Tag: Web

Categories
Life

A Local Wiki for a Town Near You

I stumbled upon LocalWiki today and then took a look at their sample site, Denton Wiki, serving Denton, Texas.

Basically, it is a wiki dedicated to a community where community members (read: anyone) can edit the pages about the community. It is meant to be a collective gathering of information about the said community, much like Wikipedia is the gathering of “all human knowledge” (or something grandiose like that).

The idea really hits me in a soft spot. I’m thinking that maybe such a wiki setup for small communities might help to foster a collective knowledge in the area along with giving some visibility to the many places, people, activities, and just ideas that are sometimes hidden in smaller communities.

I’m contemplating maybe trying to get something for New Ulm off the ground. If anything, it would be fun to take a look at the platform itself.

Categories
Life

The Web’s Present Future

I was privileged to give a talk at the 2011 Chippewa Valley Code Camp this morning. I titled it The Web’s Present Future: Responsive Web Design, and I think it went alright. The audience was great and I didn’t die. WHOHOO!

I have posted my slides along with some resources as well. You can find them here.

Thanks everyone for coming!

What is “semantic value”?

Go ahead and read Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value by Divya Maninan over at Smashing Magazine. There are some things I agree with, but I’m left with a terrible aftertaste in my mouth by the end.

A lot of the benefit of semantic markup is not seen by the customers, and that’s okay. The customer shouldn’t see all of the crappy hacks we’ve put into our CSS to get it to work in Internet Explorer. They shouldn’t look at the source code to jQuery that we are using to modify the behavior of their browser (I’m looking at you again, IE). So, sure, they don’t need to be pulling up the source of the page either and looking at the seemingly maddening soup of tags that outline the structure of the page they are viewing.

That’s all fine and good.

There are also benefits for computers and other devices to using semantic markup and making things as clear and concise as possible. That’s all fine and dandy.

Sure, it can be a headache to try and keep straight when we are going to be using an article, or an aside, or a section, or a straight div, or … you get the point. That’s a legitimate gripe about the alphabet soup of new tags that have been introduced in HTML5.

However, let’s care a little bit … just a tiny little bit about what we are doing and not look for the easiest way to just push out pages. Let’s care. Let’s care like the original Macintosh team did and not sign the inside of the case even though no one was going to see it, but care enough bout what we are doing to take some time, slow down, and think about what we are actually marking up. Think a little bit. Take a walk maybe and spend some time, yes, maybe 40 minutes, whether the article or aside tag would be the most semantic. Maybe you’ll run into another, more profound thought while you are on that journey.

We spend a lot of time trying to think of the easiest, quickly, dirtiest way to get things done and get them working. Maybe it isn’t so bad to use “semantic value” to help us to slow down and actually think about what we are doing, think about the content a little bit, and do a better job just because it would be just a tiny little bit … better.

Categories
Life

Praising A Book Apart

A Book Apart is doing something right. I own (or will own) each of their books and I will probably be doing that for the foreseeable future. They’ve got something right with their highly targeted, focused, short books which cater to the web design/development community

It is awesome to see someone shaking up the technical publishing industry.

Categories
Technology

My Current Email Setup

I’ve been struggling with my email setup for a while now, figuring out how I want my email to work for me. This is a simple post about what I have settled on for the time being.

Apple MailNo surprise here, I use Apple’s Mail application as the central hub for my email activity. I keep all of my accounts in here that I use from day-to-day and the same goes on my mobile devices as well (an iPhone and iPad). The updates in Lion were very welcome and I have a pretty decent system down for how to work with Google Apps.

However, what accounts do I have?

I used to use a generic Gmail account I’ve had around for years, but I was leery of keeping that as my main address not because I don’t like Gmail (even though I have my complaints), but because I liked the idea of having my own personal domain host my main email account.

So I have settled on Google Apps (Free) to host the email for bobmartens.net. However, that’s the only thing I host here: email. I have disabled Docs, Calendar, Chat, etc. and am running with only Mail and Contacts on this domain. I keep my actual Contacts and Calendar in iCloud.

I was going to move all of my Google services over to my own Google Apps account, but it became a hassle when Google Plus is not enabled for Google Apps accounts and what if I would want to move my email address to another service provider? Then I’d lose all of my Google stuff as well. Not ideal.

I have a similar setup for Deck78.

Martin Luther College moved to Google Apps for Education about a year ago, and that is what I use at work during the day. I have a single Google Calendar as well because that works best for me at the moment. I also use Google Chat on this domain as well because everyone else does and sometimes people will get a hold of me through it.

I had toyed with hosting email at home with Lion Server, but I scrapped that idea in favor of the simplest solution for the moment because I would really like to have a static IP address to do that, but it would cost me at least twice as much per month in order to get that service through Comcast, which I really can’t afford at the moment.

Ultimately, this gives me the flexibility that I require for the future (if I would switch my domains to my own server) while provided some features I need/want right now (like mobile push email). If Apple would open up iCloud to hosted domains, I’d entertain the idea of switching to that, but I’m satisfied with this at the moment.

So, a recap:

  • Google Apps for bobmartens.net – email
  • Google Apps for deck78.com – email
  • Google Apps for mlc-wels.edu – email, calendar, docs, etc.
  • Gmail Account – docs, calendar, reader, groups, etc.

I’ll see how long I stick with this setup.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that I am forwarding my old Gmail address to my new personal Google Apps one. That way it is easier for everyone and I don’t miss any important email.