HTML 5 Doctor
Another great site for the latest news on HTML 5. You can also submit ques­tions regard­ing HTML 5 and the authors will write a response or help find some­one that can.

# tagged: html 5

Power tips for Word­press tem­plate devel­op­ers
A great set of tips for people that spend their time on the devel­op­ment side of a Word­press—espe­cially those that use it as con­tent man­age­ment system. (via Ethan)

# tagged: wordpress

Prag­Pub
A new PDF mag­a­zine from the fine folks at The Prag­matic Pro­gram­mers. This month: Lay­offs, Clo­jure and Prag­matic Publishing.

# tagged: programming, publishing

Zeld­man on minimalism

Although it is never pop­u­lar, never the dom­i­nant trend, rarely wins design awards, and almost never earns acclaim from design­ers, design stripped down to its essen­tials is always a good idea, and espe­cially on the web, where every byte counts.

# tagged: minimalism, web design

Every­Block goes open source
Great news from a local Chicago startup. Every­Block is an amaz­ing local­ized, map-​based news site from the folks that brought you Django. Check them out.

# tagged: everyblock, open source

Mozilla releases Fire­fox 3.5
The latest ver­sion of everyone’s favorite browser is out with a bunch of new fea­tures includ­ing some speed improve­ments. It all looks good except I’m sick of seeing these stupid tables com­par­ing browsers on met­rics that don’t matter. Damn, you mean Safari doesn’t give me thou­sands of ways to cus­tomize my online expe­ri­ence? What does that mean anyway?

# tagged: browsers, firefox

New Work: Bypass Network

Last week Ryan and I launched Bypass Net­work—an online resource for med­ical stu­dents look­ing for job shad­ow­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. The site was the brain­child of Emily Eubanks, a med­ical stu­dent and close friend of ours from col­lege. She wanted an easy way to find doc­tors in her area that she could shadow and after much search­ing and frus­tra­tion, she came to us with the idea for Bypass Network.

Bypass rep­re­sents the first offi­cial project of Loud­pixel Media, a joint ven­ture Ryan and I started at the begin­ning of the year. The site is still run­ning in beta mode and we’ll slowly open things up to every­one as we work out the kinks. In the mean­time, help us test and make improve­ments by sign­ing up for a closed beta account.

0 | tagged: bypass network, shadowing

MJ

0 | tagged: king of pop

WaSP web stan­dards cur­ricu­lum
Sim­i­lar to the Opera Web Stan­dards Cur­ricu­lum, Inter­Act is an open set of mod­ules, courses and assign­ments that act as a frame­work for teach­ing web stan­dards and web design best prac­tices. I wish projects like this existed five years ago.

# tagged: teaching, web standards

Jakob Nielsen on pass­word masking

Usabil­ity suf­fers when users type in pass­words and the only feed­back they get is a row of bul­lets. Typ­i­cally, mask­ing pass­words doesn’t even increase secu­rity, but it does cost you busi­ness due to login failures.

In theory, I agree—but there are plenty of instances where having a masked pass­word makes sense. For instance, if you’re enter­ing login infor­ma­tion while con­nected to a pro­jec­tor or work­ing in a busy coffee house. Nielsen pro­poses using a check box or toggle next to the input to give the user the option of mask­ing their pass­word. Inter­est­ing read on some­thing that most design­ers, includ­ing myself, take for granted.

# tagged: forms, nielsen, passwords, user experience

Fever
The long-​awaited feed reader from Shaun Inman. Fever runs on your server using PHP and MySQL and the design looks absolutely stun­ning. It’s $30 but for those that use (and pay for) Mint—Shaun’s web stats pro­gram—you know it will be worth every penny.

# tagged: mysql, php, rss

Tweet what you eat with nom.ms
Fellow food­ies rejoice! Friend and fellow Jelly employee David Kadavy just launched a new ser­vice that allows you to post pic­tures of your food to Twit­ter. Om nom nom.

# tagged: food, photography, twitter

Opera Unite
Think web browser meets web ser­vice meets per­sonal API. Unite is a cool browser-​like appli­ca­tion that allows you share data and ser­vices from your com­puter with­out the need for third-​party tech­nol­ogy. It also boasts an HTML 5 tem­plat­ing engine, adding yet another browser com­pany putting their eggs in that basket (which is a good thing).

# tagged: html 5, opera unite

HTML 5 Roundup

HTML 5 is still in its infancy and sup­port is lim­ited to a hand­ful of fea­tures on a few modern browsers. Recently, Google has said it plans to invest heav­ily in the new markup spec­i­fi­ca­tion with the hopes of it becom­ing the new stan­dard. There is a lot to get excited about but we still have a long way to go before we’ll see wide-​spread adop­tion. So while you’re wait­ing, here is a roundup of the best HTML 5 resources avail­able right now. Feel free to add any that I may have missed.

• HTML 5 Spec­i­fi­ca­tion (W3C Editor’s Draft)
• HTML 5 Spec­i­fi­ca­tion (WHATWG Anno­tated Work­ing Draft)
• WHATWG HTML 5 Fre­quently Asked Questions
• HTML 5 Spec Tracker
• HTML 5 on Wikipedia
• HTML 5 Validator
• W3 Schools HTML 5 Reference
• Google IO HTML 5 Demo
• Show­case of sites using HTML 5 markup
• W3C HTML 5 on Twitter
• WHATWG on Twitter

2 | tagged: html 5

Site Realignments and New Work

It’s been a busy few months and I’ve finally made it back to doing some work on my own site. I’ve made some small adjust­ments to the layout—remov­ing the third column side­bar and replac­ing it on the left with a smaller column for dates. The whole layout was realigned to a 12-column grid and some small typo­graphic changes were made to side­bar and post text. You’ll also notice a more stream­lined four-​option nav­i­ga­tion menu.

The biggest changes came to my port­fo­lio sec­tion which got a com­plete face-​lift. Each project now has a detail page and the main work sec­tion shows project thumb­nails, books, arti­cles and tuto­ri­als I’ve writ­ten both here and elsewhere.

In the midst of all this, I also have some new work to talk about. At the begin­ning of the month I rolled out new a design for The Cre­ative Career, a mar­ket­ing and career blog/podcast writ­ten by my girl­friend Allie. She gave me a great logo and color scheme to work with and I think the end result turned out amaz­ing. I also used this oppor­tu­nity to sneak in some Webkit and Fire­fox-only CSS good­ness in the form of rounded corner but­tons and links and some cool hover tran­si­tions. If you’re brows­ing with either Fire­fox or Safari—check it out.

1 | tagged: realign, the creative career