Twitter Needs: Stalking

Twitter is all the rage these days, and unlike most services I toy with I found myself sticking to this one, using it often enough to develop a sense for the landscape and fitting in in my own way. Coupled with Twitterrific I find its a comfortable mixture of always on yet unobtrusive so its not a chore to use like some other communities [or other outlets, say, blogging perhaps! hah]

And for the most part I think its a perfect and simple service. I don’t really think Twitter or Twitterrific need to get tricked out with added features or bells and whistles, and I typically find myself thinking I would be less inclined to use a service it changed to accommodate some of the things I’ve seen proposed.

But let me shove that sentiment aside to add my own feature request to the mix.

On Getting Naked

Tomorrow, April 5th, we will see the return of CSS Naked Day a novel idea where participating sites will remove all styling information in an effort to promote standards, get a little self promotion, and have a little fun. My take, reposted from the discussion at webstandards.org, is below. I said a bit more about it last year in I’m Not Naked, most of which still applies.

It's meant to illustrate the importance of CSS and graceful degradation.

My interpretation on it is that it is meant to illustrate the importance of good HTML and markup practices as much as anything else — that CSS is great, but it should overshadow it all. Or maybe that's just my own philosophy bleeding through. I surely would have called it “Naked HTML day” had I thought the idea up, and explicitly included scripting in the “stripped” category.

Presentations By Busy People

Quickies! Don’t miss these.

Ethan Marcotte just posted his slides from his presentation today at An Event Apart Boston. Grab them from this post. He’s been busy, also writing Where Our Standards Went Wrong for A List Apart.

And John Allsopp wraps up links to microformat presentations given around the world by Tantek Çelik, Dmitry Baranovski and himself over at Microformatique. John too has been busy, his new book, Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 was released this week.

Released: Textpattern Microformat Plugin v1.2

I’ve just updated my microformat plugin for the textpattern CMS and blogging tool. This update is a maintenance fix to add support for Textpattern v1.0.4 and some changes made in the way tag helpers are built. Users of older versions of TXP should stick with the 1.0 version of the plugin.