dog or higher

off for a short break

I'm off for a couple of weeks unconnected holiday.

Stay safe, and I'll see you in a couple of weeks

john

Introducing MRI

Continuing with the medical diagnostic equipment analogies, I'm happy to announce the first release of MRI. For anyone who has used XRAY MRI should be familiar. It provides a heads-up display, which allows you to experiment with selectors.

Here it is in action

All you need to do is enter a selector in the text field, and click the MRI button. MRI then highlights all the elements on the page that this selector selects (even showing you the padding and margin, like XRAY).

That's the first thing it can do for you. The second trick up its sleeve is suggesting selectors for an element. Click any element, and it suggests possible selectors for that element - type, class, id, descendent, child at this stage. Please offer some other suggestions for what it might suggest.

Right now it doesn't play nice with XRAY - but that will soon be fixed.

MRI works fine in IE 6 + (dunno about older), Mozilla, Firefox, Safari 2 and 3 (not sure about 1.x). Yes, my bad that Opera is still not supported - do hope to have that addressed soon.

Plus, we have some more things in the pipeline along these lines as well.

Meanwhile, enjoy MRI!

sneak peak

MRI

thoughts?

Web Directions South podCasts and slides

With 28 presentations by over 30 presenters, getting the podcasts organized this year has been quite a task. There's permissions to get from every author, CDs to rip and downsample (unless you want to download 60MB per presentation), the podcast RSS to create, site changes to make, and more.

This year, we've created a large resources section for the conference, where you can find most of the slideshows (a few presenters asked that theirs didn't get published for a variety of reasons), and the podcasts (several there now, more coming soon, once permissions are finalized). So head over and take a look.

You can also subscribe to our podcasts, so that as they come online, you'll hear about them.

There's more to come of course, but this ought to keep you occupied for a little while. Enjoy.

An online election

non Australian readers probably wouldn't know that there is a federal election here right now. The election date was named a few days ago, and it's on in 5 weeks or so.

On thing I find interesting is the two major party's use of the web. The Labor party, think Democrats/Labour/Centre leftish, has been using youtube, and facebook among others reasonably well. Today the Government party (the misnamed liberals, a largely neo-conservative party like the mid to right part of the Republicans, with a bit of extreme right thrown in, though usually quite subtly) released a new ad. So important was it that their deputy leader gave a press conference about it. But it's not yet online anywhere.

The opposition labor party already has their response ad, on youtube and at their site. Pretty good you might say. But here's the kicker - this ad actually uses a small clip from the Government's ad! That's a pretty agile response, IMO.

It reminds me of yet another simpsons moment - but sadly it doesn't feature at YouTube, and would take far to long to explain.

Come to Web Directions Free, from anywhere in the world!

This year some lucky person will get to go to Web Directions North for free, from anywhere in the world. Join our affiliates program and it could be you.

Here's how it works. Get in touch with us and we'll set you up as an affiliate. Use your affiliate link, and our badges, to spread the word about the conference.

Anyone who refers 4 people who sign up for the conference (we track them with cookies and associated internet magic), gets themselves a free ticket -- but that's only the beginning.

In early January we'll draw an affiliate at random who will get not just their ticket to the conference, but also their flight and 3 nights accommodation, covered by us, from anywhere in the World.

We'll also draw 3 other runners up who will each get a ticket to the conference, whether they've referred 4 people or not.

We also have great books by many of our speakers to give away too - so there's plenty of opportunity to win.

Anyone who joins the affiliate program and sends a few hits our way is in the running to win big -- so, get in touch today, start spreading the word, and you could be on your way to Vancouver this January.

Web Directions North is launched

Last year was a blast, so this year we are doing it all again, in Vancouver from January 28 to February 2nd. Along with web legends Dave Shea and Derek Featherstone, we've put together a programme of workshops and speakers featuring as always some of the leading web experts in design, development, mobile, and much more.

So, if you felt like Australia was just too far to come, think about Vancouver in late January, with workshops by the likes of Jared Spool, Andy Clarke and Cameron Adams, and an amazing lineup of speakers, starting with a keynote by Jeffrey Zeldman himself, all followed up by an optional day or two at Whistler, wth dozens (if not hundreds) of your fellow attendees and the speakers (we do the organizing, you come along for the ride).

Places are just $795CDN until December 1st, and hotel rooms at the Hyatt Regency just $149 CDN, while a day at Whistler (luxury coach to and from Vancouver, lift tickets, and very likely a fantastic all day party put on by one of our sponsors, as Microsoft was so generous to do last year) is just $120CDN.

So put it in your diary, and hopefully we'll see you in Vancouver in early 2008.

