Tufte gives his thoughts on the Windows Phone 7 Series interface (There’s a name). He doesn’t seem too impressed but no one has actually used it yet so maybe the end result will be better, but I personally doubt it. Also the comments are worth checking out, they have some good ideas and points.
Some pop out points:
If you haven’t heard of Facebook’s HipHop for PHP you probably don’t care. If you have heard you probably want to know how it is actually going to help you. Seems to be a lot of misinformation out there about what impact HipHop will have.
Terry Chay wrote up Faster PHP fo shizzle—HipHop for PHP which does an excellent job of breaking down who HipHop will help, and who it will not.
So I finally got around to using the new built in thumbnails in WordPress. Was looking around for some info when I found Matt Brett’s post Bulletproof Post Thumbnails in WordPress 2.9 which lays down the code pretty simply.
The basics go like this. Check out Matt’s post and also visit Mark Jaquith’s and Kremalicious‘ posts on the subject for more info.
I love vintage ads! Nothing is more inspiring to me than some 1920′s typography, and nothing is more hilarious than 1960′s car ads. So the Vintage Ad Browser is just about the greatest thing on the internet to me. Definitely take some time out to browse it and bookmark it, you will need this for inspiration one day.
Check out the Vintage Ad Browser
I’ve recently had my eyes opened to CSS preprocessors and been looking for an excuse to use one. While I haven’t had a need for one quite yet I’ve been educating myself on them. Nathan Borror recently posted the article “Sass isn’t for me” about this very subject. While I agree with most of the points, the real gold here is in the discussion of the article. If you want some opinions or info about CSS preprocessors, the way they work, or the way people think they should work, read the comments.
Honestly I don’t have a fixed position on the issue of Sass, LessCss, or preprocessors in general yet since I haven’t used them. However I know what I want in a preprocessor. The first and biggest issue to me is syntax, I write CSS like Nathan, everything on one line. I know CSS, I have years of experience with it’s syntax, I don’t want to learn a new syntax. That counts Sass out, for now (a new syntax is being developed for Sass that is more tightly coupled to CSS).
The second is features. Ultimately this will be the deciding factor for any project. Right now Sass and LessCSS look similar, although Compass and Sass look incredibly powerful together.
Most of us have tons of experience with CSS and are reluctant to move to anything new (remember what it took to get you away from table based layouts?) regardless of CSS shortcomings. But nonetheless CSS does have a few large shortcomings that need to be addressed and it looks like preprocessors are going to be the answer for right now.
Tender just rolled out a new javascript widget which allows you to insert a form into your site which will post straight to Tender. The widget even provides links to documentation, and the creation of a user account for the person. All this without the user having to leave your site, I’ll be integrating it here soon. So right now you probably have two questions: What is Tender? and Why Do I Care?
It’s a support web app, I know sounds boring, and it is to be honest. But some of us have to deal with supporting things. Tender makes this incredibly easy and painless. 
Tender has some features which set it apart for me. Numeral uno is I can manage support requests from email, I hardly ever have to actually log into the website. Second is the integration with Lighthouse, my ticket tracking app of choice. When I first released Checkmate I encouraged people to post tickets to my lighthouse, it was a massive failure. However my Tender has been a success and has made responding to support requests much less painful.
If you don’t support any software or services you don’t care, you shouldn’t care, and you should be happy you don’t deal with it. If you do, OR you SHOULD be supporting something(*cough* your WordPress themes *cough*) then you should care. Tender is an efficient, user friendly way to offer quality support. And this new widget is just an example of their commitment to making things easy for the users, who are the most important part of your software/service.
So you got this awesome design all ready for WordPress 2.7, you even got how those pesky threaded comments planned out perfect! Oops, didn’t you know? WordPress’ comment function well, not lacking for a better term, sucks…a lot. It’ll probably get better in the future, but what to do right now? Bend them to your will, no mercy. That is what Chad Coleman has done, and thank God it was him and not me.
Go read his article Comment Design For WordPress 2.7
Blogging is changing, it has always been changing, and will continue to change. Blogs used to be about people’s cats and weekend photos, blogs then became mini news outlets, then myspace came along and they were about cats again. Somewhere along the way blogs gained credibility and became major news sources, magazines, or just a wealth of useful information. And the next step is cutting down the ever growing number of feeds in your reader to just a few, corporation sized blogs.
Blogs make money, and in some cases, a lot of money. But these are not blogs as a layperson would know them, they are huge sites with a massive amount of information, several posts a day with several different authors. I call them “Uber Blogs”, mostly because I’m a nerd. These “Uber Blogs” are more like publications, and what I see as “the future”.
Before you go and lynch me in angry mob style, let me explain the landscape of this blogging future. These uber blogs will become your bread and butter, your morning newspaper. They will be very author orientated, and as such, bloggers will save their best posts/tutorials/rantings/themes/whatever for the uber blogs. And the regular blog will essentially stay the same, except they will become more personal once again, just maybe not to the extent of seeing cat pictures again.
I think this is a good thing! Keeping up with news is now a part time job, having a few key uber blogs covering the niches you are interested in will help. But blogging isn’t going away, I’ll still be able to read Khoi Vihn’s thoughts about the news if I want.
I’m curious to know what you think now. Where is blogging headed? Where do you want it to head? Should you wear pants while blogging? How do you think advertising will work for small blogs? Will the Raiders ever be good again? Are you still reading this? Are there too many questions for one post? Is blogging dead? Is micro blogging the future?
Halloween is nearly here, and to take a break from the usual design, coding, theme banter here I’m going to give you a list(gasp!). Yes a list, one of those top whatever things that rule Digg and Delicious, the bane of the internet! But this is different(not really) it is a list of horror movies you may want to check out for a night of fright(can you tell I worked a haunted house?).
These aren’t your typical scream fests, if your looking for those skip to the bottom. But if you’re looking for something a little different, a little more eccentric, a little more dare I say artsy, then this list is for you.
Warning: This list contains some graphic images, adult language, and no poo jokes. If you’re not into that sorta stuff, you should skip this one.
It may not be obvious by my writing and general intelligence but I do in fact know how to read. I’ve even read some novels, and a few that didn’t have big pictures. So when Jeff Croft mentioned Readernaut I got interested. I signed up for the beta and got my invitation a few weeks ago. At first I didn’t know if I would actually use Readernaut, but I’m happy to say I do, and I like it.
So what is Readernaut? It is a social community of well read people that make me look like I’m shuffling through old copies of Highlights magazine. It’s a place to catalog the books you have read, add new books, keep track of your reading, comment, and share insight on books. But most importantly Read more…