After skipping the conference last year in favour of d.construct and FOWD this year I put my faith into @media again. And I was not disappointed.
None of the presentations covered any wildly controversial topics I but I enjoyed all of them. With Mark Boulton’s and Simon Collison talks being the highlights I guess. Some of Simon’s suggestions will no doubt find their way into the eConversions workflow.
Standards.Next
The true highlight was Standards.Next on saturday though. It is supposed to be the first event in a series of events about emerging standards. This time the topic was html5 and featured excellent presentations about a variety of aspects of html5. Bruce Lawson has a nice summary of the presentations on his website
All this got me really excited about the possibilites of html5 and I will definitely make use of it in the upcoming mindgarden relaunch (I’m working on it, really). And for everyone who wants to use html5 today the html5doctor.com website has gone online too. Go there to find out all about how you can make use of it right now.
Or go to http://html5demos.com/ to see some demos of Canvas or drag&drop. All really exciting stuff.
With a lot more new stuff to come this summer for vouchercodes.co.uk we’re also busy building other nice things at eConversions
For example we’ve been working on a new project built with django called discounts.co.uk for a while now (so far there’s only a holding page online) and it’s quickly taking shape.
Especially since Humso is doing a great job creating a new visual language for the website with some fantastic illustrations. And as it would be a bit boring to give you some screenshots of the markup (at least most of you would say that even though I wouldn’t necessarily agree) here’s a little preview of what’s coming:
Why Humso’s avatar has got a racoon on his head no-one besides himself will ever know but you can find out more about the project on Dan’s weblog
If you are an English speaker and have been wondering what’s going on in Germany with those plans of the government to implement internet filters: Johnny Haeusler of Spreeblick has posted an english article summing things up nicely. And if you haven’t been wondering, read it anyway. Here’s the link to the article: http://www.spreeblick.com/2009/05/13/germanys-plan-to-implement-internet-filters-by-law/
Have you ever spent 15 minutes debugging your stuff wondering why you don’t see the changes you are making to your files just to realize you’ve been reloading the page from the wrong server? You were working on your local version while the browser was really showing what’s on the dev server?
Do you know that moment of panic when everything on the website is broken and you think it’s on the live server while it’s just the QA server that hasn’t been updated properly?
Then you’re probably glad to hear about Zac’s new Firefox add-on called Browser Border
The add-on doesn’t do much but what it does it does quite well. Once you’ve installed it you can have your browser display a border around websites depending on the URL of the website. My local working environment has got a green border around it while the dev environment has a red one.
It’s onubtrosive enough not to get into the way of development but obvious enough not to get overlooked. It’s still in what Mozilla calls experimental stage but it hasn’t given me any problems. So give it a try and download it here
You can quickly open directories in the textmate project view from the terminal by typing “mate” followed by the path to the directory. So if you’ve already changed your directory to the one you want to work in you can just type “mate .”
(thanks rikrikrik for the tip)
