april.holle.blog

Found this little gem the other day on Twitter. For all of us who enjoy Pulp Fiction as much as we hate broswer testing, I bring you… Pulp Browsers.

A collection of user interface design patterns and trends that are becoming “standard”.

A standard design gallery featuring your not so standard oriental designs.

The perfect carrying case for your new Mac Air.

Great article on selling customers on emotion rather than technology and process.

Scientists create robots that lie to save themselves.

Stickk, a new service real financial motivations for meeting your own goals.

Domino’s BFD builder makes building your favorite pizza a creative experience.

Making the web cleaner, one project at a time…

Remember the Cascade To Reduce Selector Use
Try a minimalistic approach to the number of ids and selectors you create. Use the cascade to your advantage by creating child elements of your current class instead of creating a whole new class to describe what you want that additional element to do. So for instance, you have a main body area, and in that area you have a unordered list that has a new list item style. You can code for this one of two ways. You could make two separate selectors (one for the main content area and one for the ul) and have these be totally unrelated to each other and have to reference the ul selector every time you create a ul in that content area, or you could do this:

#contentMain {float: left; width: 660px; padding: 20px;}
#contentMain ul {list-style: disc;}
#contentMain ul li {padding-bottom: 5px;}


This allows you to declare only the <ul> in your xhtml instead of <ul class="ulMain">. This keeps your code really clean and cascading down from the parent class is great because you’re not stuck using those styles everywhere for each ul. This is extremely handy when your dealing with user entered content from content management systems because they don’t have to remember they have to apply particular styles to these elements during development or even worse, when the client is entering the content themselves.

Don’t be afraid to style base xhtml elements, you can always go back and make it specific to a parent selector, or even add a selector to it if they really are necessary.

Create Reusable Selectors
If you notice yourself reusing a lot of css calls in every single selector you create you may want to make a reusable base class. Got a lot of elements that need to float left? Create:

.floatLeft {float: left;}

Then just double up your selectors to reduce the number of times you have to declare the float: left; CSS call in your stylesheet.

<div id="contentMain" class="floatLeft"> </div>

You can create reusable classes for all kinds of things, aligns, floats, widths, etc.

Make Your Classes Carpool
Doubling up your classes can really give you an upper hand when you have elements that need multiple reusable selectors. Instead of creating a selector that will change one aspect of a current class, try doubling up your classes instead.

.product {width: 150px; color: #666;}
.floatLeft {float: left;}

<div class="product floatLeft">Product details here.</div>


Minimize CSS Class Footprint Using Shorthand
You can shorten up your css calls per selector by taking advantage of some of the great efficiency built right into CSS. To help you remember margin and padding short hand use the word: TRouBled. The uppercase letters stand for Top, Right, Bottom, Left, so for instance you’re declaring padding for an element:

p {margin: top right bottom left;}

or you can even shorten it to two entries if your top-bottom and left-right margins are the same, like:

p {margin: topbottom rightleft;}

Another call that is really handy is the font call. So instead of:

p {
font-style: italic;
font-variant: small-caps;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1.2em;
line-height: 1.6 em;
font-family: Arial, Verdana, San-Serif;}

you get:

p {font: font-style font-variant font-weight font-size/line-height font-family;}

Another smaller short hand notation is three value hex color codes. So for instance instead of #cc0000 you can do #c00.

I had a GREAT TIME at the 2008 Phoenix BarCamp today! I was a little… OK maybe more like VERY nervous about having to stand up in front of people and tell them about things that I might have some expertise in. But once I saw that everyone else was just as informal, I got into the grove of things. All the discussions were very informative, some of them so much so they were over my head, but thats ok!

I’ll just go over some of the great points some of the speakers had regarding their topics and discussions. Anyone that was there, feel free to pipe in regarding what you thought was interesting, points I missed, etc.

……………………………………………………………………

Pam Slim author of Escape Cubical Nation started off the day speaking about how growing start up companies can avoid becoming the cubical corporate environments that the entrepreneurs came from to begin with. There was a fairly voiced concern from the business owners in the room regarding how to avoid becoming that which they didn’t want to employed by to begin with.

Pam offered a simple common sense approach to really keeping the soul to your company, meet and get to know your employees. That a business owner should know what his/her employees really want to get out of their time with the company, and to realize there really isn’t any binding contract for these employees to be invested in your company if you don’t return their investment by investing in your employees. She mentions that open, honest communication is key to this relationship between employee and employer.

