Stefan Hayden

Just finished watching the last four Arrested Development episodes and they were amazing. It has been a bittersweet year for the shows I love and watching The last episodes reminded me all to much of my heart break at the end of the Serenity movie. It’s sad when you know things are coming to an even when there is so much story left to tell but it lets you never take a moment for granted. I miss the show already.

Check out YALit which is a site for young adult book release dates that I’ve been working on with Keri for a few weeks now. This obviously serves what I like to call a “super niche market” which is sad because I will not become world famous for building it and yet wonderful because this is a resource that is greatly needed by the young adult literature community.

How needed? After being listed in google for about a week we are already seeing tons of people organically finding the site. Not to mention that we’ve already been pick up as a resource on the YALibrarian blog.

While having a simple one stop shop to find out what is coming out when is great I hope to also build a small community to help support the site. Book release dates are not distributed in any logical fashion and it will take a wider then we currently have to catch every single book release date.

I’d love to hear any questions or suggestions you might have.

Feedloung is open to the public for $5 a month. Two months ago when bloglines was dragging it’s feet I would have jumped all over it. Now that blogline is up and running at it’s new host everything is nice and smooth and I don’t feel the need for a monthly fee (or a one time yearly subscription). As much as I want bells and whistles with my feed reader all I really want is it to be fast.

While it seemed extremely buggy, Blox0r, will probably be the direction I want to go in. I’d be perfectly happy to install my own open source feed reader on my own hosting and use that. I’d love to have that much control over my data.

Now if del.icio.us would just fix their server problems.

Two years ago was the first time I had heard of South by South West and last year was the first time I read every single blog that covered it. During SXSW it’s easy to get lost in it all and feel like the entire blogosphere is there. This year is the first I’ll be attending and while plans are being made and panels forming up I thought it would be a good idea to just double check and make sure I actually read every single website last year.

Jumping over to trusty wikipedia to find out the best sxsw resources I was greeted by the saddest wikipedia article I have ever seen. Why is the biggest and best web design conference accompanied by such a horrible entry? I have my theories. The SXSW web site is nothing to scoff at and it a great resource unto itself and there are any number of blogs that covered it minute by minute.

Many companies use the wikipedia entry as a marketing tool and that is something I’m sure SXSW can afford to over look. Either way this stub of an article is just depressing and the web designers of the world need to step up and finish this article.

There is an interesting middle ground I think a lot of new designers get stuck in. They’ve read every blog and seen every hack. They read the new A List Apart article so fast that their RSS reader doesn’t even know it’s been updated. At this point they run out of blogs to read. It’s easy to keep up with invention since all you had to do was read it. It’s the other guy (or gal) who had to invent it.

It’s at this stage where designers start to feel they’ve learned all they need to know. Masters of CSS and the internet. The problem is that CSS isn’t as easy as just reading about it. The problems you run in to are always once that no one has written an article about. No matter how many blogs you read there is no substitute for experience and meeting the problem head on.

This is the problem I have run in to. I “know it all” but I have yet to be able to apply it all. The only way to make it over that last hill is to code and code and code till magically you can fix anything. I don’t have enough focus to code new and challenging web pages 24/7 as simply coding can be tedious work.

Instead I’ve turned to new subject areas and being the dawn of 2006 JavaScript is clearly a big part of the future. So while I’m learning CSS through sweat equity I’ve found a new subject to read everything I can on. Hopefully by the time I truly am a master at CSS I will be ready to start working on my black belt in JavaScript as well.

By continually switching off  and learning about the next wave of technology before it is truly a requirement for designers hopefully I will always be ready to see what is ahead and start learning it.