Every time I go to a conference and meet with Matt Biddulph of Dopplr I feel a little pang of regret that I yet had forgotten to update my dopplr profile again. I know it is easy to do this with FireEagle (even with the awesome “my location is” REST URL (f.e. http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/my/location/is/51.4992,-0.135505) but I somehow didn’t quite make the jump to a fully mobile life yet. I guess I will have to ditch the £80 HTC Touch I got in Hong Kong and get myself a nice and more GPS enabled phone. Any ideas? I guess Alfie Dennen would be the man to help.

Last weekend I went to Atlanta, Georgia to speak at the Webmaster Jam Session or short WJS organized by Coffeecup software. I’ve written a detailed report on the event on the YDN blog and in short it was fantastic.

One of the things I did at the event is sit in on one of the Website Smackdown sessions, which are expert reviews of web sites people in the audience submitted. One of the sites was the following:

What shocked me about it was that it is fairly new, but still uses tables for layout. When I investigated I heard that the reason is simply lack of resources to build web sites in a different manner. This is sad, as nowadays we have resources to build upon readily available on the web that we couldn’t even dream of when I started developing. To prove the point that you can re-do a small info site like this one using semantic markup and CSS without even knowing much about it, I used the YUI grids and created the following in roughly 15 minutes:

You can download the web site demo files and play with them yourself.

I’d be happy to write more, in-depth articles about this kind of structure and redesign if there is interest. The only question I have about it is where to publish them? People that would benefit from these are not likely to read the blogs and magazines I write for. Is there a government web standards publication somewhere?

I just spent several splendid days at the Ajax Experience in Boston, MA and was asked to deliver a talk about the YUI. Here’s what I went for: I wanted to make very clear that while YUI is a library much like the others, the real power of it lies in the control it gives you over the whole frontend development process from start to end.

• The CSS components make sure that creating CSS based layouts and typography are as easy cross-browser as libraries make JavaScript development
• The YUI DOM control allows you to monitor the size of the browser window, the position of the document in the window and the dimensions of any element. You can use this power to control things like fixed positioning and element overlap and even monitor font resizing.
• I explained the concept of Custom Events and how the -debug versions of YUI will notify you as a developer at any moment of execution about the internal happenings.
• I showed the development tools – the YUI logger, profiler and test suite and how they make your development process much less random.

The slides are available on slideshare and here are the code examples mentioned in the slides for browsing and to download as a zip.

[slideshare id=631005&doc=yui-for-control-freaks-a-presentation-at-the-ajax-experience-631005-1473&w=425]

If you are curious to get the know the upcoming changes in YUI3 straight from the horse’s mouth and you are in lovely England, come down to London on the 16th of October to meet with the YUI team in the Yahoo offices over video conference.

• Sign up to the event on upcoming and pencil in information from 6.15 to 8 and then beers in a nearby local.

The Yahoo offices are located bang in the tourist centre of town, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, WC2H 8AD London, which is next to the cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue. If you come from Leicester Square, just walk up towards Tottenham Court Road and go right when you see the Spamalot musical theatre. The office is on the left of the road right next to the Cafe Milano.

Hope to see you there!

Chris

Dedication is a really nice thing. Esteemed Yahoo colleagues Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan of the exceptional performance team are two people who are dedicated to making the web a faster place.

Both Nicole and Stoyan have been talking about performance of CSS, JavaScript, HTML and also image optimization. Images can be optimized in two ways: visually (what is the quality) and file size. The latter is quite a corker, though as image editing tools leave a lot of information in files that we don’t really need – EXIF information, to be precise. If you open an image in a hex editor you will find a lot of things that can be safely removed without a change in the image quality.

There are a lot of open source tools to optimize images that way – amost one for each image format. Working through all of them can be a drag. This is why Stoyan and Nicole took their knowledge, dedication and all of these tools and built one application that does all the optimizations for you in one go:

You can upload a bunch of images, give it a URL or use it as a Firefox extension or bookmarklet. Smushit will show you how many bytes you can save by removing cruft from the images and gives you all the images as a zip file to replace them on your site. How cool and easy is that?

• Check it out now at Smushit.com

Here’s a video of Stoyan and Nicole presenting Smushit.com at The Ajax Experience in Boston (sorry about the audio):