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thethomasoliverband.com
www.beyonce.com
www.soleilnoir.net/believein
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slaveryfootprint.org

1. 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

• Whenever you are looking at a device, you are a cyborg. (via Amber Case)
• Ray Kurzweil has a lot of really fascinating things to say. Such as..
• Bloodstream technology will be mainstream in 20 years. If you can make it that long, your lifespan will be significantly lengthened.
• The new iPad retina display is 2048×1536. So when building websites, it is important to be as resolution independent as possible. Time to start using SVG whenever possible.
• When designing responsive sites, be task oriented. Think about what the user is most likely to be doing on the page.
• This is the year WebGL is coming to all mobile devices (via What WebGL Will Mean for the Web)
• Do media queries for high resolution screens like this:

      only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio : 2),
      only screen and (min-device-pixel-ratio : 2) { }

• Studies show a rectangle with rounded corners brings your focus inside the box, and with hard corners, your focus is outside (via Paul Trani).
• You know you’re doing CSS right when
  your content changes you don&rquo;t need to touch the stylesheets (via Lea Verou).
• Watching the Adobe guys do demos using Dreamweaver, it was interesting to see that it has been improved quite a lot. For example, it has an instance of webkit running inside.
• Facebook’s likely biggest competitor is not Google+, but rather a Federated Social Network (i.e. a network of networks)
• The Webfinger Protocol is coming back (via Evan Prodromou)

Some things I took away:

• Instead of using a class name (which can change) to select, use a semantic data- attribute (for example data-action="reveal").
• Jonathon proposed ditching AJAX for WebSockets in your app whenever that is possible.
• Use Web Workers for JS multithreading to optimize your app.
• I have a fine understanding of the module pattern, but need to get into pub/sub more.
• Jasmine and Selenium are the tools of choice for testing large scale JS apps.

There were plenty of other things he touched on as well. Check out the slides at http://bit.ly/html5sxsw.

Some of the highlights:

• CSS is ‘Constraint Programming’.
• Obsession with eliminating ‘classitis’ is outdated and not good practice.
• The idea of doing a redesign without touching the markup is a myth.
• Apply OOP principles to CSS. For example, extend your semantic classes, such as .promo-box–light (double dash indicates dependence).
• Optimize for change! Website maintainability is supremely important.
• Using semantic class names is emerging as new best practice.
• Selector Queries – Andy’s JS solution for adjusting elements based on width using a data-squery attribute and adding classes.
• Use surgical layout helpers, eg .gutter-left, .gutter-right in div containers.
• New code practice: For sprite sheets, use <a><i class=”icon icon-comment”>
• Don’t style pages, style modules.
• Do styleguides in code, ala Twitter Bootstrap or Paul Robert Lloyd’s Styleguide.
• Style guides are a great opportunity to bring design and dev together.

For a more in-depth overview of the talk, check out this blog post along with the slides.

Despite being developers’ favorite CMS whipping boy, WordPress remains the most popular CMS, and it isn’t even close. According to the 2011 Open Source CMS Marketshare Report on CMS Wire, there are over 600,000 downloads of WordPress each month. With its giant install base and continued popularity, WordPress is here to stay. There have been many criticisms of WordPress, but the platform has evolved over the years to address many of their critics’ concerns. It is a good fit for small businesses and bloggers. It has a large, active developer community. There are a vast array of WordPress plugins, widgets and themes available both free and for purchase.

There are reasons not to use WordPress. WordPress is a great solution for smaller clients who have straightforward needs for what they want in a site, but once you get out of that zone, it is time to look into more robust CMS solutions.

Even though I don’t personally know anyone who uses it, the next most popular open source CMS after WordPress is Joomla with 86,000 downloads. Not far behind in 3rd place is Drupal. These 2 CMS solutions are robust, highly configurable and appealing to enterprise, but that comes with the cost of being more difficult to develop and maintain. The Drupal learning curve has become quite infamous.

Here are some nice articles that get into more detail about the differences between WordPress, Drupal and Joomla:

• Junk In The Trunk: Open Source CMS Infographic
• Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress
• WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal
• Joomla, WordPress and Drupal – Should you look outside the big 3?

A promising newcomer on the scene is Concrete5. Of all the more well known CMS frameworks, it has seen by far the most rapid increase in adoption rate, and has the highest satisfaction rate among its users. I predict that eventually C5 will overtake Joomla and Drupal as it offers much of the same configurability, and offers the same kind of simplicity that has made WordPress a popular choice for many developers and users.

All that being said, after listening to a Shop Talk Podcast with an interview of Jeffrey Way of Themeforest, I’ve decided to take a try at developing some WordPress themes of my own. Themeforest is a large and popular marketplace for developers and companies to sell different kinds of themes at low prices. WordPress themes have the most sales, so as a developer who needs to have money to put his kids through college, developing for WordPress seems to be the right direction move. As Stephen Colbert likes to say, the market has spoken.

So, given my change in focus, and the fact that I have no apps on the iOS market for which I am charging money, I decided not to renew my Apple Developer License. Apple charges its developers $100 each year, and if it is not paid, all the developer’s apps are pulled from the iTunes store. Therefore, Match the Letter is no longer available if you have an iPod, iPhone or iPad.

Google however is much more reasonable. They charge their developers a one-time fee of $30. Therefore, you can continue to get Match The Letter on your Android devices.

Things started off when on New Year’s Day I posted my Scrollorama plugin to Hacker News and a couple other places. To my great surprise, it shot up to #1 on HN and stayed on the front page for pretty much the whole day.

Then it started showing up on Twitter, and got a lot of great compliments from people I really respect. I even got a tweet favorited by Paul Irish. The fun continued when Scrollorama got featured in dailyjs and The Verge and softpedia.

Then, my “What The Heck Is Responsive Web Design?” slides got posted to Hacker News, then linked to by a number of people, including Mr. HTML5 For Web Designers Himself, Jeremy Keith.

Finally, to top it all off, my work has been featured across JavaScript Weekly, The JavaScript Show and HTML5 Weekly, all in the same week.

Of course, I also have to say that Grant, my new baby boy, has been absolutely great. No colic, sleeps and eats well, and is just a pleasant baby. So, professionally and personally, it has been a really great time for me. Thanks everybody!

With that in mind, I’ve created Scrollorama, the jQuery plugin for doing cool scrolly things. Basically, it lets you animate elements on the page based on the browser window’s scroll position. You can see what I mean by checking out the project demo page on Github.

The other plugin I made is scrolldeck.js, which is for making vertically scrolling slide decks. It uses Scrollorama and keyboard listening to manage the slide transitions. You can see it in action on its demo page, and also in some example scrolldecks I created. “What The Heck Is Responsive Web Design?” is a scrolldeck that demonstrates a variety of features, particularly animation builds. “Infographics Are Cool” is a demo of how to create a scrolldeck of full screen images. Lastly, I created a parallax scrolldeck demo of how to use it with the Parallax jQuery Plugin.