(BTW keep your eye out for news of our affiliate program coming shortly - which will be very much worth being part of - no matter where on earth you live)

Blog Action Day

Today (well, yesterday now if you are in Australia) is the first Blog Action Day - where "bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone's mind."

In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment

For whatever reason, the readers (yes both of you) of this blog seem to be pretty 'liberal' minded, which I am guessing extends to the environment.

I've very long been so, both actively and passively. For over a decade I didn't drive a car - and rarely stepped in one, taxi or otherwise (though I have done a fair bit of air transport in my time - twice to Europe, several times to North America, once to Japan), quite a bit to the South Pacific and New Zealand, and increasingly around Australia.
These days, it is true, I have a lot of electronic devices, both in my house (several computers, TV/DVD, plus phones, cameras, video cameras, iPods and so on that need charging), but we use green power here - essentially, we pay a smallish premium for our power to be purchased from wholly renewable sources.

Our servers in the US are run by a carbon neutral hosting company (pair).

Going forward, we want our conferences to be carbon neutral as well - that is to offset the green house emissions that all those flights and so on generate, and to make it easy for our attendees to do so as well.

Is all this sufficient - not by a long shot. But I've learned over my time on this planet that the best intentions and strongest passion doesn't necessarily achieve a whole lot - 'from little things, big things grow'.
Tomorrow, next week, next month and next year, the way we live our lives will look largely similar to today. But making incremental changes - green power, carbon offsets, reducing our footprint, reducing our consumption and so on - in my mind stands a far greater chance of real long term systemic change than an all or nothing set of expectations.

Just do something starting today eh? A few "easy" things.

Make your web hosting sustainable
Offset the carbon from your car today
Switch to green power for your domestic or commercial power consumption
Work from home more

What suggestions have you got?

Goodnight, good luck

and may your god go with you

Here's a challenge

Spend a day or so using the web without your keyboard.

Then let me know what you learned about the web.

Accessibility is about people, not compliance

As developers, designers, architects, anyone really who designs and builds things that people rely on to get on with their lives, often think about accessibility is very theoretical terms. In the case of the built environment, it's about complying with building codes. On the web it's about meeting WCAG level A or double A or so one. But it's really about people. And as tough as we might think complying with these criteria is, think about how tough not complying makes other people's lives. This is a moving an powerful story from a woman who found herself confined to a wheel chair after an aircraft accident last year.

I first became aware of this harsh truth when I made a trip to a Perth department store with Michael and my father to buy a birthday present for a friend. I left feeling utterly dejected, in no doubt about my new reality. The store's aisles in the book section, for example,were so narrow there was no way I could manoeuvre the wheelchair around them. In the food department, the counters were so high I could not see over them to the sales staff, and I found myself at eye level with young children holding onto their mothers' skirts. Here I was, an independent 34-year-old woman whose entire adult life thus far had involved many hours in shops buying clothes, make-up, browsing for books and CDs, and now I felt completely shut out of consumer society.

I think keeping in mind stories like these when we address our tasks as developers and designers makes us much better at what we do.

Why oh Why?

Could someone, anyone explain to me why the Business Review Weekly publishes their text content as flash, or some other you know, non HTML format? It's insane right? Or am I?

where's your web at?

So far, I've spoken at every one of the conferences we've run. I kind of feel like it's an indulgence in part, but I do also hope it is of some value to attendees, and definitely to me. It makes me really focus on some issues that I feel are important to me as a web developer, and hopefully to my peers. I really enjoyed my presentation this year, and a lot of people said some very nice thing about it. The slides are now online at the wonderful slideshare (podcast will be up soon, we need to rip 30 hours of audio from CD (it was recorded to CD this year at the venue), then make the podcasts out of that), if you'd like to take a look. There's several strands to the presentation, all brought together around the idea that the web is really becoming decentralized and distributed - geographically, 'politically', commercially, in terms of user experience, and in other ways. Each of these areas in some ways is worth considering in greater detail itself, and hopefully I'l be able to write some of my thoughts down for some articles in the near future. I also hope to explore in particular ideas around design and the user experience in a web that is no longer desktop computer based, but which is running on handhelds, phones, in cars, on game consoles, and so on with Dave Shea at Web Directions North (picking up on the ideas from a panel I ran with Dave, Doug Bowman and Eris Free at SxSW in 2005).

BTW

Apologies for my absence. It is not caused by the arrival of my ipod touch, which is, might I say, even better than I could have imagined as a piece of tech. Even my luddite non tech friends (don't even start on the remotely tech kinds) love it at first touch. Rather it's caused by the utter exhaustion of the aftermath of Web Directions (which too was cooler than I could have hoped). I'll write in detail about Web Directions, and the new iPod (it's bad as well as good points) soon.