Thursday 15 May 2008

Thirty Percent Likely to be Humorous

After a few of the responses to that last silly post, I realized that people sometimes take me far too seriously. So here’s a short list to know when I’m being humorous:

• - The post is tagged with “humor” or “just fun” or both
• - There’s one word in a post that has a long subject line (dead giveaway)
• - There’s a pun somewhere in the content that is either glaringly obvious or super subtle and negates whatever I’m saying
• - If it really seems like I’m being funny rather than serious, apply the 30/50 rule (30 percent likely to be humorous)
• - Ask me

Of course, I’m probably delusional to think I’m ever funny in the first place, but I’ll leave that to your judgment.

How funny are you?

:P

Filed under:   humor, molly asks you, community, just fun
Posted by:   Molly | 1:12 am | Comments (9)

Monday 5 May 2008

Tracking Pop Culture References about the Web

As many readers are aware, I’m one of the old ladies of the Web, having started in 1993 back when the Web was text-based, accessible and not at all a part of culture much less popular culture.

It surely has been a fascinating experience watching the Web, and the online world in general, infiltrate society in different forms. From the first time I saw a URL advertised on television (1996, I believe, for Subway Sandwiches); read about Web sites in books (”Mary went downstairs to Google for an answer to her lonely heart”); and more recently, references to Twitter on shows such as CSI, I have been in awe of how the Web has become a part of the fabric of our lives.

Sitting here last night watching an episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun from 1999, I was tickled beyond pink to hear the character of Dick Solomon quip “I was going to order it off the Internet until I realized there was no such thing as Amazon Dot Crap.” It got me thinking that tracking such references to the Web and Internet in popular culture could be a really fun and revealing adventure.

Got a favorite reference about the online world from a film, book, lyric or other relevant media? Share below!

Filed under:   music, pop culture, film, society, molly asks you, community
Posted by:   Molly | 12:29 pm | Comments (19)

Monday 21 April 2008

Follow You Will You Follow Me?

The overwhelming success of Twitter leaves many of us swirling in its twitertwhirlious wake. I’ve been a member for about a year and half and find it still ranks highest amongst my daily habits.

The Word “Follower”

“I will follow you will follow me” - Phil Collins

I also realize that I am now either a very persuasive cult leader or am being stalked by close to 1,890 people.

To the point, I’m mostly bewildered by the “Follower” concept. Since Twitter has been around, the term “follower” has been applied to thousands upon thousands of people who simply read other people’s Twitter streams.

The word “follower” however, bears a bit more weight and consideration. The simple Twitter interface tells us who is “follower” to our Twitters. You can compare this with who you are “following” and a finely tuned interface will tell you who follows you, leaving all of us confused as to whether leading or following bears more persuasion.

I’ll beg the question

If you are a leader, are you a follower also?

Filed under:   society, molly asks you, community, religion, Twitter, cults of personality
Posted by:   Molly | 6:02 pm | Comments (22)

Tuesday 8 April 2008

My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

You know you have one. Or twenty.

Admit it.

Unless you live in a rural area, never travel, see few people, and even then . . . many humans have signs of OCD.

Some years ago at SXSW a fantastic group of friends had lunch at P.F. Chang’s and talked about our unique Obsessive Compulsive Disorders.

It was such a funny and enlightening conversation, I’d like to jump-start it here.

Mine? Pillowcase openings must point to the left; I can’t leave an empty cardboard toilet paper roll on whatever that thing is (the roll?) that we put it on. I have to either replace it or leave it empty.

Other than that I’ve only a few inconsistent quirks.

How about you?

Filed under:   humor, pop culture, society, creativity, molly asks you
Posted by:   Molly | 6:50 pm | Comments (56)

Saturday 15 March 2008

Your Best Pop, Your Worst

NEEDING TO GET AWAY FROM STANDARDS and browsers and conferences, I’m interested in a conversation about the best and worst pop culture right now.

Whether journalism, fiction, television, film, photography, illustration, diaries or mixes thereof, I really need your help expanding my horizons.

It can only help!

I’ve been watching “Ashes to Ashes” and waiting for a new episode of the “Big Bang Theory.”

What are you following? Reading? Watching? Doing?

