Tuesday 5 January 2010

Shine On, Brad

After six years of hosting the Breaking Bread with Brad parties at SxSW, I was joking with him in 2006 and asked if anyone had ever literally broken bread with him. It turned out NO one ever properly broke bread with Brad! So of course I seized the moment and had the great pleasure of doing literally that.

Who knew it would be one of the memories I will now hold very close for the rest of my life, for Brad Graham has passed on, far too young, at age 41.

Rest in peace, dear friend. I will remember you always. You were one of the most magnanimous people I’ve ever known – great in mind and heart.

Filed under:   community, photos, society, sxsw
Posted by:   Molly | 07:42 | Comments (3)

Tuesday 29 September 2009

Why Bottom Posting Sucks

Throughout the years, posting styles in email lists and in forums have been a point of contention. Essentially, there are three types of posting styles.

1. Inline posting. In this style, the responder answers queries or provides insight throughout the document.
2. Top posting. The responder writes his thoughts at the top of the previous discussion. This particular method has long been frowned upon because the dialog is out of order.
3. Bottom posting. The responder writes at the very bottom of the discussion, leaving the previous dialog intact and creates a sequential order for the discussion.

At first glance, both inline and bottom posting make sense. The logic of each is maintained. In the first case you have essentially an actual dialog. He writes, she responds, the conversation goes back and forth. In bottom-posting, you have all the sequential context of the dialog available.

There is also the issue of what gets clipped out, or doesn’t. But let’s save that rant for another day. The issues with these styles have only been based on preference within the group or organization, and it’s daunting to think how much people argue about something so seemingly simple.

Because I personally find inline posting to make sense, as I am a verbal person and think in dialog anyway, let’s set that one aside. It’s fairly neutral overall. Most people won’t freak out if you use inline posting. Although I’m sure there are some of you out there!

Top-posting puts the sequence out of order. So why am I advocating it over bottom-posting? There are several reasons, all of which have their own logic. First, we’re becoming extremely used to backward sequencing. Blogs do this automatically. Twitter does too. Think of any social network and the way your posts are ordered. They are essentially top-posted.

Not only are we becoming accustomed to this behavior and perhaps prefer it in certain situations, but a second point also reigns true. We have many tools now so as to retrieve and save threads. IMAP, for one. Gmail provides archives. All current, popular mail clients allow some sort of filtering and thread views.

A third and important reason bottom-posting needs to die a fast death is the increasing access of email on small devices. It becomes absolutely senseless to have an entire novel sent when the message is simply “yup, I’m on the task” or what have you.

The final reason that bottom-posting sucks is that long emails that require a user to scroll through what is sometimes pages and pages of information is physically damaging and actually very difficult to do for those of us whose wrists and fingers tire easily. If someone with mobility impairments has to scroll through so much data just to get to “yup, I’m on the task” it just becomes an insult to that user, who suffers through the inconvenience to get to the message.

Two words: Not Accessible.

If there is any reason for everyone to abandon bottom-posting at this point in our evolution, I have to say it’s that alone. And if you’re young and strong and able-bodied and think I’m nuts, that’s okay. I’m probably older than your mother and sticking around to hear you grow up and say “Mom, you were right” will be my goal!

Bottom posting sucks. Let’s abolish it now and get on with the day.

Filed under:   accessibility, policies, pop culture, professional, revolution, society, software
Posted by:   Molly | 17:24 | Comments (61)

Sunday 26 October 2008

Flashback: Way Back! Me at 19

Here’s a photo of me at 19 years of age, close to three decades ago! I’m inside one of the smaller Toltec pyramids at Teotihuacan, Mexico.

The photo was taken by my friend long passed, Jack Schwanke.

This of course was not digital, just taken with a cheap camera, commercially processed, put in a box for 10 years and scanned at some point.

Filed under:   flashback, just fun, photos
Posted by:   Molly | 08:58 | Comments (19)

Thursday 9 October 2008

I CAN HAZ TAN!

This is Honey Bunny, insisting on having a tan right in front of my monitor.

Filed under:   family, humor, just fun, lolcats, photos, pop culture
Posted by:   Molly | 03:19 | Comments (27)

Sunday 31 August 2008

Flashback Post: Web Design and Development Personality Indicators

From 2005, for your amusement.

