I used to ride a bodyboard. I wasn’t great at it, but I didn’t suck at it either. But one day, I realised that little by little, life had gotten in the way, and I hadn’t taken my board out of its bag in a couple of years. And now, I miss it.
I miss the feeling of paddling out in the pre-dawn glow on a glassy day, when there’s no breeze and the temperature is just below warm. The paddling is easy, settling myself into a rip so that I don’t have to duckdive oncoming waves, and it pulls me out with barely any effort.
I miss the feeling of sitting out the back, straddling my board, half submerged in the water as I wait for the next set to roll-in and give me my first ride of the day.
I miss the feeling of paddling hard for a few seconds, then taking off, grabbing a rail and trimming along the glassy lump of water, about as close to being liquid myself as possible.
I miss the feeling of pulling off the back of the wave once the ride is over, my face covered in spray, heart racing, and beginning the paddle back out the back.
But most of all, I miss the feeling of freedom. Once that first ride is over, everything else goes away. Work, the internet, fights with family or friends, my to-do list, stress, anxiety, the million and one things everyone has running through their minds at any given time. It all just… disappears. And in that moment, when you feel your soul lighten, and as the sun comes over the horizon, you are free.
A Book Apart publishes short books on single topics for working web designers/developers. The short length of these books lends themselves to clear, detailed examinations of single topics that are of importance to people who work on the web.
The first issue – HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith – was a fantastically written, incredibly informative, and beautifully designed book; which I devoured in approximately 2.5-3 hours immediately after receiving it. I can’t speak highly enough of this book, even as a non-professional web “designer”.
While these books sound fantastic, and I will clearly purchase each and every issue, given the focus on web professionals, I think this series has exposed a gap in the market. Whether this gap represents a missed opportunity for the team behind A Book Apart, or such a small niche to be of little to no consquence I honestly don’t know.
The gap that I refer to is the beginner/less than knowledgable web designer/developer market.
Web design is often bemoaned as a crowded field where anybody with a computer, a little knowledge of HTML and a copy of Photoshop can call themselves a web designer. There certainly are a large number of people out there who fit that bill exactly, and they certainly do refelect poorly on the profession.
However, there are also a number of people out there who, like myself, don’t want to be lumped in with the hacks, and want to learn how to do things properly before they even begin to consider calling themselves designers or developers. For myself, I feel that my HTML skills are about 99% as good as anyone else’s, while my CSS skills are about 70-75% of the way to where I want them to be1.
So, what this exposes is an opportunity for a similar series of books – short, clear, detailed, and written by experts – to help people with little to no knowledge in certain areas. I have actually got a list of books in my mind that I would love to see written, most of which are introductions to scripting langauges:
I’ve got more, but they tend to get more specific after that. As you can see, a lot of them are quite basic to people who have professional experience, but these topics can seem quite intimidating to those who don’t have someone to show us the basics.
If I thought I was the right man for the job, I would definitely take up the challenge and try to find the right people to write these books, and create my own version of A Book Apart. Unfortunately, I know that I’m not the right person, and that’s why I’m putting this idea out there. Hopefully, someone will stumble across this and run with my idea.
Footnotes
There is really only a few things I don’t quite get just yet — positioning being one of them. ↩
Subtitled: The box model, positioning, and putting the cascade in Cascading Style Sheets. ↩
Here in Australia, close to 3,300 men die from prostate cancer each year, and 1 in every 8 men will experience depression. Every year, the Movember Foundation runs Movember, to raise awareness of these mens health issues, and to raise funds for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue.
For the last 5 or so years, I have had the best of intentions about participating in Movember, but for one reason or another, it never happened. This year, I’ve finally gotten off my arse and signed up. I’ve joined forces with a number of other men from the company I work for to form a fundraising team.
What I need now are your donations and support. Visit my Movember profile and, if you can, click the “Donate to me” or “Donate to my team” button and give what you can. It’s a great cause.
I’ll be posting regular updates and photos of the ugly caterpillar that will be growing on my upper lip once Movember kicks off in earnest on November 1.
This post was originally posted on my tumblelog, but I thought it was important enough to cross post here. Any support you can offer is greatly appreciated.
The mixtape as it exists today, and indeed probably when they were first in vogue, is a cultural curiosity. They exist for any number of reasons — to heal, or wallow in, a broken heart; to get pumped up before some strenuous activity; the primary reason for their existence, though, is to win over the unfortunate object of your nerdy, unrequited love — or for no reason at all.
The act of making a mixtape was a painstaking process, particularly before the advent of the CD player. It involved sitting by your radio for hours on end, waiting for that song that you know is exactly what your tape demands, only to miss the first 20 seconds of the song because you lost focus and had to rush to hit the record button.
Sometimes it even involved pestering the radio station with call after call to request that one song which will perfectly express how you feel. But it didn’t matter how long, or how many calls it took, you were going to sit there until you got that mixtape perfect.
And then, only once you were done recording both sides perfectly, you would spend hours making the perfect cover art or case insert to accompany the tape; giving it that special something to make it even better.
These days, the art of the mixtape seems lost. Adrift in a sea of smart playlists, audioscrobbles, and genius mixes. The art of song selection is no longer an act of persistence and determination, but simply a matter of sifting through the 50,000 tracks you have in your iTunes library to fill a CD, or compose a playlist.
