October 2006 Archives

Don't ask me what I was writing or to who, but I had occasion to notice this over the weekend. I wonder if either publisher will fix the idiosyncrasy in upcoming releases.

satzansatz -- About Ingo Chao. It makes me giggle to write something so silly about a person. And I wouldn't call someone I don't know a pervert of any kind except that he says it himself in describing his CSS debugging service:

So far, you were working out the browser-specific problems on your own, read the mailing lists, kept up-to-date with latest bug reports, and searched bugzilla entries.

But why not leave CSS debugging to a man who cultivates this little perversion?

I was attracted to his site and stayed to read about CSS hasLayout which is new to me. It has some information regarding designing for IE browsers, and the difficulty of floats in IE while maintaining cross-browser compatibility. I thought it was very informative. Maybe I am a pervert too.

If you don't get this yet: Content (the words I write, the pictures I show you) should be separate from presentation, or the way a web page is styled to make it appear to the reader.

Ingo also controls the size of his type and lines in his CSS. (i.e. some measure on some other measure like 11/12pt used to be specified for printed type) This is something graphic artists from the "old days" always used to complain about HTML's inability to correctly handle. CSS font specification has become fairly complex compared to what we were doing on the web back in 1995.

Well, I didn't mention it until now, because my own home page broke when IE 7 was released last week. It really fries my chops, because I know of a couple 7 year old sites designed in tables that didn't break. My site is XHTML 1.0 Transitional and it validates, yet when I saw it in IE 7 I wanted to yell! It looked like some avant garde horizontal CSS layout.

The problem is discussed by guys who do this stuff more than I do, and so they should know. It didn't work for me, but I didn't try very hard to make it work either. (These things seem known.)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

That is commonly known as (Aurthur C.) Clark's third law. Its been further modified several times in popular culture to read more like this from the web comic Freefall:

Any technology, no matter how simple, is magic to those who do not understand it.

I have had cause to think about this lately. I mentioned the confusion of some of the audience at the business blogging with regard to feeds. And its important to remember that these things are on a fairly continuous scale. Which is to say, although I work with networking and servers all the time, there is still technology in this sphere that might as well be magic to me.

Since most businesses these days operate somewhere on this spectrum of technology and magic, its important to have some simple rules to guide our everyday actions with. For lack of a better reference I point to the number one item on Microsoft's list as the the most exploited.

About a day after I posted an announcement about the seminars, they filled in NYC and Boston. Sorry about that, I am told they are planning another series of events in the first quarter of the new year. This report is from the seminar in DC last week.

Actually the focus of this seminar was supposed to be Politics and Advocacy. Since it was held in DC, so close to an election, I think "Inside the Beltway Bloggin" would have been funnier. I was disappointed that Anil was sick, but pleased to have a chance meet and listen to what the pinch pitch person from Six Apart, Marissa Levinson, had to say.

In fact the main reason I went is to hear the pitch again. Sometimes in my world of servers and interfaces and dependencies, combined with search engines, feeds, and templates the picture becomes too complicated. That probably comes across in my own pitch to prospective business bloggers. Its good to hear the basic reasons for business blogs recited occasionally.

A business blog can be modeled on:

1. An outwardly facing newsletter.


2. As a simple internal collaboration tool, or sort of ad hoc groupware.


3. A way for businesses to extend their reach, or the number of people who hear their message.

I work in a profession where the other people my age or older seem to be fewer and fewer. One of the things that is kind of neat about this is to work with people and see them develop over the years. As they move on and find new influences it is wonderful to see the work they do.

I've known Jesse since he was just out of high school, and we've always worked on websites together. Several years ago he started his own web design firm, and he's done some nice work. Recently he's done a couple of remarkable sites, both with an ecommerce aspect and both focused on giving very small businesses very professional web sites.

I mentioned attending a business seminar in May, and now Six Apart has scheduled a new series of Business Blogging Seminars all over the country in the coming months. These events are not just for ProNet members, but are geared towards the general business public with a different industry focus for each city.

If you attend you will hear about current business blogging case studies, and of course a healthy dose of Six Apart self promotion. (Did I mention Anil Dash will be at all the seminars?)

I really enjoyed meeting some of the people who will be speaking at these upcoming seminars when I went to NYC in May, and it was quite telling to hear Anil speak, after having read so many things he's written. I will probably attend several of the events on the East Coast, and I will invite some clients to go along with me to NYC and Boston. I think that the presentations were great, and really demonstrated clearly some of the simple benefits of blogging.

If you can get to one of the seminars for a day trip, it will be time well spent. If you wait for the last minute they will charge you double. Which is to say, it's half off if you register in the next week or so.