(original post here: Web Design and Development personality indicators)

-=-

I’VE HAD ENOUGH! Frustrated with the range of attitudes and opinions I deal with as a standards-oriented educator, I’ve decided to begin a project (very) loosely based on the Meyers-Briggs personality indicators. So, dear readers, I’m hoping you’ll help me add and refine my categories, but I’m off to a start with the following:

• OFAD. Old Fart Anti-Design. These are the guys (and I mean guys) that were on the Web as early as 1991. Almost all physicists at major research institutions, they’re the ones who helped Tim Berners-Lee refine the Web and were the first adopters. Mostly long in the tooth now, some are still kicking and they can be described as the anti-designers. These aren’t even purists – today’s approaches seem foreign and sometimes frightening to them. They long for the days of Lynx, really, but barring glowing text on a terminal and HTML authored in Vi or Emacs, their idea of Web design is default gray backgrounds, default text, maybe a list, and the apex of old fart visual design: a horizontal rule. Fortunately, this is a very rare breed and usually they can be ignored because unless they’ve progressed somewhat, they have precious little to offer the contemporary, standards-oriented Web designer or developer.
• OSVD. Old Skool Visual Designer. These are the folks that refuse to see beyond their nested-tables-spacer-GIF design. In fact, you can find them at a variety of ad agencies and teaching at conferences all over the world, still excited when they create a design in Photoshop and use the so-called HTML export utility. These designers are often extremely hostile toward standardistas largely because the idea of change or looking at code is so traumatic that they hold on to the Old Skool methodology as if it were a lifeboat on a stormy sea. Unfortunately, this breed isn’t rare enough.
• TTLM. Trying To Learn More. In this category are the good men and women who might still be serving it up Old Skool but are open to learning, open to growth yet struggling with standards related concepts and the snakepit of browser challenges of contemporary Web design and development. These brave souls are not in the majority, but they are to be lauded and assisted for their willingness to venture forth and expand their horizons.
• SAVD. Standards Aware Visual Designer. These people are designing with standards in mind – creating beautiful sites for the screen, working toward achieving accessible sites, examining usability and human factors, and very possibly beginning or already designing for alternative devices and media types. A very rare breed, and if you are reading this post it’s very highly likely you’re either one your own fine self, know all their names or have Zeldman’s personal phone number memorized.
• SASS. Standards Aware Structural Semanticist. These personalities are very code-centric, with little interest (or more often, skill) in presentation but lots of interest in the proper structuring of documents, use of meaningful markup, microformats, Semantic Web and the like. At their most compulsive, they can become purists to the point of having unrealistic expectations of the more worldly Web worker. Also a rare breed, SASS personalities are extremely important to the good of the Web but sometimes need to be reminded that smart structure and semantics can happily co-exist with visual design.
• SACE. Standards Aware Cutting Edge. Whether visual designers or code-centric or both, these are the folks that design first for Firefox, Safari and Opera and work around IE 6.0 only because they have to. Given their druthers, sites would be built using practically no markup and lots of attribute selectors, just because they like the idea. A rare breed worth watching, but also in need of reminders that the rest of the world just ain’t there yet, and in fact, really are lagging behind.

Hybrids are not unusual, either. I sort of live between the SASS and the SAVD personalities, with not enough real design skill to execute great visual designs, but enough savvy to appreciate beautiful, standards-based Web sites. There’s probably a personality type for people like me, but it’s very difficult to assess my own character, so I’ll leave it there for now.

As I’m typing this, I’m on a ship in the Eastern Caribbean teaching CSS on a Geek Cruise. The ship, the MS Zuiderdam, is just in the process of docking at Road Town, Tortola, in the British Virgin Isles. I’m sure you all feel really sorry for me right now.

It’s just past dawn and I’m up at the very top of the ship where there happens to be WiFi at the going rate of 40 cents USD per minute, so you’ll forgive me if I leave you now with the following questions: Are you one of these personality types, and if so, which? Do you have a personality type you’d like to add to my little list?

Filed under:   blogging, flashback, general, how we will be, humor, just fun, molly asks you, pop culture, revolution, society, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 01:37 | Comments (31)

Tuesday 26 August 2008

When You Met Nick Drake

BY THE TIME I’d “met” Nick Drake he was already long dead.

I believe it was after the “Pink Moon” Volkswagen commercial that aired in the United States. It’s possible I’d heard him before but I’m pretty sure I’d remember.

I’ve been listening to Nick Drake now nearly 10 years. What about you?

