Shane Life

Attention concrete and decking companies!

I am looking for someone interested in possibly going back to the old school days when people exchanged services for services instead of money.

Small businesses know that having a good website is a necessity for operations. I am looking to get a concrete patio and a new deck for my backyard. I am willing to donate a fully-functioning website to your business if you’ll install either (or both) of these.

If you’d like to contact me, you can reach me by sending an e-mail to [shane] at this domain dot com.

…is that the majority of e-mail programs lack support for CSS.

Please support the E-mail Standards Project.

Designing with Web Standards
by Jeffrey Zeldman
RATING: 8 out of 10

Ever since I became a web designer, people have been telling me to read this book. DWWS is considered by many to be the seminal tome on how to design sites using CSS, XHTML and a collection of standards set forth by the W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium).

Since I’m a self-taught designer, I am always anxious to read anything that will help me to become better at my job. Thanks to my good friend, Kevin, I didn’t have to buy this book or go to a so-called “library” to pick it up. He had a copy of the newly released second edition for me to borrow.

I’ve been reading this book for what seems like ages and I haven’t breezed through it, but that’s not because it’s a bad book. It’s a great book, in fact. Other things have been going on that have put my reading at a snail’s pace. Plus, I haven’t exactly been diligent about getting into the gym (where I do most of my reading). If I had, I would have finished this book and at least one other by now.

So to the book: Zeldman is a former-copywriter-turned-designer who has literally written the book on the latest revolution in web design, which is to part with presentation, table-based designs in favor of semantic design that separates presentation from structure. Using the suggestions put forth by Zeldman is better for the Internet. It saves bandwidth and ensures that your web sites play well in all browsers.

Zeldman is a great writer and he makes this topic understandable and interesting. Not only that, but he gives you the reasons why it is important, which books sometimes forget to do.

DWWS is a very grood book and I suggest it to anyone who designs web sites. I also suggest reading his personal web site and his side project, A List Apart.

I had a MySpace account for all of about 3 days. I signed up because my cousins in California had them, my brother has one, and they all said it was the hip thing to do. (Nevermind the whole stigma about it it being a haven for sexual predators…)

Anyway, I thought I would try it out, just to see what it was like.

I didn’t like it. I just felt like everything it offers, I already had (a place to share pictures - flickr, a place to share thoughts - this site). The only thing that I don’t have already is the whole “social” aspect of it. There are over 50 million users on MySpace, all linked through “friendships” and schools and groups and other connections.

What always bothered me about it was how ugly every site that I saw was. Not only that, but even ones that used these so-called MySpace templates STILL looked crappy. So I promptly deleted my account.
Today, Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine, put forth a MySpace effort that is clean, respectable and wicked worn.

For the first time, I reconsidered my decision to delete my MySpace page, download his CSS hack, tweak it up and go back, but ultimately, MySpace isn’t really my scene. I found 1 or 2 people on there that I wouldn’t have otherwise, but to be honest it wasn’t worth the effort.

Maybe after their new security advisor gets things into order, I’ll go back…but for now, I’m dedicated to this site (and topFIVEdesign, of course).