This week saw the end of winter mixing with the first day of spring — in the northeast that meant snowflakes on the few flowers that have started poking out. There’s also been a flurry of activity on the net from site launches to reports from the SXSWi and MIX09 conferences and some other good stuff I thought needed to be called out.
I Did That
I can only take credit for a small production role, but this past week the Web Standards Project launched WaSP Interact. Its a new effort to promote standards aware education through a curriculum, outlines, and general standards advocacy. The goal is to provide a framework and reference for helping students become web professionals and looks to cover beyond mere font end development and extend web standards and best practices knowledge into all disciplines involved in producing a web site.
On a more somber note, this week came lots of news of the shuttering of Nokia’s MOSH mobile file sharing site. It was an interesting project to be involved in that I’m sorry to see come to an early end, or well, a new beginning. If its still up when you’re reading this check out this hidden gem user moshing’s drawings to your phone for some quirky handmade wallpapers. Some reports this week sniped at it for its seedier side to which my response will forever be nice ass.
More Web Stuff
SXSWi
SXSWi wrapped up this week and there’s plenty of reports from the field to catch up on. Not having gone myself I’m the wrong person to recap it so I’ll just point to Molly’s CSS3 Panel slides links and the whole shebang in MP3 from SXSW. [You can say its a podcast, SXSW, but if I can’t subscribe to the feed straight to my MP3 player its not].
IE8
The big news from Microsoft’s MIX event was the official release of Internet Explorer 8. Nuff said.
Also
- Dori Smith and Tom Negrino have a new book out — Styling Web Pages with CSS — I can’t wait to see it on a store bookshelf and check it out.
- Google launched Chrome Experiments, a showcase site showing some neat Canvas based work that works ‘best’ in their Chrome browser. Some may work ok elsewhere too. Its a nice repository, if the individual works do feel a bit like the pointless [cough] flash and dhtml experiments of 2001.
- Also from the ‘future’ the WHATWG blog has an informative introductory post to HTML5’s section <section> is not just a semantic <div>
Even More Web Stuff — JavaScript
Going to the more technical end here are some things to check out for your hardcore JS coders:
- John Resig’s article JavaScript Testing Does Not Scale isn’t just for people coding JavaScript libraries. Very often site specific code I write gets mashed together with other libraries or third party code that I have no control over, so thinking about the issues John has when testing jQuery is important.
- [
](http://www.jsmag.com/), a promising new PDF based technical journal for JavaScript developers recently published their first issue. There’s a free sample, too.
Photo Stuff
- I’ve posted a few new landscape photographs for sale on shop.placenamehere.com. If you’d like to keep up with updates over there visit the Just Added! collection and subscribe to the feed.
- For you Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW users Martin Evening has posted a video explaining the differences between the Exposure and Brightness slider. Its a quick and clear demo that might be useful if you’re like me and don’t typically use the brightness slider.
Other Stuff
- On the site launch front the very promising social beer review site 97bottles has launched. Look for me here
- I don’t encourage drinking and biking, but from MAKE comes info on Contrail the bike accessory leaves a trail of chalk behind you
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