When did you see/hear/learn about Nick Drake?

Perfection has no stopwatch.

Filed under:   blogging, community, creativity, cults of personality, molly asks you, music, poetry & fiction, pop culture
Posted by:   Molly | 21:09 | Comments (32)

Thursday 31 July 2008

Even Dexter Knows HTML

I’m thinking there’s got to be a lot of jokes residing in this still I grabbed from the show “Dexter” which is about a blood spatter CSI by day and a serial killer cleaning up the streets of bad guys by night.

Filed under:   just fun, pop culture
Posted by:   Molly | 12:54 | Comments (39)

Thursday 19 June 2008

MicroThought: Late Night Music

I go for Chill. Faithless spinning now. What’s your 4:00 a.m. music magic?

Kajagoogoo Kajiura Yuki Kaki King

Filed under:   Twitter, just fun, microthought, molly asks you, music, pop culture, religion, society
Posted by:   Molly | 03:54 | Comments (34)

Monday 26 May 2008

Andy Warhol Had it Wrong

Fifteen minutes of fame was a good guess, but had Mr. Warhol known about blogging, I think that measurement would have been far greater.

Filed under:   blogging, community, cults of personality, flashback, humor, just fun, pop culture
Posted by:   Molly | 22:32 | Comments (23)

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:   community, film, molly asks you, music, pop culture, society
Posted by:   Molly | 12:29 | 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:   creativity, humor, molly asks you, pop culture, society
Posted by:   Molly | 18:50 | Comments (77)

Monday 7 April 2008

Design Coding: Rap for The Rest of Us

The very awesome iJustine posted this like ten days ago, but I can’t stop watching it, it’s just that yummy.

Just(in)e case you haven’t seen it, I’m re-sharing it here and hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

BTW, who did this bit of brilliance? Where was it filmed?

Comments are open, I want to know.

Enjoy:

Design Coding

Your site design is the first thing people see
it should be reflective of you and the industry
easy to look at with a nice navigation
when you can’t find what you want it causes frustration

a clear Call to action to increase the temptation
use appealing graphics they create motivation
if you have animation
use with moderation
cause search engines can’t index the information

display the logos of all your associations
highlight your contact info that’s an obligation
create a clean design you can use some decoration
but to try to prevent any client hesitation

every page that they click should provide and explanation
should be easy to understand like having a conversation
when you design the style go ahead and use your imagination

but make sure you use correct color combinations
do some investigation, look at other organizations
but don’t duplicate or you might face a litigation
design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction

follow these instructions when you move into production
your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned
please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time

make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat

tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate

check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
some use IE, some others use Flock
some use AOL, I use Firefox

title everything including links and images
don’t use italics, use emphasis
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong

when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker
they stuck on your page like you made it with a sticker
and then they convert now that’s the real kicker
make you a lil richer, your site a lil slicker

design and code right man I hope you get the picture
what I’m telling you is true man it should be a scripture
if it’s built right you’ll be the pick of the litter
everyone will want to follow you like twitter
competition will get bitter and you’ll shine like glitter

if you trying to grow your company will get bigger
design and code right man can you get with it

Filed under:   browsers, creativity, humor, innovation, music, pop culture, society, software, standards, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 19:27 | Comments (22)

Monday 24 March 2008

For the Love of Maps (where to go from here)

Since childhood, maps have captured me. It’s not a unique conquest – many of us love to study maps.

Maybe it was my father beside me, driving along and asking where next? I was always the best at maps, and my dad liked me for it.

It could be that travel is so important to me for my love of maps, but I know so many other people who’ve expressed this same passion.

For the Love of Maps!

Now we should figure out where we go from here.

Filed under:   faith(less), nmby, poetry & fiction, pop culture
Posted by:   Molly | 15:32 | Comments (29)

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:   blogging, community, creativity, faith(less), humor, molly asks you, nmby, poetry & fiction, pop culture, society
Posted by:   Molly | 19:23 | Comments (68)

Monday 18 February 2008

Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History

Guess I’m going down in those history books, because I am scandalous!

What fun! I love the fact that Matt (the fellow whose shirt I unbuttoned the top two buttons of) used to “smuggle” my books into class. In the sixth form, no less! Oh, the irony.

Filed under:   blog slut, blogging, conferences, food and drink, humor, pop culture, society, travel, web design and development
Posted by:   Molly | 19:25 | Comments (13)