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I am proud to announce that all of you who have the new Yahoo Messenger 8 beta installed now have a bit of my code on their computer.
The Answers plug-in shown here was my first task when I joined in April and actually is nothing but a bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript – and you could do it yourself.
Watch this space for more information…
Some people asked me at @media about detailed content of my upcoming book. So without further ado, here is the table of contents with page numbers: (more…)
I very much enjoyed attending @media2006 over the last two days and network, hear some good stuff, meet some people again I met last year, take embarrassing pictures and much much more.
The topics discussed and presented were much more diverse than last year, where it was a bit of “preaching to the choir”, I especially did feel the pain of Patrick when he showed his introduction to HTML and half the audience fell asleep last year. What I didn’t quite like was the two channel idea of having parallel presentations, as it meant you had to sacrifice some good presentation for one that is only slightly better or even different.
The keynote by Eric Meyer was a wrap-up of the history of CSS, and actually was much like the WaSP story Jeffrey Zeldman told last year.
Jeffrey Veen’s presentation was my favourite, basically as it was very cleverly playing with the fears of seasoned developers (dunno what seasoning flavour) that Web 2.0 and the lot just turn out to be another bubble that will soon burst and set us back to square one.
The JavaScript panel was less controversial than I thought, and I talked to Dan Webb and Brothercake that we might do some more collaboration writing in the future (for netzines that is).
The “Good Design vs. Great Design” panel was rather insightful, but was a bit disjointed at times.
Tantek’s Microformats talk was very informative on the subject and I will take a very close look at some of those soon.
Nate Koechley’s Yahoo vs. Yahoo (vs. Yahoo) I was lucky enough to see in the office the day before (and pointed out that it is IFRAMES or iframes and not iFrames as they are not Apple products) and I hope that it showed some people in the audience that there is quite a difference between running a blog and getting millions of hits a day. The photo beta is really a stunning piece of coding and shows that web apps can and should work like real apps rather than simulating them with the browsing ideas and patterns in mind.
Dan Cederholm’s Bullet Proof presentation didn’t show me many new things (I do own some of those flexible trousers – they’re made by Dockers) but that is also due to me devouring his books.
Molly’s internationalization talk was very passionately presented and informative, but somehow I get the feeling that the American crowd is much more amazed by the idea of multilingual and multicultural distribution as us Europeans are, as it was quite a necessity for any product if it wanted to sell Europe-wide.
I stop now..
You’ve read enough of my stuff, now it is time to see and hear me talk (if you are able to do both). This means not only will you be able to listen to some stuff I have to say, no, you can even ask questions and shout at me without risking comment moderation.
Stuart Colville of Muffinresearch has organised the first Web Standards Group London Meetup and I was asked to give a presentation on “something about modern JavaScript”. He also asked Andy Budd to talk about “something about CSS and web standards”.
Hence I pondered and came up with the idea to hold a concept/idea/tips and tricks session about “Maintainable JavaScript”. This means I’ll talk about how to create JavaScript that will not come back to you for maintenance but make it easy for colleagues, clients and other third parties to change the look and feel and even the content of your scripting solutions.
In any case, it’ll be an interesting evening and there’ll be book giveaways (with mine being released 3 days after the event) and drinks to make you forget what Andy and me talked about. So go to the site, sign up and I’ll see you on the 14th of July in London’s beautiful north (I can take a bus home, or cycle!).
Update: The performance was great and I met Henry outside later on for a quick chat. He really is as down to earth as you’d expect. The venue, however, was a joke: Boiling hot and there was no space for your feet (on the most expensive seats).
I am always amazed how hard some web sites make it for you to order a ticket for a show. This Sunday, Henry Rollins is performing at the Hackney Empire in my neck of the woods (I found out by pure chance, seeing a small flyer on a bus-stop). Now, I go to the Hackney Empire web site and get a splash page with an enter button before reaching a nice looking flash interface (what is the use of the splash page?).
I need to select the genre from the menu on the left which is OK enough – although having the current month as the first option would be a nice touch – what is the point of checking shows in the past?
I select Comedy and sure enough Henry pops up. If he hadn’t been the first to show up I’d have to use a flash scroll bar on the right to scroll down. Below the show’s photo are two links (with pointing hands to the right of them): “More info” and “How to book”. I click “How to book” as I do want to book, and get a panel sliding up from below offering me the obvious choices to book “In person or by phone”, “per post” first. Hello? I am online! The next choice is “online booking” which tells me to “Simply click on the show you wish to buy ticket for and follow the instructions on screen.”
In short, clicking the “how to book” link this was a pointless exercise – unless you don’t want to book offline.
I get rid of the panel via the “close this window” (what window?) link and get back to the show to try to “click on the show you wish to buy a ticket for”, but neither the photo of Henry nor the title of the show is linked. Instead, I have to click the “more info” link, which pops up a panel with exactly the same information as the listing and a massive “book here” button.
Clicking this button opens a new browser window listing all shows playing at the Empire at the moment with only a “buy tickets” link in the last column of the table row to buy them. There I have to find the show again and I can finally purchase tickets – in a pretty straight forward interface though.
Now I wonder if Hackney Empire is being paid by clicks on their web site or why there is no “purchase tickets online” link on the first listing?