I will most likely slow down posting (not that it’s been that active anyway) until the 20th for several reasons. Mainly because I’ll be working heavily on a couple of projects that you’ll be hearing about soon and I can’t take much time to blog (particularly considering I usually don’t post for the sake of posting, but only do when there’s something important to say or to talk about).

That being said, I’ll see you all in 10 days. I sure hope those of you who are having vacations this year enjoy them. Since I’m not having them it probably means there’ll be some time this year when i’ll take a couple of weeks to do nothing but catch-up with friends and family, who lately have been seeing less and less of me as projects pile in on the agenda.

Here’s a few things you should definitely read while WeBreakStuff is out of town:

• Entreprenour? Techcrunch - great portal on the web2.0, design by yours-truly. Getting quite some hype with all the awesome company profiles.
• Artist? We-Make-Money-Not-Art - a blog on arts, tangible computing, cute devices and pretty much anything else that’s cool. A must-visit daily, even if only to refresh the mind with some nice ideas.
• News-addict? BoingBoing - BoingBoing, what else?

There’s a lot more out there, but no real time to post about them. Browse, get to the beach if you can, and I’ll see you in ten days. Time for some serious working. Oh, and did I mention WeBreakStuff was coming back with a bang? Right. It is. Stay tuned!

There’s a really good post (link) on Anil Dash’s weblog that goes quite along the lines of my “Ajax won’t cook you breakfast” post, which you should definitely read if you haven’t yet. Anil criticizes (and I quite agree) raving about products because of their underlying technologies just because they’re “hip”. He does this by talking about Blinksale (Techcrunch Profile), but in my opinion, it’s not about the product itself.

Abstracting from Blinksale (because this may not be their case, I’ve been too busy to keep up on stories on them), product developers are starting to promote tools based on what they’re built on and not what they effectively acomplish. This is just plain silly for several reasons. First, because Ajax (and you know everybody is getting it on their apps like it was sugar) isn’t the be-all-end-all of web technologies (definitely read my ajax post for the explanation why). Secondly, because I (and most people) don’t really care what it was built on if it does its work, and it does it well enough for me to use it. Heck, if you look at most web apps right now you won’t even know what they’re built on, but you know they work, right? Isn’t that a little more important than going around showing your technology-bling?

I really believe it is.

One of the things I’ve been working on the most lately has been about maintaining and developing knowledge logs or corporate blogs. One of the latest I’ve worked on has been TechCrunch, an extremely active Web 2.0-related website, that’s getting a lot of hype even if only a few weeks old. This post documents the why’s and how’s of redesigning Techcrunch and presents some thoughts on how to create blogs for mass audiences, particularly those of a technical nature. Shall we begin?

One thing you should always keep in mind when we’re talking about designing blogs, be those for corporate-intranet knowledge management or general public viewing (but mostly in the latter) is that the main purpose is to read and write information (even if - I’ll just use my usual example - you’re just talking about your cats). This means we’ve just found or main interest point - text.

It is a regular mistake for companies to request redesigns that are focussed on fancy graphics, most of the times ignoring that the real purpose is communicating, establishing a relationship between them and their audience. When redesigning TechCrunch then, my main point of focus was balancing looks and functionality - content readability and accessibility should always be the top priority. The goal is to make people come back for more of both - the good lucks, and the great content. If you draw attention among the two sides of the audience, you’ll naturally succeed. (more…)

Pick up your battle-axes again, oh pro-standards hordes: IE7 will not be CSS compliant according to Microsofts Internet Explorer team, who posted about supporting standards on their upcoming browser version (for which there’s a beta out already, too). And then they wonder why developers use the competition browsers?

When back at the 6th of July I wrote about Microsoft and WaSP’s agreement of supporting standards in some of Microsofts products, I asked the question of whether this move included the Internet Explorer team and how this would actually benefit the end-user and developer communities. At the time, Molly Holzschlag replied stating that even though IE team members were involved, efforts weren’t going towards standards compliance:

We do have IE developers on board. The problem is that’s not an area where anyone can have influence right now, the internal issues are such that it’s just not possible.

That was the first hint that things weren’t looking as bright as they might seem for standards support. Chris Wilson on his post on the 29th threw the last stone into the discussion. They’re “sad” about not fully supporting standards, but they’re focussing on “security issues” like phishing or low-rights IE. Now Chris, how is it competition is able to accomodate all those and still be standards compliant? Shouldn’t there be a conscious effort to step up and just do it so you can finally ease the troops?

Not all is lost, though. They do seem to be fixing some bugs (refer to their blog post for a list), but that just sounds like using tapeglue on a flat tire to get some extra miles. Heck, it has tabbed browsing (with menu bars under the tabs - who the hell was the genious behind *that* one?) and fancy transparencies. It has to be worth something.

I believe we are doing a much better service to web developers out there in IE7 by fixing our known bang-your-head-on-the-desk bugs and usability problems first, and prioritizing the most commonly-requested features based on all the feedback we’ve had.

As long as I don’t have to keep adding IE rendering fix code to perfectly standards compliant pages, I’ll do fine. My only problem is as a standards-based developer I want to support everyone in the audience. Even those who use IE. I guess we’ll just wait some more, and in the meantime, there’s still Firefox and everybody else.