Christian Heilmann

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Archive for the ‘Odds & Ends’ Category

All blogs look the same…

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

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

What your blog looks like

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.

Reason #13423 why I love the internet – Lego instruction booklets

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

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…

Web Standards Group Meeting London

Saturday, July 15th, 2006

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.

Web standards are not important?

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

Au contraire, as Googlefight proves.

Googlefight screenshot showing that there are more search results for web standards than for porn

Smugpanel – show the world who links to you

Friday, July 7th, 2006

Are you quite proud about the amount of people linking to your site?

If you are, be smug about it and show it to the world, using a Smugpanel

Demo of a smugpanel

Simply put a JavaScript in the HEAD of the document, customise it to your smug-URL, add a smug DIV and anyone can see who links to you.