the weblog of m.kelley

Slashdot | Problems at the W3C

Nice, typical, Slashdot thread that includes comments from members of the W3C and clueless Flash strokers who suggest that Flash is a way around W3C standards.

ComponentArt MultiPage for ASP.net

Yes, for $99, you too can have an ASP component that with a little bit of JavaScript and CSS with a few transparent PNGs, you can have for free. I should know, I spent 4 hours putting a JS & CSS widget together that has this exact same functonality.

I know I’m fussy about this, but why would anyone purchase this?

Another job has been created at work and we’re now looking for a server geek. Someone who knows IIS and server technology as well as someone who isn’t afraid of learning.

If you’re interested, or know someone who is, please leave a comment here and I’ll forward the link to the online listing. Please make sure to have your resume’ ready, as I’d like to see it before I refer anyone to the position.

Exclusive leak: Editor says Lycos will shutter Webmonkey – Valleywag -

“now, i’m an employee of wired news, which means that i work on conde nast properties (wired news) as of this week. webmonkey, being a lycos property, is off of my desk now. i’ve asked around about the details, and i just got word that lycos is mothballing webmonkey. no new content, no new employees. they say it’s “just for now”, but considering that they were never willing to spend a dime to provide me with any resources for anything relating to site maintenance or improvement, i can’t imagine they’d start doing so now.

chances are, lycos will do a completely new site at the domain and take all of the old stuff offline. this sounds like a really bad idea, but they’ve already done the same with Cocktail, RGB Gallery, HotWired, Netizen, Suck.com, and Animation Express. so, it’s not that big of a jump to consider that they’ll eventually do the same to Webmonkey. this is the third time webmonkey has “died” (1999, 2004, 2006) and i have a feeling the third time’s a charm. one month short of its tenth birthday!

i advise you all to make PDFs of everything that you’ve written for
webmonkey. it may still be online in six months, but it just as likely
may not. if you take the article and run it on your site or your blog,
lycos might send you a cease and desist letter. but quite frankly, i
really don’t think they have anyone that will be checking. i’ve been
handling the policing of all of the content thieves for the past
couple of years, and i know that nobody else was doing it. just please don’t say i gave you permission to run your webmonkey article somewhere… because (for the record) i never said that.

the gravy train has run off the tracks and the conductor has fled into the woods. if you’re currently working on an article, please lift up your pens and stop writing for Webmonkey right now. the budget is frozen and there’s nobody at lycos who will be able to handle posting the articles. i hang my head in shame as i write this, because i really didn’t want to have to tell assigned authors that their assignments won’t be running. but those is the breaks, as they say.”

While I didn’t use Webmonkey to learn HTML, I use it as a resource as well as directing people there to learn about web design. You could really tell when the site become a second-thought as opposed to a site where the owners cared. That site should have been as popular as A List Apart and pull the community together….but Lycos didn’t give a shite.

I’m seriously asking this question: I wonder how much Lycos would want for the site + content? I wonder if a few people, a small group of investors, would be up for purchasing it and keep it up as a resource and maybe develop the site with new articles….?

I don’t think it’s worth a million or even a hundred thousand….what would this real estate be worth?

I’m a secret virtualization geek, so I’m spazzing out today. Both Microsoft and VMWare have released free products. Virtual PC is now free and VMWare has added Server to it’s free product line, that includes VMWare Player.

I ran VMware Player at home to see if I liked Ubuntu. I also ran Virtual PC for years on a Mac for website testing and to run little apps that corporations require you to run. I’ll probably install VMWare server on our little home workhorse to virtualize some of the ideas for a home media center. We’re also running the hell outta the VMWare ESX stuff at work.

Virtual PC isn’t bad, it keeps getting better. I always thought VMWare was a better product, but we didn’t have it on the Mac. I even ran RealPC (r.i.p)on the Mac, many moons ago under OS 8 & 9…

As some of you might have guessed from the lack of posts, I’ve been extremely busy. The new job is going well, great actually. A bad day working on websites is better than a bad day or a good day at the old place. Lots of projects going on, the clock is ticking on one of them so it might get more barren around here.

Over the past week, I’ve changed our (work’s) 5 year-old tabbed menu into a css, javascriptless, wonder. The new boss has a good grasp of CSS, but I kinda shocked him when I showed what all I could do by handcoding. Took me most of a day, but instead of 12 graphics, we’re down to 4. 88k to 3k.

I’ve also been going through a vendor’s code, more and more, as I keep finding code that disgusts me. Again, the new site will be tableless and (according to them) all web standards. So my question today was, “with all of this talk about standards, why do we have javascript rendering images and text?”. So, like I did with the menu mentioned above, I tore into their little widget and recreated it with more accessible version of javascript and css. I seriously, feel more sure of myself, as I work with these huge company’s coders and see how much CSS knowledge most of these people use just through Dreamweaver. I have a strong feeling, that if I just opened up the code-side, they would be absolutely lost.

The Sacred Cow Tipping redesign is still upcoming. I have some ideas based on what I showed off about three weeks ago. More based on what I’m doing at work…although I’m on Movable Type and not Teamsite. I’m also looking at redesigning the personal site and even keeping a tiny blog over there for more design-y things….don’t know yet.

