Dispatches From The Internets

Hello, my name is Aaron Gustafson and I’m a delinquent blogger. It’s been over a month since my last confessionpost.

SXSW has released their “Honor Roll” for 2006 and “How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting” managed to make it pretty darn close to the top. I had no idea there was such a thing, but apparently audience feedback is tallied and the sessions are graded and then ranked. I’m pretty proud of our 4.69 “GPA” too — it put us solidly in the Top 10. The two other sessions I participated in (“Web Standards & Search Engines” and “Web Standards & SEO”) also garnered some respectable scores (4.01 and 4.06 respectively) and made the list.

I just got the best comment spam ever:

I’m very, very impressed that this sort of work is being done; Web Design is getting stagnant with people using just styled block-level elements to produce artwork. The incorporation of SVG into sites excites me a lot.

At SXSW, I gave a sneak peek at the new bizhub Pro site I built for Konica Minolta and, in particular, the “scroll and flash” usability enhancement I added to the product pages. I have gotten a lot of questions about it and the technique even generated some discussion over on Geoffrey’s site. Well, the site finally launched and you can now see the “scroll and flash” for yourself.

In case you missed the real thing, you can now listen to the podcast of How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting, the presentation international male model Jeremy Keith and I gave at SXSW this year. And If you want to follow along, you can pick up the slides on DOMScripting.com.

I received an email announcement yesterday that WestHost (my host of choice) is going to be offering Ruby on Rails for install through its Site Manager. I guess it means that, sometime this month, my tutorial on the subject will no longer needed. Still, I’m glad it will be a bit easier to set up Rails on WestHost now.

We feel bad about missing Grey Tuesday, CSS Reboot and all the April Fools shennanigans (too much work, not enough sleep), but we finally found something we can join/support in with little to no difficulty: CSS Naked Day. For the whole of today (April 5th), we’ve turned the CSS off for both this site and Easy Designs. We hope you enjoy their rich, semantic goodness.