Ten years ago, web design was a big part of my world. My few hours spent offline were spent dreaming up new ideas for websites. I built sites for myself, sites for friends, sites for unlikely clubs and groups that my friends and I made up. I was always creating something, always pushing myself to make a better website.
But that environment didn't agree with me. You know what web design was like ten years ago. For me, it felt like the web had no direction. With every new competing browser version, there began to be more frustration than achievement in everything I created. I gradually stopped even trying to make websites, and ended up not touching the inner workings of any website for several years.
Fortunately for me, ten years ago I was in tenth grade, so the years off were spent somewhat productively finishing high school and starting university, and the web was in the process of healing itself by the time I was ready for it again. But I must admit that I do envy today's tenth grade web designers who grow up not with a severe browser dichotomy and free-for-all methodology, but instead grow up with published works such as these.
If we want better sites, better work, and better-informed clients, the need to educate begins with us.
… getting an email to display consistently in all of the popular email clients is by far the most frustrating part of the job. It's a painful and always moving target that's getting harder instead of easier. There's really no justification for it and it's about time something was done.
When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.
— Jeff Bezos, 2002
Today, the web has direction, and it's a healthy one.
Because without it, Blue Beanie Day would be that much more implausible.
Monday, November 26, 2007 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.
Facebook manages to make even the strangest things seem reasonable; that in itself of worthy of further analysis, but only after I get back from the tuque store.
The explanation from the beanie bearer himself, which quadruples the project's plausibility. So there seem to be two good methods for making out-of-left-field ideas seem reasonable: create a Facebook event, or be featured on The Daily Report. Mix and match to taste.
prq Feeling lost and cut off without twitter. I want my fake co-workers back! about 2 hours ago
And it's true.
I thought Twitter was silly for the longest time—at least, for my purposes. I talked to people enough. I was active enough on Facebook. And my mobile phone bills were already sky-high.
Then two things happened:
So I signed up for Twitter, if only to reserve my three-character user name. Now I'm addicted. And it feels great.
See, I work at home. My only co-worker has four legs, sleeps a lot, and prefers to stalk birds on the deck instead of interacting with me. I work and communicate with clients and contractors, all of whom are terrific people and are great to deal with, but—it's still work. Almost all that communication is a means to an end, which means that there are pressures and worries inherent in every word typed.
Twitter's a diversion from that. I follow people who are in the industry, doing the same kind of work that I do, but not necessarily working with me. With TwitterFox in my status bar, I'm reminded every few minutes that there are people out there, working on the same types of problems I'm working on, in the same kind of environment I'm in. No pressure or worries: it's just something we do and love. They inspire me to work, they keep me level when things go wrong, they keep me company. It's comforting knowing that someone's on the other side of the cubicle wall.
And it's even nicer when your co-workers don't just sit on the windowsill and demand to be let outside.