than having a blog, pinging them and trolling your own stats for links from other blogs. I actually found some colleages to hire that way. Flickr is also a great place for that.

Reason 5: Promotion

Having a blog that gets linked a lot is a great chance to promote your or other people’s stuff. It is just fun to use google as your bookmarks ;-)

These are my reasons. let’s tag others:

• Edward Eliot
• Stuart Colville
• Tim Huegdon
• Tom Croucher
• Mike Davies
• Gez Lemon