Dear blogosphere, how I’ve missed writing you

Oh my friends.

Yak shaving got a bit out of control and next thing I was doing a site redesign.

And then the redesign I created after about 2 weeks was not really IE-compatible.

So I went back to the drawing board and came back with the design you see today.

There are still a few tiny things ( uhm, the ‘by month’ archives look terrible ), but I know how to fix them and know that I can get it done quickly, so I’m enjoying the feeling of being in the home stretch.

So much has happened since I went new content silent a few weeks ago. Lack of a site that I felt actually looked like “me” ( that is to say, default Wordpress theme, “Kubrick” ) really made me loath to post - it was an uncomfortable reminder of a job not-really-done.

If you’re going to start learning HTML, let me highly recommend the Heads First guide. It is an excellent book that gives you examples in a primitive state, requires that you work through them during the course of the chapter and then, at the end, helps you know that you successfully transitioned the work.

For people experienced with (X)HTML this book can be skipped from Chapter 1-6 as the basics of markup, semantics, design and content split are covered. The introduction te CSS styling is solid and the book rapidly progresses from simple CSS to advanced layouts. It actually explained what the heck float:right means better than anything I’ve ever read before.

Here are just a few post ideas that are backlogged and begging to surface:

Status update from where I was a few months ago in being absolutely dumbfounded with too much stuff to do
Developers: Why do we have this crazy need to start from scratch?
SXSW wrap-up ( with very cool modified images to show where I was and what I was seeing ) - yes I know this is about a month late, but I saw some good things that should be shared
How to handle a panel discussion at SXSW. A major complaint was that panels were “pointless” - here’s how to fix it
Grid design and this great old copy of Ricoeur’s Conflict of Interpretation
Other ruminations, opinions, and conjectures

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