InterACT with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design has reached the stage in the publishing cycle where you can preorder the book.
You can order on Amazon.com or from Amazon.co.uk. At some point in the near future, it will also be available from Peachpit and other booksellers like Barnes and Nobel.
A new site at interactwithwebstandards.com went up yesterday in support of the book. Currently there, you’ll find the table of contents, and a list of all the people involved in writing and designing this book. The list contains some familiar names and excellent people at work on this book.
It’s the first “companion” book written in support of the InterAct Curriculum.
Speaking of the InterAct Curriculum, even more course materials and more courses are going to be announced at SXSW in March, so be watching to see what the new courses are.
Here’s a blurb from the site, explaining what the book is all about.
Crafted by the education luminaries that brought you the revolutionary InterACT curriculum, the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, and the experts that power The Web Standards Project, this book is the definitive guide to the best practices every web professional needs to master to succeed in their career.
If you’re teaching a basic web design course, you should check out the resources available in this book as well as in the curriculum, which has materials for many more courses as well.
Women and the backchannel on This is Rachel Andrew talks about the backchannel comments directed at female presenters at the recent 200th Boagworld podcast. A couple of good ideas were proposed to deal with the issues raised.
The chatroom on the Boagworld show was essentially a backchannel, and similar issues have happened in conference backchannels in recent months, I believe this is something that needs to be addressed in two ways. Firstly, the community need to be ready to stamp on this kind of behaviour as soon as it is seen. If you are in a channel that starts to go down this line make sure you are not contributing to it, and speak up against it. Can you help to turn the general mood to something more positive? Or offer constructive criticism? I’m certainly not suggesting we shouldn’t be able to disagree with a female speaker! Quite the opposite, we should be dealing with everyone in exactly the same way, I’m not a fan of positive discrimination either.
Secondly I think there are technical solutions to some of this. If you have a live chat or backchannel, people should not be able to post anonymously, or behind nicknames that do not link back to a real person. As a thought perhaps we could have a system where everyone has to sign in with Facebook Connect? Facebook is about real names, real people. Would yesterday’s commenters have been happy for their comments to go out next to their photo, real name and the company they work for? In a conference situation the organisers usually have all those details, so a system can be created that ensured that comments only go out on a live channel that are identified to individuals. There are some people who will quite happily stand behind unpleasant comments but I would suggest they are far fewer than those who switch personalities when they can hide behind an anonymous nickname.
I think her second idea would create much more success than the first. Everyone already knows they need to behave. The chances of getting them to actually behave are greater when there’s full transparency about who is acting like a juvenile jerk.
The reference to “similar issues” in the quote above refers to a backchannel event that gave danah boyd problems. Since I’m very excited about the fact that she is one of the keynoters at the upcoming SXSW Interactive conference and am really looking forward to her talk, I’ve been wondering about how that will go. Audiences at SXSW have been known to disrupt a keynote in the past using the backchannel. In one case the backchannel ire was directed at a woman. However, men have been on the receiving end of bad mouthing from the backchannel, too.
The default display for a fieldset is a square cornered border. In certain browsers (Firefox and Safari and perhaps others) you can use CSS to make rounded corners on the border around the fieldset and around the legend.
The property used to create rounded corners is the border property. The rule is repeated three times, a redundancy meant to create the effect in as many browsers as possible. The border-radius rule is CSS3, not yet in standard adoption by all browsers. The webkit-border-radius rule is understood by all webkit browsers such as Safari. The moz-border-radius is understood by all mozilla based browsers such as Firefox.
A border can be added to the legend as well. That element can also display the rounded borders. Here’s the CSS.
How to have fun in Denver on March 4: attend the funeral for IE6. Yep, sounds like a fun party. Information at IE6 Funeral. May I add for all of us, “Good riddance!”
Manage Twitter is a new app that examines the people you follow on Twitter to see who’s active, who’s relevant to you, who doesn’t follow you back. All in the name of helping you pare down the list of who you’re following by finding the right people to unfollow.
It gives you a list of all the people who aren’t following you back. You can hover over each Twitter account and see how active they are and how long they’ve been tweeting. Leave the checkbox selected next to the account name to delete all the folks you no longer want to follow. I found a lot of people I follow, such as the still Twitter-clueless ABC Public Libraries, that I want to follow, even though they don’t follow me. But I did eliminate some people who were no longer relevant.
In the ten years since 2000, things changed rapidly in the technology field. We get used to them day by day, adopt changes and never look back. When you do take a moment to look back, you realize how much really has changed in the last 10 years. I wrote this as part of BlogHer’s 10 in 10 series. Here are ten things about the last ten years of technology, starting with women in tech.
Two Women
Marissa Mayer is Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google. She started with Google in 1999, with a computer science degree from Stanford in her hand. Ten years later, here she is in action at Web 2.0 Summit 09.
