August 2010

An Event Apart Minneapolis: Dan Cederholm, "The CSS3 Experience"

Submitted by admin_marc on

One of the key people from whom I learned how to do standards-based markup and CSS is Dan Cederholm, through his books Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. He has a real knack for taking the complex and challenging and transforming into something seemingly simple and doable. So the opportunity to hear him talk about CSS3 at An Event Apart Minneapolis was a real treat.

An Event Apart Minneapolis: Greg Rewis, "Weaving the Modern Web"

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

The final speaker of the first day at An Event Apart Minneapolis was Greg Rewis from Adobe. Yes, Adobe was a sponsor of An Event Apart, so this was a promo for Adobe in general and Dreamweaver CS5 in specific, but Greg made clear that he not only promotes Dreamweaver, he uses it quite a bit, just like many of us do. I had the delight of chatting with Greg for a while after the first day finished: he’s quite a character and does a great job explaining the things Adobe has done to make the lives of working designers and developers easier.

An Event Apart Minneapolis: Eric Meyer, "Everything Old is New Again"

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

The second day of An Event Apart began with Jeffrey Zeldman introducing Eric Meyer. Jeffrey pointed out that there was much one could say of Eric, but perhaps the simplest is to say that he has been documenting CSS since 1996, and browser makers have come to him to ask how to implement CSS in their browsers.

An Event Apart Minneapolis: Jeremy Keith, "Paranormal Interactivity"

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

Jeremy Keith, expert on JavaScript and HTML5, spoke to An Event Apart Minneapolis about “Paranormal Interactivity.” The session description describes this as:

Interaction is the secret sauce of the web. Understanding interaction is key to understanding the web as its own medium—it’s not print, it’s not television, and it’s certainly not the desktop. Find out how to wield HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to craft experiences that are native to the web.

An Event Apart Minneapolis: Ethan Marcotte, "A Dao of Flexibility"

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

Quite frankly, you know that a session for An Event Apart will be awesome when the speaker’s blog is unstoppablerobotninja.com and his Twitter handle is simply @beep. Ethan Marcotte, who strikes me as the web equivalent of a Zen master, spoke to us about “A Dao of Flexibility.” He recently wrote a ground-breaking article for A List Apart, Responsive Web Design, so I suspected this would be a pretty profound session.

What I learned at An Event Apart Minneapolis

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

Recently, I attended An Event Apart in Minneapolis, convenient since I am a homegrown Minnesotan.

I really can think of no better way to turn your brain into swiss cheese than by attending An Event Apart. Each session had its own brilliance that on its own would make you rethink the way you do things. When your mind gets blown six separate times, two days in a row, your head hurts afterwards.

Drupal: Removing Pingbacks from Recent Comments block

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

If you’re using Drupal for your blog, and you have the default “recent comments” block displaying, you may have discovered that it swiftly fills up with comments with the subject line of “Pingback.”

I found this annoying: I want to see real people comments, not computer comments.

Luckily, this is a pretty quick fix.

Assuming you’re using Views (and who isn’t?), a comments_recent view should be listed as disabled. Enable it and edit it.

We are why IE6 lingers on

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

If you ask any given web designer what frustrates them most, my guess is most will tell you IE6.

We know the extra development time and costs that come from dealing with IE6 and other misbehaving older browsers. We know the feeling that it’s difficult to move forward when older browsers hold us back.