To really spend the time to know what each of your employees is interested in and their personal investment and interest in your company. She says to build on what your employees want to learn and do, this will enforce trust in you and foster a real value of your company to your employees instead of merely being a “job”. This will help take the pulse of your company’s true interests and values from the ground up.

Understand that perhaps some of your current employees final goals in their career may mean starting their own business, or moving away from your company in some other way. Foster this growth in your employees, perhaps once they have broke out on their own they’ll send business back your way, or other potential employees that will be a great fit for your company. Make sure you aren’t buying into the mafia mentality of you’re either with us or against us, and if you leave you’re against us for sure.

Open, honest communication allows for huge growth potential in your company when your employees are allowed to honestly express their ideas and true feelings on company projects and directions. Instead of wasting six months on a dumb idea, Fred over in development, will simply be able to express… “you know that’s not the brightest idea, but I’ve been toying around with this other thing and I think it might work…”. Don’t make yourself or your employees “check their soul in at the door”, make sure everyone is in agreement that all your companies practices align with your company’s overall goals and values.

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Derek Neighbors from Integrum Technologies spoke regarding rapid business growth and how your company can live through culture changes from creative culture to command culture and back again.

Derek started out with a recap of Integrum’s rapid growth due to new projects and contracts that they were taking on at a very rapid pace at the very beginning, and that when you loose sight of your company’s core values things can get messy VERY fast.  They had become a beast of command and control with sour employees.

So, once they finally realized that they had become the beast that they tried to run away from, they revisited their core company goals and values. Then they took the pulse of their employees, finding out what really motivated them every day to get out of bed and drive to work, and how those motivators aligned with the company’s goals and values. Aligning your employees goals and the company goals will make each teammate personally responsible for their part within the company, allowing for self-motivation and interest in the company as a whole. Making you less responsible to your immediate manager and more responsible to the company as a whole. Derek says, “Sometimes people have a hard time figuring out who’s the boss when they visit the office.”

Derek sighted that these key communication between employee and employer was an extremely important part of really getting back to their creative, coordinated company that they had originally envisioned. Today, Integrum is a team of eleven VERY talented, VERY driven close-nit people that get things done and done right. But, without that reassessment of their goals and how their employees fit within those goals was key to that success.

I asked Derek, as part of a fast-growing company, what can I do as an employee to help foster that feeling of a creative culture instead of a command culture. Derek’s advice was to share my opinions and ideas candidly, build team activities that bring us closer together as a whole, and become entrepreneurial within my own company (build activities to promote and foster teams and the company within itself).

As an early Christmas gift to myself I went ahead and bought an iPhone. I’ve been debating for quite a while about plunking down the change for one, but eh, there just really isn’t a better phone out there right now, and there isn’t going to be for a while. So, why not.

I LOVED the fact that I didn’t have to spend a ton of time in the AT&T store to set it up, I just bought the phone, and left. That’s right… no questions, no paperwork, no signatures, no plan upsale, no blah blah blah. It was nice, since I’m a geek and social interactions are difficult for me to manage sometimes.

I come home, unwrap it, plug it in, and AWAY WE GO! My pro version of Vista didn’t seem to have a hard time shaking hands with the Apple device, and iTunes recognized what I was trying to do RIGHT away. I went through the really simple steps of selecting a plan, transferring my existing Verizon number (waaay easier than I thought it was going to be), and synced up with all my music. DONE!

The only smug thoughts I had were the fact that it doesn’t sync with my Firefox or Thunderbird.

After using it during the weekend I noticed the headphone jack flaw that everyone was griping about, but after a quick trip to Best Buy to pick up a headphone adapter for $7 I was back in business with my audio connection in my car and my Sony earbuds I love so much.

I have since handed over my 30GB iPod to Kaleb to use in his new car and I use my iPhone for all my music needs now.

I LOVE the map feature, I can quickly search for businesses, get directions, and all that with a couple of clicks. So I don’t have to call Kaleb asking where the nearest PetSmart is from Rural and Broadway.

The only issue I’m having with the iPhone right now at all really has little to do with the phone itself. AT&T coverage seems to be spotty in the valley, especially in front of my computer in my home office. What gives?

I think it’s interesting that AT&T and Cingular’s whole advertising campaign is “More bars in more places” and I can’t even get a good signal in my house in a super urban area. BOO!

But besides the coverage, everything is going great, I’ll keep you posted as I use it more and get used to some of the features it offers.