But even setting aside the art of the mixtape, is a mix CD or a playlist even remotely as personal, as visceral, as important as an actual cassette tape painstakingly recorded by hand? No, it’s not.
The mix CD seems like the natural progression from the mixtape right? But it’s not. It’s the poor cousin of the mixtape. The mix CD lacks the panache, the personal touch of the mixtape. Choose your playlist (you are burning a playlist, right?), put the blank CD-R in the drive and click burn, then 5 minutes later out pops your CD ready to give to that someone special. Maybe spend a little bit of time in Photoshop creating cover, and if you are feeling extra adventurous maybe a label, and you are done.
The playlist is an even poorer cousin. Literally the only effort that goes into creating a playlist is the song selection. Good luck winning your crush over with that — all you’ve done is prove to him/her they’re worth approximately 5 minutes of your time
And now, we have the online mixtape. The online mixtape is as far as I am concerned, the new natural progression from the mixtape, if only for one reason — it’s just as easy to get wrong, and just as hard to get right, and it all boils down to effort.
You can put some work into it: use a proper domain name, you know, one you’ve paid for; learn HTML & CSS1 and create a beautiful, personal design for the page; slip them a handwritten note with something cute or romantic on it along with the URL, the wait and watch your effort pay dividends1.
Or alternatively, you can take the easy way out: dump the mixtape into a plain, undecorated HTML page (or worse, a generic “free” template); upload it to some modern version of Geocities, littered with ads because you were too cheap to pay for even the cheapest of hosting; send your crush an impersonal email or SMS with nothing but the 157 character URL, then watch in horror as they spend two minutes on the page and never return.
Often, as technology is made obsolete, we lose some of the charms we hadn’t considered about our old stuff; but then, occasionally, something pops up that allows us to resurrect the spirit of what has been lost.
Or, you know, you could just buy a tapedeck, and record a proper mixtape, old timer.
Footnotes
If, for some reason, you don’t already know it. I’m sure you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be making an online mixtape, for crying out loud. ↩
Or not, because you really should know that a mixtape rarely actually works. ↩
This is a rewritten version of an old article, called, strangely enough, The Mixtape Dilemma. Feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email at dean@harris.tc and let me know if I’ve gotten better or worse at this.
Back when I decided I was going to start blogging again, I made a decision to change the way I wrote. I don’t mean my process, or the voice or tone I tried to use; I mean the way I marked up my articles. In all my other attempts at blogging, I made use of the WYSIWYG editors, and ended up with <font> tags galore.
I decided for the sake of future proofing my articles, I would give them the gift of proper markup. If I didn’t do this, any time that I redesigned, I would have ended up with mangled, nasty posts that didn’t fit my designs. Never mind the fact that its just bad practice to allow that type of code.
At first, it was perfect. I was writing like I never had before1, and I was furiously adding all the markup my articles needed with full on HTML. Unfortunately, this new found desire to use the right tools came at a cost: readability.
It turns out that its damned hard to read the unrendered version of an article when it is full of HTML tags and encoded characters, and its just as hard to edit those articles.
After writing this way for a while, I miraculously came across a tool that I somehow hadn’t heard of before: Markdown.
Markdown seemed like mana from heaven. It was easily readable, there were WordPress plugins that allowed me to publish untransformed Markdown, and it was easy to understand. Or so I thought.
Unfortunately, Markdown never really caught fire in my mind, and as a result I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle of constantly trying to learn the syntax, and constantly checking the dingus to make sure that what I was writing was correct, and would actually render once I published. I returned to the dark days of doing all my markup in HTML
Of course, the issues I had previously been struck with were back, but this time I noticed something new. I was writing less complete articles.
What was happening was a result of a failure to prepare. I would sit down with an idea in my mind, and start to write without doing any research or resource gathering first. Then, when I cam to the first place I wanted to put a link, I would have to hunt out the URL. By the time I found the URL, and added the link, I would have either lost my thought, or decided that I didn’t want to write about this subject anymore. I have a huge amount of files in my “Drafts” folder that fell victim to this; simply stopped at the first link.
Recently, however, I decided that I wanted to give Markdown another shot. I started by trying to type out all the required Markdown elements, and I was failing miserably, and just as I was about to give up on Markdown again. Then, there came articles from Minimal Mac, MacSparky, and One Thing Well, all about how to make writing Markdown more simple by using TextExpander.
TextExpander is a tool that allows you to set up “snippets” of commonly used text, and assign a hotkey to insert those snippets into anything that accepts text. Why I had never thought to use TextExpander to add markup to articles is beyond me. using TextExpander will make the insertion of the Markdown elements both simple, and reliable
I won’t go into detail about how I’ve set TextExpander up to expand snippets of Markdown, other than to say that I’ve set up a bunch of snippets based on those found in the above articles, and I’m giving Markdown another shot.
I do still want a dedicated Markdown Editor, as I think that the aspects I outlined in that post2 would definitely assist in helping to learn the syntax faster, and also allow me to see at a glance if I have made a typo in my usage of the syntax.
For now though, I’m focused on continuing to work on my writing, and integrating Markdown into my process so that one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, it will feel natural to use.
Hi, I'm Dean, and this is my blog. A collection of random rantings, and half written musings with the occasional completed, and even somewhat researched article. More.