I just got this photo from Tracey Croom, my production editor on the Second Edition of Adaptive Web Design and I wanted to share it with you. Production is almost done and I should be getting my bound copies soon. I’m so excited!

Forms exist on pretty much every site on the web in one form or another. They are the primary mechanism by which we gather information from our users.¹ Of course, before anyone can fill out a form, they need to know what it’s asking for. Labeling is key.

Between Future of Web Design in New York City and Øredev in Malmö, Sweden, I was a busy boy last week. I delivered three talks and a workshop in total and am a bit exhausted.

Like many, I’m disappointed that gender—or ethnicity, etc., etc., etc.—should even have to play a role when it comes to selecting awesome speakers, but the reality is that the dais at most tech-related events and conferences is still occupied (largely) by white men. That needs to change. We’ve been very intentional with our programming of Code & Creativity, but it wasn’t like it was hard to find an incredible speaker lineup that also happened to be pretty diverse.

Last week, Jeremy Keith posted about syndicating his content to Medium using their new API. Before they added the API, there was no way to automatically publishing to Medium from your own blog. And doing it manually was quite tedious.

Jeremy posted in detail about how to set it all up and provided the PHP code he’s using to make it all work. As I’m running a static site on Octopress, I ported it to Ruby as a Jekyll Generator. I’ve posted it to Github, so you can grab it there if you so desire.

I wrote the bulk of Adaptive Web Design in early 2010 while taking a much-needed break from client projects. I had originally slated for it to be released just before the holidays that year, but life happened and the book did not make it out into the world until mid-2011. Six months is a long time in the technical world, and especially on the Web. A year is forever.

On Friday, Kelly and I were having a conversation over lunch about the ubiquity of Bootstrap. It’s a topic we’ve been kvetching about for the the last few years—we’ve grown tired of seeing the same site everywhere we look.

I’ve been complaining about “man in the middle” attacks brought on by internet service providers a bunch over the last year. The only way to keep uninvited third parties from injecting JavaScript and more—potentially screwing up your page—is to move to HTTPS. So, as much as it pains me to abandon good old fashioned HTTP, I’ve decided to lock things down a bit.

I’ve talked about this before: As web designers, we can’t trust the network. Sure, we have to contend with mobile data “dead zones” and dropped connections as our users move about throughout the day, but there’s a lot more to the network that’s beyond our control.

The fine folks at 18F just posted a beautiful write-up of the talk on progressive enhancement that I delivered as part of the 18F Design Speaker Series. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the folks that came. They presented some interesting challenges and asked pressing questions—exactly the kind of engagement I love.