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I’ve been busy lately, so I haven’t had as much time to post as I would like. I’ll make up for that with a post full o’ links today! A plethora. Plethora.

First off, in the spirit of the never-ending redesign, here’s a great 15 tips blog post on choosing a type face. I am a type amateur, but I love reading and learning about it. This Spiegel article is ancient in our 24/7 newscycle, but here’s a community that has done away with traffic signals. This is reflective of Christopher Alexander’s maxim to always design scaled to the user. It also shows how, though human-designed systems are good, human nodes in an amazing complex physical, emotional, and spiritual system called the world possess an innate ability to regulate themselves and their behaviors absent the enforcement of other humans. Libertarian moment over… now.

From a time slightly after the Spiegel article came out, i.e.—right after the dinosaurs started becoming oil—Tim O’Reilly felt compelled to redefine Web2.0 with a more compact definition. It’s a good read, but the Hype Curve has sailed on that one, Tim.

Some random accessibility stuff about video captioning, Dutch law and a new effort by Joe Clark to make media uniformly accessible.

Garrett Dimon has an interesting article about markup as craft. I’m pessimistic today, so all craft feels dead to me. Happy Valentine’s Day. However, Garrett’s 21 points are right on. They’re the implementation details of these 15 research article-derived design tips. What the heck is up with 15 being the magic number of tips? Who the heck knows?

Where did I get all this great stuff? Lots of it came from the Web Standards Group mailing list. This maxdesign guy put out the links for light reading weekly. Highly recommended.

In the file under random portion of our post, I’m beginning to research buying a hybrid, and this Jamis Buck article on concerns in activerecord in Rails hit the spot, oh, a month ago, when I began this post, back when my life was far less chaotic.

Yow! I love using Bloglines as my RSS feed reader. First off, another great find by Ajaxian, cssdocs.org. Basically, it’s an autocomplete interface to the entire w3c’s CSS spec. A nifty example of how Web2.0, in part a presentation layer upheaval fueled by AJAX, can work at its best.
Today’s Sunspots at 37signals has a bunch of great links on shopping, death, getting the most out of high potential people at work, and what I take as the begining of the end of the Web2.0 hype curve. And on that note, here’s post from a few weeks ago by Bill Thompson pissing in the wind of the Web2.0 “revolution”. In it he argues that AJAX and Web2.0 is a presentation layer-only fad in which the true promise of distributed systems is being ignored in favor of fads. He’s right, but only to the extent that the means matters more than the ends.

In other words, if you are enabling networked social software, does it really matter what’s on the backend or which backend is being used? Joel Splosky gets all Frederick Brooks about this point, making it clear it is not the means—i.e.—tools or methods, but understanding the requirements that matter:

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.... If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.

Cool! TimeOut Chicago has published a “Continuing Education Guide” highlighting educational opportunities for folks already in the workplace. Yay! They mention the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s continuing studies program.

Why ‘yay!’ you may ask? Because I’m designing and teaching several of the courses for the digital design curriculum, of course!

Back from Michigan, and tired as heck from 5.5 hours of driving, Detroit to Chicago. I’m cruising through my inbox, and realizing how much I have to do this week. Oy! In any event, a great writeup by Jim Ley on a JSON XSS vulnerability when using “text/html” as the mimetype and some thoughts from Anna van Kesteren on using the role attribute for accessibility in html documents were waiting there.

As was notice from Amazon that the book I wanted to use for one of the courses I’ll be teaching at the School of the Art Institute doesn’t exist because I’d ordered the wrong variant. Since it got knocked off my order, they then charged me for shipping because I didn’t qualify for super-saver. End result? I paid to ship a book 10 days later than I would have if I had ordered it by itself. Swell. I’m cranky, so maybe it’s time to change topics.