Marissa Mayer is responsible for many of the changes in how we conduct an online life, how we search, how we interact with technology. To my mind, she is the most influential woman in tech for the last 10 years. Fortune Magazine placed her a 44 in a list of the 50 most powerful women, but as far as I’m concerned, she’s number 1.
Dori Smith runs a close second in influence behind Mayer. It’s not because Dori Smith is an important public face for a big corporation. She’s much quieter and less public. Here she talks about JavaScript programming.
Dori she did something years ago, the ripples from which are still spreading through the tech community. She created a web site called Wise-Women with a tech oriented discussion list: an old fashioned listserv. For all these years, the focus in that list has been women (and men too, but mostly women) helping other women with technical issues. Scores of people have learned much of what they needed to know from conversations on the Wise-Women list. The focus has never wavered, the information sharing has never stopped.
Dori Smith is not spending all her time on listservs, however. She written a number of books on topics like JavaScript, was a founding member of the Web Standards Project, and produces all sorts of information on programming. She has helped a great many learn about technology.
Two Websites
It’s hard to narrow the list down to two influential websites from the last 10 years, isn’t it? So many important sites get left out. Surely BlogHer has been relevant for women. Here are two I think have had huge general impact.
YouTube tops my list. YouTube changed the way we learn, the way we share, the way we teach, the way we play. It’s often the first place we look for something—a video of Marissa Mayer speaking at a conference, for example. We go to YouTube for news, for music, for tutorials, for interviews, for everything.
My second choice is Facebook. In a way undreamed of 10 years ago, Facebook has changed our lives. We use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, promote our work, find jobs, support causes, and play games. Facebook pulls in information to your personal page from other social media sources such as Twitter. It’s the ubiquitous social network.
Two Innovations
Beginning the decade with the Y2K bug and moving through literally hundreds of technological innovations in the 10 years since the meltdown that wasn’t, plenty of new tech has claimed a place in our lives.
Mobile phone technology changed the decade, starting with clunky and limited phones and advancing to the iPhone (released in 2007), mobile technology has altered lifestyles in numerous ways. Using myself as an example, I no longer have a home phone, just a cell phone. I whip out that phone 50 times a day for one reason or another, but seldom to make a phone call. If I want to tell you something, I’ll text it or tweet it. If I want to learn something I’ll search for it or find it with an app especially designed to give me the exact information I want from a weather forecast to a movie time to a map.
Wireless everything is now standard. Even 30,000 in the air. Smaller and smaller computers that connect wirelessly to the Internet from everywhere. Netbooks, iPads, tech innovations that grow more and more portable while doing more and more of your daily chores. iPods that don’t just play your tunes, but connect wirelessly to get your mail and let you surf the web. Restaurants prosper whose main claim to customer loyalty comes from free and fast wireless.
Two Flops
Microsoft could never get Vista to capture the public’s affection. Now we have Windows 7—thank you Microsoft—but for a while, it looked like Vista was going to make even the most loyal of Microsoft fans turn away from the mother ship toward that juggernaut known as Apple.
Microsoft Zune, the mp3 player meant to compete with the iPod, was another stunning flop. Sure, it played music as well as the iPod, but it didn’t provide the experience that an iPod did with its beautiful and simple interface. In the never ending face-off between Microsoft and Apple, Apple keeps getting the experience right and Microsoft keeps flubbing it. Apple is like eating at Benihana. Sure you can get fried rice and grilled shimp at any decent Asian restaurant, but you don’t get the Benihana experience just anywhere. Zune just doesn’t provide the cool experience.
I hate to lay both flops at the feet of Microsoft, with so many flops to choose from, but the Microsoft giant has been losing ground to Google, to Apple, to open source, and to just about every other innovator who wants a piece of the pie.
Two trends
Social networking is a pervasive trend affecting everything from personal interaction and network building to political fund raising. I don’t know how long this trend will continue to grow, but the growth has been astonishing. We have people proposing marriage and finding jobs on Twitter, documenting life on blogs or places like BlogHer, setting up coffee dates on Facebook, and looking to the social networks for answers, advice, and connection. Social networking grew exponentially during the last decade.
The final item in my list of ten is the trend toward digital delivery of things we used to go to the store to buy. Music, movies, books, tech support, financial services, television, phone service, news—the list is long. Yes, you still have to go the store to buy a mattress, but the mattress store in my neighborhood is now in the former location of a Blockbuster video. Blockbuster is a thing of the past with Netflix bringing movies straight to your TV. Many businesses that thrived in the past are struggling and dying in a digital economy. By the time another decade has passed we should know how this particular trend has played out. I, for one, hope that news organizations with paid investigative reporters find a way to survive in a world of digital delivery.
Feel free to suggested the big events, people, and stories of the last decade that I left out.
On a personal note, I must mention that this blog will be 10 years old in 2011. I didn’t quite begin when the decade began, but I’m becoming a venerable oldie in the blog world.
InterACT with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design has reached the stage in the publishing cycle where you can preorder the book.