Share your worst, your best!

Filed under:   faith(less), humor, blogging, pop culture, poetry & fiction, society, creativity, molly asks you, community, nmby
Posted by:   Molly | 7:23 pm | Comments (71)

Sunday 17 February 2008

Happiness is Sexy

As a depressive, I’ve always found the people I get involved with during the dark times end up being my worst mistakes.

But happiness, I’m sure, is sexy. I see a plain person frown, and that’s just a plain person frowning. I see any person, no matter their physical being, alive with happiness, and that is very appealing.

Happiness is sexy. I may not always be able to be happy, or sexy, but damned if I don’t love being both.

What do you think?

Filed under:   blogging, pop culture, blog slut, society, molly asks you, community
Posted by:   Molly | 3:23 am | Comments (40)

Saturday 2 February 2008

Avoiding the Melting Pot while Embracing Global Differences

Earlier this month there came an interesting post on the “Top 15 Women Bloggers” courtesy xfep.com. The list is surely a good one, citing strong women bloggers from a variety of backgrounds, interests and talents.

This morning, I woke to find a link to a post by Hùynh Vĩnh Sơn, a Vietnamese blogger who has published the top 15 list in his native language. He then followed it up with a thought-provoking image questioning “Vietnam female blogger where are you?”

One of the most awesome things about the Web is surely how global we have become. Yet, our blogging and social networks, while becoming more international in readership and scope, still have gender, language and cultural boundaries that will likely remain for a long time to come. And, these distinctions are important. I for one want to see the values of culture preserved. I’m sure most will agree. I mean, who wants to have one language, one food, one way of life? Much of life’s experience is in fact in our diversity, and the fascinating things that happen when we are expanded as individuals and groups through different views of the world.

I think about translation tools and online social environments as well as global interaction guides to help us understand some of the etiquette and behaviors involved when dealing across cultural boundaries, and even divides. I see that these are good tools to use to begin with, but I’m interested in discussing how to create social software that can assist us in avoiding a melting pot and embracing our global differences.

The Web, which often progresses socially a lot faster than the actual world does, offers much to enhance, assist and aid both the opening of the world to its true global potential while maintaining a respect and awe for the individual cultures that makes our world so very rich.

Hùynh Vĩnh Sơn’s post, which I could not read but for the fact there were translations and a high-impact image, has brought these thoughts to the forefront. What are your thoughts about blogs, the social network and cross-cultural enrichment? I’m truly fascinated to know.

Filed under:   blogging, software, society, molly asks you, community
Posted by:   Molly | 6:49 pm | Comments (25)

Saturday 12 January 2008

Too Wired in a Wireless World?

When traveling, I always notice I need to pack extra cables and wires, transformers and adapters.

The luggage I pack is sometimes filled with so many wires, cables, power supplies and other do-das that I am quick to wonder if something about all this is a bit fishy.

Do you have more cables now as a result of all our “wireless” devices or less than when we were “wired”?

Filed under:   software, web design and development, hardware, browsers, molly asks you
Posted by:   Molly | 5:23 pm | Comments (36)

Saturday 5 January 2008

Twitter Sucked the Blogging Out of Me

I often post pictures and words about weather. Bits of me here and there. Then, somehow, Twitter sucked the blogging out of me. Made me write in 140 characters less.

People ask “why don’t you blog so much anymore, Molly? Is it your work?”

Nah, it’s Twitter. Sucked the blog out of me in 2007.

I’m almost ready to make 2008 Twitter-free.

Close to making it IM-free too.

How about you?

Filed under:   policies, pop culture, software, society, molly asks you, community
Posted by:   Molly | 4:18 pm | Comments (58)

Friday 28 December 2007

Best Bets for Browser Bug Bashing

One of the most frustrating, time consuming and challenging aspects of managing cross-browser rendering of CSS is dealing with bugs along with incomplete implementations. Examining helpful resources such as position is everything and QuirksMode, it becomes profoundly clear that today’s front end web designer and developer must be pretty adept at dealing with this core problem.

I call it a core problem because of course, interoperability is a problem the Web was meant to solve! Yet, the disparities in Web browsers have in fact caused the greatest accessibility challenge to the Web we as its authors must face, and conquer.

