Ah, that feels comfortable. Like a whirlwind travel adventure to a new place you’ve seen in lots of pictures, but never experienced for yourself, then returning home and being able to slip back into your own comfortable clothes, and collapse in your own bed. There’s a familiarity here with the markup, style, and templates that feels good. continued

Feeling inspiration from others who’ve been redesigning, I finally decided it’s time to take this site’s design in a slightly new direction. I’ve been working on this one in the background for a while, whenever I’ve had spare time. The colors were inspired by a photo I took of the Brockton Point Lighthouse in Stanley Park while visiting Vancouver last year for the AIGA National Design Conference.

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Last night, we went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’ll add my enthusiastic endorsement for the spectacular brilliance of this film. Whether it’s Kaufman’s creative screenwriting, Gondry’s directing, Carrey’s talented acting, or all of the above and more, I don’t care. Something comes together in this film that makes for a wonderful experience. All of us left the theater, nodding our heads, unable to immediately identify exactly what it was we liked so much about the movie. continued

With all due respect to any former colleagues still stuck within the organization, there’s no greater satisfaction than leaving a major internet company over year ago, and now, seeing their home page turn into this.

The very slow lane. I returned from Austin a little over a week ago. Once here, I had to face the reality: I needed to use a dial-up connection to get online from home. Something I haven’t needed to do (at home) for almost five years since DSL was installed. Our office has high-speed wifi, as do the cafes I frequent. Even when traveling, many airports and hotels are now set up with a high-speed wireless network. So I seldom experience dial-up speeds. continued

There’s a spattering of activity here all of a sudden. Yes, I’ve been busy. And yes, you’ll see even more from me soon. Big things have been in the works for a long time.

Digital Web Magazine just posted another interview for their latest issue, this time, the questions from Craig Saila were directed at me. Read all about why I wrote off CSS as a failed pipedream for so long, what I think about the Wired News design more than a year after our launch, and my sentiments about the end of Webmonkey.

I’ve received a few requests for public links to the presentations I used for the CSS panels at SxSW. In the spirit of sharing information–and since they’ve already been linked from other locations–I’ll point to them here. If you weren’t there, you won’t get all the commentary that went along with them, but you’ll get an idea of what I covered for each panel. If you were there, thanks for coming; I hope we covered topics on both panels that were engaging and relevant to you. continued

Whew. The all-day and late-night, non-stop activity in Austin is enough to leave anyone exhausted once the event is over. (And to think some of the geeks are still there for the Music portion of the festival.) Yesterday morning, the hotel alarm clock had been set for 5:50am. The Veen brothers were coming to pick me up at the hotel at 6:20am for a way-too-early flight back to San Francisco. True to some law that states “an alarm clock will not go off when you need it most”, the alarm never sounded. Regardless, in some miraculous instance, I somehow bolted up in a panic at 6:18am. No idea what woke me up then, and why it couldn’t have occurred a few minutes earlier. continued

South by Southwest is flying by. I’ve only been here for two days, but it already feels like 10 with the number of people I’ve run into, all the parties, and the panels.

Well, today is double-down day for panels on CSS, and I happened to find my way onto both of them. I’ve been busy wrapping up my presentations for both, so I haven’t had time to be as social yet as I would of liked. But that’s all changing after the two panels are done this morning. More reports later.

But before I head over to the convention center, a big huge congrats to Dave Shea and all the CSS Zen Garden contributors on winning big last night at the Web Awards for Best Developer’s Resource and BEST OF SHOW. Holy cow, that’s cool!.

Last August, I praised Macromedia for its release of Dreamweaver MX 2004 with its broad advances in support for CSS and accessibility. When I want to use a visual editor to crank out a quick HTML comp, sometimes I’ll use Dreamweaver. But for those of you who know me and my working style, you may know I usually prefer to hand-code over using visual editors. That’s just me, and my insane desire to type one character at a time. While I didn’t spend as much time in Dreamweaver during the Wired News redesign, you can bet that its powerful text-editing companion HomeSite saw hours and hours of use once I had a design finalized. (Since it only exists for Windows, HomeSite is the one and only thing I miss now that I’ve switched back to Mac.)

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