We need to embrace the fact that we are not perfect. Instead of striving for perfection, we must simply try to suck less today than we did yesterday. Firmly setting a destination, and never checking our instruments, can easily end up with a perfectly honed path to failure. If we strive to engage our community as participants, more than just users, they will willing guide us to creating the right product (as long as we remain receptive). Focus on progress.

Honestly, I do not see Plurk as a competitor with Twitter. Twitter is really going for being a communication platform where Plurk seems to be more focusing on the community aspect. I do see Plurk as being one to watch in the realm of microblogging in general though. Especially considering I discovered them via Jason Calacanis, the Don King of the the internet.

One big reason of writing this post is in hopes to reach someone who was like me. “Why would I want to broadcast an IM when I really don’t have that many regular contacts that I communicate with via IM?” I mean scalability doesn’t seem that important when you don’t have a large scope (I’m looking at you Ruby On Rails Devs). I ask, “Do you have any interest in what your favorite bloggers/ Internet Superstars are doing between posts (ZeFrank… we have learned our lesson, please vlog again, we all miss the show)” or “Would you like a grand equalizer that allows you to communicate real time to these ‘A’ list internet types?” Of course you would.

So, twitter is a paradigm shift in communication. Don’t be a ludite, tweet (all the cool kid’s are doing it**).

*playing with it has no proven relationship to blindness.

** Cool is subjective and a particularly difficult case to argue in terms of web apps. Please consult your local Fonz if your are seeking an increase in cool.

There is something to be said about the excitement created by being surround by that much excellence. Paraphrasing Kathy Sierra, there is still something to be said for atoms. It is one thing to read blogs from like minded individuals and see that people want to make the web a better place, but to actually interact with so many people, in the flesh, that are passionate about the same things you are is much more powerful (assuming your into that kind of thing).

TTFN, I am off to the beach party. I have a notebook full of notes as well as some audio, video, and images. So there is definitely more to come about this.F

I would say at a price of $99 for admission, you can easily get your money’s worth. However, if you are very familiar with Photoshop at all, it becomes more of a “you get what you pay for” situation. For the most part, I found myself thinking “If only I had seen this seminar when I was first learning Photoshop.” For me this seminar was a collection of practical tips that should be fundamental. I must admit though, I had already been familiar with many of the “tricks/ tips” that were covered long before I sat in on this seminar. In credit to this seminar, it did take me much time reading magazines, scouring blogs/ forums, and skimming through tutorial links to obtain what was covered in this one day event. If you are new to Photoshop and value your time I would recommend this seminar.

Personally, I would like to take a more advanced or at least more focused seminar (maybe a workshop?) with Mr. Monroy, as he definitely strikes me as a wealth of knowledge. As a professional with nearly four years of work experience (and an insatiable appetite for dabbling), I was not overwhelmed with new stuff I had never seen before. The thing about Monroy is he has the experience and practice to execute these projects very well. In the course of this seminar though, Monroy seemed to want to display too much too quick. During his segment about layer styles, Monroy created a remarkably realistic rendition of a weathered brick wall in a few minutes. Again, it was not that he did things I had never seen before, just that he did it better than I had ever seen before. I only fear that many attendants have seen Monroy pull off these techniques so effortlessly and well they will mistake filters and styles for “make art” buttons. Monroy displays how many aspects of Photoshop that can be type cast as tacky can, in fact, be used to successfully save time and yield excellent results.

Perhaps the target audience Monroy was going after was a little less savvy. For instance, when Monroy spent a considerable amount of time explaining the difference between vector and raster images, I screamed on the inside. Later, there was a half an hour dedicated to using the pen tool (as in adding points and moving handles). And, although I say that I found many of the topics covered to be intuitive (or down right obvious), I eavesdropped on a few conversations of attendees that were blown away with new ideas that they had never encountered before. One gentleman equated trying to consume information at that seminar to trying to sip from a fire hose. And during the seminar one man interjected and asked what the difference is between flatten and merge visible. Obviously these men were getting their money’s worth.

