One of the most commonly overlooked and under-refined elements of a website is its pagination controls. In many cases, these are treated as an afterthought. I rarely come across a website that has decent pagination, and it always makes me wonder why so few manage to get it right. After all, I'd say that pagination is pretty easy to get right. Alas, that doesn't seem the case, so after encouragement from Chris Messina on Flickr I decided to write my Pagination 101, hopefully it'll give you some clues as to what makes good pagination.
It's finally time: I'm changing the structure, nature and overall feel of the site entirely. Gone with the web standards-blogging (for now), no more "strictly professional content" policy (I failed on that a few times, anyway). Comments are off, due to the site turning static for a while, and to start off in the new direction I present to you a long post about far more personal subjects than I've ever blogged about.
Last Friday was the one-year anniversary of version 8 of the KuraFire Network, as well as the FACE project. It went by without so much a whisper, albeit unintentionally. Ordinarily, I use X-year anniversaries to reflect on what's happened and changed in the past year, how it has influenced my life and so forth. This year, though, what happened was me making a decision and that decision made me totally forget to write about V8 and FACE. I made the decision to take my site in a new direction entirely.
Despite me having become quite silent the last few months, the scarcity of activity on this site hasn't affected traffic much at all. To commemorate (read: challenge and test) that, I figured I should throw in a semi-controversial poll to see where people stand these days. The question is as follows: are CSS hacks a useful tool, utter evil incarnate or a sign of laziness in the web developer that uses them? Elaborations after the cut!
Time flies by when you are having fun/busy like crazy - or both! So November's here already, which means that Refresh Orlando is just around the corner. After that, Christmas and the New Year are soon upon us, leading us to 2007 - another fine year for web conferences no doubt. It starts off with South By South West, but even before that - in February - we have Web Directions North with a fantastic line-up. If this is to reflect how the rest of the year will be, it's going to be a great 2007!
Over a month ago, Matthew Oliphant asked me if I would support the Pink for October initiative. I said I would try and do something, for I strongly support it and this October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but unfortunately the only thing I managed to do is write this post to highlight it all. It was also my birthday until 68 minutes ago, which makes me happy (about my birthday falling in this month). Here's some thoughts.
Here's one for Mac users. It's dead easy, it's dead obvious, but chances are you've never thought about doing this (I'm sure plenty of you have, so those of you can just ignore all this). Flickr exports RSS feeds for photo streams of almost any kind; iPhoto 6 offers Photocasts, for feeds containing pictures; Mac OS X allows you to specify a folder or Photocast from iPhoto as screen saver. With only very little work, you can have a screen saver showing the photo stream of your choice - no plugins or anything required, providing you have iPhoto 6. Let me show you how.
It's been quiet on the KuraFire Network of late, though for good reasons. I've been very busy with a plethora of things, not in the least of which comes moving to an apartment of my own in Ealing. However, I feel compelled to give you a long, very long overdue update on FACE as well as a small overview of the things that I've been busy with outside of this blog, most of which revolve around getting published!
Presenting is a wonderful art that takes skill and talent just as much as it does hard work and dedication. It can be the most exciting and at the same time the most nerve-wracking experience you can have, and where some people wouldn't ever dream of standing in front of hundreds or even thousands of people, others can't wait for their next opportunity. Some people do it well; others do it superbely. Who are those great speakers that inspire me?
For about eight years and counting the Web has been one of my life's greatest passions. Building websites isn't all that much different from one of my other great passions: creating stories. When building a website, you have the chance to tell a story, your story. Your choice of color and imagery, your style of writing content, all of the elements that you use to put the website together tell the visitor the story of who you are. I've now found a new passion, and again it bears resemblence to the telling of a story: photography.
Lately, I've been sensing a fair amount of apathy in our corner of the web industry, concerning the fight for web standards. It is as if a lot of people have started wondering, "is it all really worth the effort?" Or maybe some of us feel that, after all, it's just a part of our job and not a life goal? Maybe it really is - but then, what fight, exactly, are we fighting right now?