Fortunately, there are some proven ways to deal with cross-browser challenges. We can use hacks, which of course are controversial in their own right due in large part to how difficult they are to maintain and how often they are based on invalid markup or parsing errors (* html anyone?).

We can use conditional comments for managing IE versions. CC’s are in my opinion the cleanest way to manage IE issues on a case by case basis, but they too are controversial. An HTML comment was never intended to contain a conditional statement, so a CC is essentially a hack. Furthermore, it’s an IE-specific solution, so that in and of itself smells a little funny to the purist nose.

Another approach involves using JavaScript to “correct” browser behaviors, such as we find with Dean Edwards’ IE7 Scripts.

What ends up happening, as we all know, is that we use a combination of these techniques where necessary to address our browser base.

So we have the techniques: Three primary ways we approach bug bashing and implementation problems. What’s missing isn’t our knowledge, but a conventional method. If we had a step-by-step procedural to walk ourselves through, that could be very helpful. Clearly, what works for one site isn’t necessarily going to apply to another, but some guidelines to help each other manage this very murky, very challenging problem would certainly be of benefit.

My intuition and experience suggest that the most effective way to manage bugs is to kill them where they live. That means having a clear workflow from the earliest stages of authoring to manage browser issues regarding CSS. Surely many folks will have created such workflows, perhaps even unaware that you’ve done so, as it’s just become part of your process.

Think about how you work and if you could take a moment to share your best bets for managing cross-browser CSS design, we can together examine the least time-consuming, most efficient and most solid method by which to bash those bad, bad bugs.

Filed under:   standards, web design and development, browsers, molly asks you
Posted by:   Molly | 12:26 pm | Comments (50)

Sunday 16 December 2007

Define Web Standards in a <p> or Less

You’ve got one paragraph to clearly define the term “web standards” - if you can do it in one sentence, all the better.

GO!

Filed under:   professional, policies, standards, software, web design and development, WaSP, w3c, browsers, molly asks you
Posted by:   Molly | 5:56 pm | Comments (98)

Tuesday 20 November 2007

Your Best Practices for Creating Great PNGs

I’ve been futzing with PNGs for years and still find myself thinking there has to be some better way to get the best compression and still retain the quality of the image. I notice that while I can create great PNGs in a variety of software such as Photoshop and Fireworks, I still can only manage to get acceptable results, I’ve seen others do a lot better.

So, I’m askin’ for your wisdom regarding best practices for creating great PNGs, especially now with alpha transparency support in IE7. What are your tools? Processes? Any special techniques you care to share?

Filed under:   standards, software, web design and development, creativity, ie7, molly asks you
Posted by:   Molly | 12:24 pm | Comments (71)

Wednesday 31 October 2007

Self Portrait: Witchy Woman

How about yours?

Filed under:   pop culture, photos, blog slut, creativity, molly asks you, nmby, costume play
Posted by:   Molly | 1:11 am | Comments (12)

Photoshop and Designer Friends Please Lend Me Your Wisdom

When asked what I use to create web sites, I default to the three most important tools in my entire career: Photoshop, a good text/html editor with color coding, and an intuitive and secure FTP client.

As an educator focused on standards, and teaching technology to designers, I fear I’m not spending enough time in the visual world. I have all the tools, but over time, MY time with Photoshop has decreased while my attention to CSS and markup has increased.

Lend me your wisdom, oh designer friends. I need you!

Filed under:   professional, web design and development, society, creativity, molly asks you, community
Posted by:   Molly | 12:07 am | Comments (46)

Monday 15 October 2007

Shift in the Web Wind

It’s autumn here in the US. Time for pumpkins and Halloween and a different season. The seasons are changing. I can smell it on the Web wind.

I feel there’s a major shift in our industry. It concerns me so I want to chat about it with you.

The latest Dot.Com boom is declining as far as I can tell. Are we on the edge of another Dot.Bomb? What do we do?

What’s changing for you?

Filed under:   professional, faith(less), policies, standards, web design and development, society, Blogroll, creativity, innovation, molly asks you, community
Posted by:   Molly | 1:17 am | Comments (50)