I’m doing a bit of blog consulting and wish I could do this full-time. I can’t really be anything but vague about it, but it’s an interesting project. It won’t be “mine” but it will be nice laying the groundwork for someone to have a killer blog. I’m still hashing out details, but it’s nice being an old-school blogger who no one knows. Being on the C-List (hell D-List) has it’s advantages.

I’m still trying to find “my place”. A mindset or a grouping of thoughts. But I have so little time to think about anything but work, that off time is just veg time. I miss music, don’t know if I actually want to play again, honestly. I’m just so burned out on that aspect of it. I’d almost consider being a manager for a band or an artist. I’m *that* much of an asshole and might be actually good in that role.

Ok, enough of this ramblings…..

Google formally declares war on Microsoft -

“GOOGLE HAS confirmed that it will launch free spreadsheet and word-processing software online and take on Microsoft in one of its biggest markets.”

So the new announcement about Google Spreadsheet is actually old news.

{Mozilla CEO: ‘Why we’re still shunned in the enterprise’ } – “Baker said: “Enterprises have intranets that only work with IE. We can’t fix their intranet.”

Another hurdle Firefox must overcome is the “heartbreakingly slow” process many enterprises go through to certify the use of a tool as critical as a web browser, according to Baker.

It’s this need to comply with proprietary technology – as well as general quality issues – that, Baker claims, holds IT departments back from going with client-side open source applications, not merely the fact they’re open source.”

Part of the problem goes back for years. When at a critical juncture for Enterprise Mozilla, they didn’t even offer NTLM support. This was back in IE5 times up until 2003 or so. I remember working with a Netscape engineer on the issue, but no one would throw resources at getting Mozilla working on a Microsoft-based network…it was a slow process…you had more people working on XUL Stylesheets to make it pretty. The Mozilla-ites seem to want Enterprise to adapt to them, when it should be the other way around.

Most enterprise customers don’t care about a GUI package, like the customization program. They want something that will work with their firewalls, their system management systems, as well as an email program that is as good as Outlook. They don’t care about tabs or RSS. Oh, and they need support. Mozilla has large companies supporting them, but they still can’t reach the enterprise and *will not* unless they change their attitude.

Yeah, blah blah blah, support. Yeah, there is a forum, but when you deal with arses on the form, why even try to help the community? I had a 30+ install base of Thunderbird on OSX. My users didn’t need a calendar, just email. Thunderbird handled it better than Entourage and Mail.app, but it was still much more “wonky” than Outlook on a PC.

I like Mozilla, just wish they would get with it……

See also

I’ve spent the past week or so working on a couple of projects that a “kinda known” company ’round here as well as a large national design firm, put together for my company. I have a few nits to pick with these people, promptness being one of them for both. My main, large problem, is that their code isn’t too clean. I’m not talking ASP or PHP, but their XHTML/HTML & CSS is a mess.

While I’m not the cleanest of html’ers, this site’s code is a testament to that, but when I code for a business site you had better bet that it’s damn tight. When I showed an example of the code in question to a co-worker, they brought up that it was probably done in Dreamweaver’s Design view. The more I thought about it, the more that it all became apparent.

While I’m not gonna get into the whole handcoding vs. WYSIWYG debate, I’m starting to become a handcoding snob. I think that handcoding has the possibility to make the site more efficient. For instance, if you’re coding a table. Why have DIV’s applying a style inside of a TD, when you can have that TD or TR apply the style instead?

One of my other little nits to pick, is with the use of Javascript menus. I think we’re all to a point now, where we can hack the hell out of UL’s to make some nice menus that are smaller in size and function a little better. 75K of graphics & Javascript or 3k with CSS & two graphics? Sure the fonts don’t look as nice on older systems, but that’s a trade-off. I will say that I’ve implemented more CSS/Javascript-less graphic menus in the past month than I ever have.

The more I work with outside web designers, the more and more I want to just put together a group of 3-5 people to just kick the shit out of these people. Get a good graphic designer or two, get a good css/html coder (my specialty), get a good programmer or two and you’d have an awesome core group….very similar to the one I’m in now.

I don’t care if anyone does Flash. I don’t care if they’re the Pooba of Perl or the Admiral of AJAX. If it’s not clean, then you’re doing your customers a disservice.

…as given to me by a recruiter

• Spit out your gum.
• lose the water bottle. (or ask if you can leave it with a recruiter)
• don’t sit till asked to do so.
• turn off your cell phone/pda/blackberry/pager…you get the point.
• please have examples of past work (or give a url)
• please have a copy of your resume
• dress nice. funeral clothes….
• **due diligence & research.

Granted, a lot of these seem like common sense. but it’s not. One of the people, who I interviewed as my replacement for the last job, wore cowboy boots and jeans to the interviews. This was for an IT position, not as a ranch-hand for the “back 40″.

**If you don’t know what due dilligance is, then look it up. Know something about the company to which you’re applying. Seriously, go to Google, type the name in.