Esther Schindler has been busy asking members of evolt’s the list what their biggest pains are when dealing with clients are. Or – in other words – what developers would love their clients to know. The result is called Becoming Clueful and was released at IT Business Net yesterday.

It is an article full of good information, albeit I’d loved to see some more structure in it rather than a string of quotes. Something like a Top 10 myths and Top 10 annoyances with a lot of footnotes as to who said it would have been easier to read.

Anyways, my bit is on page 2:

“Clients seem to think that web development is like getting your car fixed in one of the quickfix garages: You agree a fixed price, bring it in, and pick it up after a certain amount of time,” says Chris Heilmann, a web developer in London. “In reality, a good web product needs buy-in and dedication from both the development agency and the client.”

At least to me, and this is how they look:

Judging by my stats and the referrers, that is the same for a lot of people – not necessarily using the same RSS reader, but one of the dozens out there.

The reason is simple: Time. I simply don’t have the time to surf around all the blogs I like to read, which is why I chose to stick to the RSS feeds and netvibes to collate them all ( in case you’re interested in what I read, here are my subscriptions in OPML format ). And after all this is what blogging is about: Writing and syndicating/linking to others.

That said, I keep finding posts about “Redesign of my blog”, “new blog design” or even “Sneak preview of my upcoming blog design”. Frankly, I couldn’t care less – unless you create a step by step tutorial as to why you have redesigned (which should be something like “increasing readability/usability” and not “to add this new gizmo”) and what tricks you used to overcome browser issues and you offer the templates for download.

What I’d rather like to read is things like “How I sold a good practice of blogs to a client”, “How I proved that web standards make a difference to a client” or “How I integrated CSS in an older CMS or framework – the issues and their solutions”, but sadly enough these are rare.

Talk of “we won the web standard war” is all over the place, and, to me, is premature until there are commercial solutions, frameworks and large sites that really embrace not only the syntax but the idea of standards – which includes that not every browser gives the same result but according to what it can support.

If you are bored with CSS or you think we’ve achieved it all – I guess you never had to face a project that’s been around for a while with clients that just don’t want talk but cheap quick solutions. Once we cracked these situations, it’s time for celebration.

I never cease to be amazed by what effort people put into their passions and putting them on the web. I just stumbled over this page with scans of Lego booklets which must have taken ages to put together – well, the scanning not the page.

Content, wonderful content…

I’d like to get some feedback on an idea for a plugin I developed for the Yahoo! Messenger.

My idea was to collate all the different search services I am using day by day into one plugin to save me the time to open several tabs when a contact asks a question.

I’ve uploaded the screenshots as a Flickr stream and would be happy to hear if you’d consider this worth while, and – more importantly, if there is anything else that would be cool and sensible to add.

Before you go nuts about “add this and that”, make sure that you can also provide an API I can use (in JavaScript / REST based) to get the results.

Some other options I thought about and discarded:

• Audio search (as it is two steps with the Y! API)
• Shopping search (what for, without localisation)
• Local search & Upcoming.org (for the same reason)

Thoughts? Either comment on flickr or here.

As some people asked me for them yesterday at the Web Standards Group Meetup London here are my slides on Maintainable JavaScript.

I took some out as they don’t make much sense without me monkeying around on stage and the others will be in the podcast that’ll be out some time later. I didn’t have any notes, but ad-libbed the lot so that’s all there is.

Thinkvitamin will release an article next week on the subject which will be a lot more hands-on and tell you what you can do to make your JavaScript more maintainable.

It was a lot of fun, and I hope to see some of the people I met at the next meeting. A big thanks to Stuart for organising and endangering all participants by allowing me on stage. Check out the flickr stream to see the crowd.