You may have watched this elsewhere, but I found it impressive enough to add here as well. Its a very fine talk about the tech industry by Lena Reinhard at the first ever .concat() web development conference on March 7th 2015.
Here’s the abstract of the talk.
And, yes, literally nothing. Together we’ll take a look behind the curtains of reality and explore some of the underlying rules that shape our existence. We will dig into ancient philosophy, the history and today’s status physics and maths, look into the origins of computing, programming and analyse the way we develop software today. We’ll see how nothing influences us, how it shapes our behaviour every day and how nothing can help us grow – in our professions and, even more, as humans.
“Nothing really matters,”, Freddie Mercury wrote in a song that was released 40 years ago. I want to show you how right he is.
The talk is nominated for the “Conference Talk of the Year” in the .net awards 2015. Listen to it carefully as she builds her message and listen all the way to the end.
Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Megan Smith, was a guest on the Charlie Rose show recently. She talked about how women have been disappeared from the history of tech.
I’ve been teaching Dreamweaver again. Yeah, I do it all the time, I know. I have some ideas about what Dreamweaver needs to do to make life easier for newbies who haven’t been using the product forever like I have.
The New Document Options
The Dreamweaver New File dialog box
These suggestions deal with the options for people who are opening a new file and starting to work on a new site.
Get rid of the fixed width layouts.
Provide a 1, 2 and 3 column responsive layout
The Fluid Grid layouts are very complex. Find a way to make them more user friendly. In fact, if there were enough useful responsive layouts provided in the layouts category, fluid grids could go away, period.
The CSS Designer
Regarding the CSS Designer interface, when media queries are present, even if all the CSS rules are in a single stylesheet, the CSS Designer lists them as separate stylesheets. It would be clearer if the terminology was different. Perhaps something like “save the styles in” or “locate the style in” to indicate where to place them in the single stylesheet.
In the panel where the selectors are listed, it would be very helpful if some sort of divider or identifier could be included to indicate which selectors went with which part of a stylesheet. When there are media queries, there are several selectors by the same name. Yes, I know that the selectors at the end of the stylesheet would be the ones used in the @media rules, but that isn’t obvious to someone rather new at CSS.
Why Adobe Should Care About This
I see people who are new to Dreamweaver in my classes. If Adobe wants them to convert to subscribers and users, they need to pay attention to the learning curve on the product. I can’t tell you statistics on how many of the people who come to learn Dreamweaver go away thinking maybe they’ll use WordPress instead, but it’s a good percent. Putting aside my female tendency to be modest – I’m a good teacher. I’m doing everything humanly possible to make successful Dreamweaver users out of my students. Some attention from the Adobe Dreamweaver team should go into the same consideration.
The good news about subscribing to Adobe Creative Cloud is that you always have shiny fresh, updated software. You’re up to date all the time.
The bad news about subscribing to Adobe Creative Cloud is that you always have shiny fresh, updated software. Every time you update it’s different and you have to figure things out all over again.
About a year ago I started a new pop culture/entertainment blog called Old Ain’t Dead. I started a new Twitter account for it as well @OldAintDead.
In the service of my new topic, I wanted to follow the tweets of many people and sources who write about entertainment and the stars making the pop culture news.
I also wanted to get people to follow my new Twitter account. A much harder proposition. It’s a slower process to get followers than it is to find people to follow.
I didn’t want the numbers to be out of proportion when potential new followers looked at my twitter profile. My regular Twitter account, where I tweet about web design topics, is @vdebolt. There I have more followers than people I follow.
Having more followers than accounts I follow looks okay.
It’s great to have lots of followers in proportion to the number you are following. Makes you look interesting.
But what about the @OldAintDead Twitter account. If I were following 2000 entertainment accounts and only 412 people were following me, it would look as if over 1500 people decided not to follow me back. Someone seeing my profile would think I’m not worth following.
The proportion of following to followers is fairly equal because I put public figures in a list.
My numbers are about equal now. That’s okay with me. So how did I manage to keep track of people I want to follow without actually following them?
I used a list. I took all those people and organizations I wanted to read like @Variety and @ShondaRhimes – people who would never follow me back – and I put them in a list. I called the list #mediawelike. I put actors, shows, media sites, networks, and those kinds of accounts in the list.
For my @OldAintDead Twitter feed, I follow real people who follow back, people who sometimes read my blog and people who are willing to engage in a conversation about something on Twitter.
I use Tweetdeck for watching Twitter in a browser. On my phone, I use Hootsuite. (Hootsuite doesn’t have an option for viewing lists.) Here’s what I see in my Old Ain’t Dead Twitter feed in Tweetdeck.
The Old Ain’t Dead Twitter feed
You see my Home feed, which is where I see the accounts I follow. I also keep open a notifications column. You also see the column for tweets coming in to the #mediawelike list. By using the list, I can keep the number of people I follow in a reasonable ratio compared to the number who follow me.
Creating a list is simple. In a browser, go to the Lists tab on your profile page. The create a new list option can be found there.
The new list button
Makin’ a list and checkin’ it twice. Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice. No, wait. Wrong song.
It’s the end of an era. The web site that dedicated itself to publishing articles about best practices and web standards at webstandardssherpa.com is shutting down.
Here’s how Aaron Gustafson, the founder, put it in his announcement on Facebook.
It is with a heavy heart that I announce that we are closing Web Standards Sherpa. As of April 2, we will be archiving the site in order to keep the valuable insights and techniques shared by our authors available in perpetuity.
To make that archive a reality, the Sherpas teamed up with Environments for Humans to create an online conference called Sherpa Summit. The summit features four expert sessions and live Q&A roundtable sessions that will let attendees from all over the world take part.
The online conference is on April 2, and you can save 20% if you register now using the discount code SHERPA.
UPDATE: Because of illness, the Sherpa Summit had to be postponed until April 23. A side effect of the delay is that you get more Sherpas for the Round Table Q+A’s: Steve Fisher and Dan Rubin!
