I enjoyed being back in Ireland. Jessica and I arrived into Dublin last Saturday but went straight from the airport to the train station so that we could spend the weekend in my hometown seeing family and friends. Said town was somewhat overwhelmed by the arrival of one of the largest cruise ships in the world . We were back in Dublin in plenty of time for the start of this year’s XTech conference . A good time was had by the übergeeks gathered in the salubrious...

One of the most questions we get in regard to our popular podcasts is, “What’s that catchy intro music?” Today, I thought I’d share. SpoolCast: Mocean Worker - Right Now SpoolCast Crew: Cal Tjader - Soul Sauce Josh and Jared Show: Medeski Martin & Wood - End of the World Party Usability Tools Podcasts: Medeski Martin & Wood - Mami Gato All [...]

Sean McGrath is delivering the closing keynote at XTech 2008. Sean would like to reach inside and mess with our heads today. He plans to modify our brain structures, talking about the movable Web. Even though Sean has been doing tech stuff for a long time he freely admits that he doesn?t know what the Web is. He quotes Dylan: I was so much older then, I?m so much younger now. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is a book by Nicklaus Wirth from 1978. Anyone remember...

Perfect pagination style using CSS. Learn how to design a perfect pagination style using some lines of HTML and CSS code.

Override Inline Styles from the Stylesheet. A way to override what someone else has done with inline styles.

Getting Creative With Transparency. Arm yourself with the knowledge of how different file types of images can be used to achieve transparency on web-pages.

I just had to mark-up and style a "Nutrition Facts" label that matches the layout found on food packaging here in the US . Jonathon's templates just saved me a few hours work. #

The enigmatic Steven Pemberton is at XTech to tell us Why you should have a Web site: it?s the law! (and other Web 3.0 issues). God, I hope he?s using Web 3.0 ironically. Steven has heard many predictions in his time: that we will never have LCD screens, that digital photography could never replace film, etc. But the one he wants to talk about is Moore?s Law. People have been seeing that it hasn?t got long to go since 1977. Steven is going to assume that Moore?s Law is not going...

It’s time for my second Gavin of the day at XTech. Gavin Bell asks Data portability for whom? To start with, we’ve got a bunch of great technologies like OpenID and OAuth that we’re using to build an infrastructure of openness and portability but right now, these technologies don’t interoperate very cleanly. Getting a show of hands, everyone here knows of OpenID and OAuth and almost everyone here has an OpenID and uses it every week. But we’re the...

Simon Batistoni is responsible for Flickr’s internationalisation and he’s going to share his knowledge here at XTech. Flickr is in a lucky position; its core content is pictures. Pictures of cute kittens are relatively universal. We, especially the people at this conference, are becoming hyperconnected with lots of different ways of communicating. But we tend to forget that there is this brick wall that many of us never run into; we are divided. In the beginning was...

Gavin Starks , the man behind AMEE ? the Avoiding Mass Exctinction Engine ? is back at XTech this year. The service was launched at XTech in Paris last year. Data providers have been added in the last year, including the Irish government. There’s also a bunch of new sources that are data mined. There are plenty of consumers too, including Google and change.ie from the Irish government. It’s cool to have countries on board. Here’s Edenbee . Yay! Gavin really...

The wonderful Paul Boag from Headscape interviewed me for the latest episode of Boagword , almost certainly the best web design podcast on the planet. We talk about my “controversial” views on web standards, Blueprint CSS , and more. Unfortunately, I hate my voice, and it sounds even worse when propped up against Paul’s sexy British accent. Oh well — I think it came off pretty decent, anyhow. Check it out , won’t you?

A few weeks back, our own Jeff Croft sat down (well, virtually, anyway) with Paul Boag, proprietor of Boagworld — almost certainly the world’s best web design podcast — to talk about Jeff’s sometimes-controversial positions on web standards. The two chatted about various subjects, such as the Blueprint CSS framework, the “culture of compliance” in our industry, using personal projects as outlets for experimentation, and whether or not the web...

People often ask questions like that. And from the inside it's clear that things aren't as easy as we wished they'd be. But I've never thought long enough about the issue to figure it out for myself, let alone try to explain it to others. Luckily Greg Cohn has. Here's just a bit of what he says in Doing Business with the Semi-Permeable Corporation : Today’s environment is transparent, open, and conversational - meaning almost anyone can get to anyone and communicate with them...

I skipped a lot of the afternoon presentations at XTech to spend some time in the Dublin sunshine. I came back to attend Blaine ?s presentation on The Real Time Web only to find that Blaine and Maureen didn?t make it over to Ireland because of visa technicalities. That?s a shame. But Matt is stepping into the breach. He has taken Blaine?s slides and assembled a panel with Seth and Rabble from Fire Eagle to answer the questions raised by Blaine. Matt poses the...

Michael Smith from the W3C is talking about the changing browser landscape. Just in the last year we?ve had the release of the iPhone with WebKit, the Beta of IE8 and just yesterday, Opera?s Dragonfly technology. In the mobile browser space, the great thing about the iPhone is that it has the same WebKit engine as Safari on the desktop. Opera Mini 4 ? the proxy browser ? is getting a lot better too. It even supports CSS3 selectors. Mozilla, having previously expressed no interest in...

Rob Lee is talking about making the most of user-authored (or user-generated) content. In other words, content written by you, Time?s person of the year. Wikipedia is the poster child. It?s got lots of WWILFing : What Was I Looking For? (as illustrated by XKCD). Here?s a graph entitled Mapping the distraction that is Wikipedia generated from a greasemonkey script that tracks link paths. Rob works for Rattle Research who were commissioned by the BBC Innovation Labs to do some...

I?m at the first non-workshop day at XTech 2008 in Dublin ?s fair city. David Recordon is delivering the second of the morning keynotes. I missed most of Simon Wardley ?s opening salvo in favour of having breakfast ? sorry Simon. David, unlike Simon, will not be using Comic Sans and nor will he have any foxes, the natural enemy of the duck. Let?s take a look at how things have evolved in recent years. Open is hip. Open can get you funded. Just look at MySQL. Social...

Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) just announced that they now power AdSense for Search. Another nice new change is that if you provide a Sitemap, Google will use that to improve the coverage of the custom search engine. Now let me nip one idea in the bud, because I can already feel a few people thinking [...]

The Yahoo! Developer Network (otherwise known as "YDN", also known as "where I work") is looking for a skilled webdev to work full-time at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale, California. Here's a bit of the boilerplate about the job. I've left out the "who is yahoo" stuff, since I assume your know what Yahoo is if you managed to work the Internet long enough to find this. :-) The ideal candidate will have a strong command of JavaScript 1.0-1.5, DHTML, DOM Levels 0-2, CSS 1-2.1, HTML & XHTML,...