Today is Blue Beanie Day. Most followers of Unkle Jefferey are sporting the blue beanie in recognition of the importance of Web Standards and the first book on the topic. A big thanks to Mr. Zeldman from yours truly is in order for raising awareness and getting it all sorted out before I came along in the industry.

I think it’s also important to check your own work by using the validator. It’s a great tool to keep your markup clean and error free. It can be an eye opener and keeping your code W3C compliant will make those search bots happy. SEO isn’t some magic potion that only the most savvy web developers can understand. It can be as simple as structuring the site properly and using the validator is a good place to start.

I had been listening to a lot of The New Pornographers lately and decided to check out the solo stuff from one of the members. Neko Case has an amazing voice and listening to her latest album Middle Cyclone is like listening to some sort of nostalgic dream wrapped in honey. Here’s some of my favorite lyrics:

From: This Tornado Loves You

I have waited with a glacier’s patience
Smashed every transformer with every trailer
’til nothing was standing
65 miles wide
Still you are nowhere
Still you are nowhere
Nowhere in sight

From: I’m An Animal

I do my best but I’m made of mistakes
yes, there are still things I’m still quite sure of
I love you this hour, this hour today
and heaven will smell like the airport
but I may never get there to prove it
so let’s not waste our time thinking how that ain’t fair
I’m an animal, you’re an animal too

From: Magpie To The Morning

Black hands held so high
The vulture wheels and dives
Something on the thermals
Yanked his chain
Smelled your boring apex
Rotting on the train tracks
He laughed under his breath
Because you thought that you could outrun sorrow
Take your own advice
Thunder and lightening gets you rain
Run an airtight mission, a Cousteau expedition
To find a diamond at the bottom of the drain
A diamond at the bottom of the drain

I’m taking a flight to Seattle that cost me $102.50. Sounds good right? I’d probably wonder what the catch was. The catch is I’m the friend of a Continental pilot and I’m flying standby. I really have no idea what that entails but I would soon find out.

My pilot buddy Davin and I meet up at the Seattle airport, rent a Subaru Forester and make our way to explore Washington State. This trip is only going to be two days and it requires that we make an 11:30pm red eye flight back to Houston the next night. We make our way through Washington and down into Oregon the first day then back up to Seattle on the second. The Pacific Northwest is beautiful this time of year. I needed to be home by 9am the next morning to stay with the kids while my wife goes to work. We check the status of the flight at the airport. It’s now 10pm in Seattle the night before I need to be home. The flight has filled up and we are not looking good. The thing with standby is you have no idea if you’re going to be able to get on the flight. Davin assured me that the 38 seats still available for the flight 3 days prior would not be filled and we were golden. That is until we checked again the night before and it proved him dead wrong.

I’m tired and nervous as the terminal fills with men, women and children. The first class is called to board. Various rows of passengers are called and start piling into the plane. We wait. And wait. We’re sitting at position 3 and 4 on standby. The first standby passenger is called. We wait. The second standby is called. We wait. Five more passengers are called. What? We wait. Finally my name is called. “Yes!” I get to the desk and the small blonde lady asks if I would like first class. “Why yes, I would like that very much”. Davin and I board the plane giggling like two teens about to get on a roller coaster ride. We get in our seats and high five.

We made it back to Houston at 5:45am. I slept almost the entire flight in my giant comfy leather seat. First class is awesome. Especially when it’s only $102.50.

Flexibility in Web design is the mark of a true craftsman. Designing something statically in an image editor is one achievement, but allowing for give and take within the boundries of a page layout is what sets good Web design apart from great Web design. It’s taking the Web as a medium into account as part of the design process, and letting go of pixel perfection.

Flexibility is something I practice and IMHO makes the web better.

Moving on to the fun stuff:

My mind was racing with ideas as I was starting a new project for a bike ride event. The interface had to engaged visitors that were cyclists of all ages. Visualizing bicycle frame tubing and cyclists gear I took a chance at coding the main navigation with slight rounded corners on the bottom left and right using the border-radius property and adding a nice silvery 2px wide border. IE and Opera get regular corners but I think it looks fine. Of course the CSS doesn’t validate but I think we have to push it so browser vendors will support it. If we keep accommodating challenged browsers they will never change. Let the browser be what it is. If it’s a shitty browser it will show and when someone decides they want to try out a modern browser they will notice and convert. Ok, enough ranting. Here’s the code I used:

-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 10px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 10px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 10px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 10px;
border-bottom-right-radius: 10px;
border-bottom-left-radius: 10px;

I would like to encourage designers to use it. It’s a lot of fun to just plop in some code and change the look of a site.

I make websites. I make them with virtually no other professional creative input. Since I design in the browser, I sometimes have my clients play with unfinished designs to get a perspective that could help me make key design decisions. We web designers work in an interactive medium. No matter how hard someone tries, a photoshop document isn’t going to respond to a click or hover. Having this kind of interaction with my clients scratches my collaborative itch. It works well for me but my clients tend to be individuals, small 1 to 6 man companies or non-profits. I don’t have enough experience with larger companies to know if it would work, but for now it seems to be effective. This is something Andy Clarke has been talking about lately and is how I’ve worked since I started freelancing.

I’d like to know if this is how other freelancers work. How does the client react to this process? Is the client confused when interacting with a live, unfinished website? What sort of reaction do clients have about virtually no static design visuals prior to launch?

Jumping on the bandwagon, I had a chance to make some HTML5 code changes to juicyk.com. I basically changed the doctype and threw in some new structural elements. The site is also featured at html5gallery.com.

Most of the time we don’t really get enough sleep but we’re trying to get the little barracuda into a good sleep cycle. For now 4am seems to be her bedtime. I give the wife a night off here and there but with work and freelancing it’s difficult to do that on a regular basis. It’s really rewarding to see your wife after she’s had a proper sleep cycle. Happy wife. Happy life.

Sienna was apprehensive at first. Not knowing what to think. We would talk about Sydnie during the pregnancy to try and ease the shock a little but I’m not sure it helped. She was very attention starved turning up the annoying about two fold. In a humorous moment she mentioned that she would like Grandma to take Sydnie home when she leaves. I guess she was feeling a little left out.

All and all it’s been a lot of fun having the wife home on leave. She has a few more weeks left and then it’s Daddy day care all over again.

I met the guys at The Creative Space back in January when I attended Design Camp and really enjoyed the atmosphere and fresh perspective . I’m excited to get to work with so many talented people and hope the next 12 months brings value to my craft.

I’m also attending The Big (D)esign Conference in Dallas on May 30th. Hope I meet some cool people.

I’ll be updating on my Twitter profile for anybody who would like to follow what’s happening the next few days.

I love my girls.

I really liked all the whites. They seem to have a really good mineral core that appeals to my palate. Among the white lineup was the 2007 Mulderbosch Chenin Blanc. This was the most impressive wine of the entire tasting. Red or white. Very polished notes of mineral, lemon and lime with exceptional length and an outstanding bargain.