All in all, I would say this is a very nice seminar. Monroy is very knowledgeable and has nice presentation. A few times during the filter section, Monroy seemed a bit more like an illusionist than an illustrator with a very, “for my next trick…” heavy tone. Quite appropriate considering the parlor trick like stigma that oft times surrounds filters. There were many useful gems scattered throughout the seminar and I would honestly say that the hour Monroy spent covering channels made the workshop worth the money for me.

Narrator: For more than 12 years, ominous rumors had been privately circulating among high-level web developers that a world wide consortium had been at work on what was darkly hinted to be the ultimate weapon: a doomsday device. Intelligence sources traced the home bases of this top secret international project to the perpetually fog-shrouded wasteland below the facilities of MIT/CSAIL (USA), ERCIM (France), and Keio Univ. (Japan). What they were building or why it should be located in such remote and desolate places no one could say.

Well, I’ve been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard… You sure you got today’s codes?

Do you still use tables to control your layouts or know someone who does? It is ok, I am here to help. I’ll level with you; I too once used tables to control my layouts. But thanks to Jeff Zeldman and other standards evangelists, I have found the way. In this, my first post, I am going to do my best to perpetuate the standards movement by posting about the reasons web standards are good for humanity.

For me the journey to smart web design began in 2003 by reading Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman. Upon reading this book I had a bit of a “eureka” moment. If you have not yet read this book I recommend it (the second edition just came out recently). Many of the HTML conventions I had previously adhered to, simply because they “worked” (I mean really… spacer gifs… what was I thinking), were about to become a thing of the past. Ah, but it was not an easy transition, I had been programmed to do bad things. At first my sites were just as clunky as a table based websites… I had to fight the urge to simply swap tr and td tags for div tags. I thought that all elements needed to be bound by something or they may run away.

… through the purity and essence of our natural… fluids

If you began web development with table based layouts, you may see this whole tableless development as just another of the many fads the web development community seems so eager advocate then abandon. Table ridden websites download slower, put more stress on your server, and are more likely to break for no apparent reason.

If you have been using tables for a while, it may not seem obvious, but if you think about it, how many times do you use nonsensical “hacks”? How many spacer gifs do you implement? How many times do you mark width=100% only to cross your fingers hoping that it fills the existing space and not force your containing table to stretch erratically? For that matter how many times does it stretch erratically?

But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you build such a thing?

Oh, I know what you’re saying, “But Ryan, that’s the way they did it in nineties and the internet thrived”. People tight-rolled their pant cuffs in the nineties too… we have evolved. In a nutshell, the nineties were decadent era for web design (among other things). Web development could be sloppy; there was plenty of money to write one website for IE, and a couple for Netscape. Font tags for every one! Hire another guy to make sure all in-line styles to the appropriate sidebar links are the right shade of magenta. Of course in-line, I mean, it isn’t as though there exists some sort of complete and recursive (cascading) declaration your site’s appearance (style?) of the entire website in an external page (or sheet). So that all 200 pages of this site could share a single… hmm what do we call it CRAP… certainly not, maybe just simplify it… CSS.

Enter CSS. One sheet to rule them all. No need to spend sleepless nights ensuring that all of your buhgillion inline styles and are consistent amongst many pages. Less chance of those obnoxious pixel-jumping page changes that result from one of your pages using a slightly different font size. It is a kinder, gentler, more logical web.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here!
This is the War Room

Let me just plainly state… tables are not evil. They have a purpose. To display tabular data (oh yeah, what technical blog is complete without a recursive definition), and that is where it ends. You need fields of data to line up in a grid based relational format; table is the man for the job. You need logical structure to a website that is both easy to disperse on wide scale use and won’t impact the market value of Maalox; table is not up to the challenge.

I feel the need to say this, as all too many times, I have seen new tableless zealots spend hours (if not days) coding an all div representation of some sort of data matrix (or table). I feel Charlton Heston would agree with me when I say, tables do not make absurd websites, designer/ developers that use tables incorrectly make absurd websites. To be fair, designers/ developers can make equally if not more absurd websites with CSS. The key here is to design more intelligently.