[ breakfastdinnertea ]

Excuse the Smashing Magazine-like title. I couldn't resist.

I increasingly seem to be subscribed to more and more tech-based advent calendars, it's a nice gimmick which pretty much guarantees 24 days worth of solid content on varying topics. So here are (at time of publishing, I might add more as they appear) 5 to check out and throw scorn upon:

• 24 Ways

  The original, and arguably the best - a veritable who's who of the web development world provide tips and insights on a variety of topics - mostly design and front-end based.

• PHP Advent

  The theme this time is, quite obviously, PHP. This year's topics have already included Javascript (the link being AJAX), Deployment Automation, and URLs. It's a great read, highly recommended.

• WPEngineer

  Everybody and his mother seems to be making a living from wordpress, and why not - it's way customisable, easily deployable, and easy for clients to work with. WPEngineer.com are running a tip every day in December, and they're of great quality.

• SysAdvent

  SysAdmin->SysAdvent - geddit?! Hahahaha, geeks are awesome. Anyway. I don't know about you, but my day-to-day activities seem to involve quite a bit of cross over with everything else tech, especially SysAdmining. Over last year and this year, it's addressed both Linux and Windows, as well as more highlevel stuff, such as time-management.

• Phpied.com: Performance Advent Calendar

  A new one on my radar, this advent calendar has thus far looked at the anatomy of a web 2.0 web page, tools for analysing performance, and required reading. It's looking promising.

Open source is great. But really, raising a bug and submitting a patch for a few documentation issues is more trouble than it's worth. I'm stupid and lazy, so don't contribute too much code to open source, but I am very anal. I hate stumbling across spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that anyone could fix, but to get this sorted without coming across as neurotic is nigh-on impossible. That was until Github came along.

I could wax-lyrical about Git and Distributed Version Control all day long, but a billion and one people have already done that a whole lot better than me. So I'll just give you a quick step-by-step in how Github solved my problem.

First: Gareth posted code for a couple of nice CSS testing ideas he'd been mulling over.

I looked over his README, and recognised that Gareth had clearly wrote it as an afterthough and left some annoying spelling and grammar mistakes in it (I was particularly riled by the flagrant abuse of they're/there/their). So I forked his code. That's right, I forked it mercilessly and without remorse. It didn't matter that the only thing I wanted to change was some spelling in the minimal documentation: OCD is my problem, nobody elses. And forking is ridiculously cheap in Git.

Once forked, I didn't even need to clone the repository locally. Github lets you modify files from the web interface, so I fixed the grammar issues I could find.

Great, I've got some nice grammatically correct documentation - what next? Should I just say "screw Gareth, my version of CSS-test is clearly better, for I know my 'theirs' from my 'theres'"? Of course not, that didn't wouldn't work, and what's more, it's not very nice. Rather, I sent a "pull request" to him (again, available from the web UI), just saying - "look, you can't spell, I can, and I've even done the boring work for you". Mr Rushgrove merged in my changes to his copy, and the world was better for it.

Yes, this is a fairly weird use-case, but I wasn't the only person to consider it. It's just a simple alternative to the traditional centralised commit-bit / bug report->patch scenario found in "normal" open source projects.

Coincidentally, it is a year today since I updated this thing. Whoops. I might keep it updated in due course, but I've got other commitments for now, so while it may get the now-and-again treatment, don't expect anything regular.

I actually came here to post a link (something I'd usually save for my ma.gnolia page), because for about six months now, I've been trying to get Gears working in 64-bit Ubuntu (Google's insistence on not even trying is giving even Adobe a run for their money). Finally, Scott Wolchok, has put together a binary, which he has linked to, on the Gears Google group. (OK, he actually originally put this together in March, I just couldn't get it to work back then).

I've tested it with Google Reader. On initial installation, it screams that my version of FF (v3) isn't compatible, but offers itself to restart any way. After restarting, everything is back to good again, Reader works in offline mode with no problems.

It took slightly longer than a week, but dammit - the new styles have been applied. They've been tested against nothing but Firefox2 on Linux at 1024 (I did have a peek at 800x600, but it made my eyes hurt. So for now if you care that much, you can upgrade your computer or buy some stronger specs - I am an accessibility Lord). All in all, it's an obvious improvement over the previous eyesore, I'm still unsure as to how I let myself upload that heap of dung.

Computer Science Degree == the design chops of David Blunkett

I never fooled myself into believing that the previous design looked good, however I just stuck with the excuse that it was probably the best I could do. However, my job as a front-end developer sorta led me to need to at least understand WHY it looked wank, and so I started to do some research. I invested in a couple of design books - specifically Robin Williams' (no - not THAT Robin Williams, you douche) "The Non-Designers' Design Book" and Timothy Samara's "Making and Breaking the Grid: A Layout Design Workshop". Both have been extremely helpful, particularls the former.

Non-Designers' Design Book

I cannot recommend Robin Williams' offering highly enough, she presents the four basic design principles (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity - CRAP!!! GEDDIT?!?!) in easily digestible chunks with a bit on Typography to set you on your way to knowing just why everything you put out there looks like it was shat out by a constipated rabbit. Having read through it, I had a better understanding of what to avoid when hacking together this new design. It still lacks in good typography and the contrast aspect of the profane acronym, but I think it's something ok to work off of.

The only thing I found this design book short of was some level of colour theory, and that's why I have deliberately avoided using any colour that isn't in the generic HTML palette (ie the link colours). I'm on the look out for a good book on colour, so anyone with recommendations feel free to shoot them my way. I'd also like some guidance on Typography books - nothing too heavy, there's such a selection out there and they tend to cost about a grand each, so I wouldn't mind some advice before I mortgage my (rental) house.

Making and Breaking the Grid: A Layout Design Workshop

As instructional books go, this isn't particularly amazing - it goes in to what grids are and how to use them, but mostly serves loads and loads and loads of examples. As you can see, I'm currently sporting quite the grid of my own - nothing ripped directly from the book, but plenty of inspiration gained. Half of the book is devoted to breaking the grid and how to do it, but I never really got why the non-grid designs worked even when explanation was attempted. I'm unsure whether this is down to the book or my small brain capacity, either way - you should be expecting to see something more closely looking like a sudoku puzzle than a beautiful garden anytime soon.

To conclude..

I am by no means the next Vivienne Westwood of web design, but this is good enough for now (or at least until I get some colour theory under my belt) - the rest will be done in little increments, (babysteps, if you will). Either way, if you - like me - left uni with a lot of coding knowledge and absolutely nothing in terms of design you should definitely check out Robin Williams' book.

Tune in next time for a brief recap of hackday...

My last post promised some proper content that week. That was quite a lie, wasn't it? Pick your excuse - work, personal life, coming of age - they could all be applied for why I am yet to update properly.

This place looks like it was neglected, however I have done a complete redesign offline. This redesign highlighted a fundamental problem with this whole thing - my code is out of sync with what's live. Like totally - the mark-up's wrong, there are features here that haven't been replicated on my laptop, and visa-versa. It's a complete mess. So this week I've made it my mission to bring both deployments into line so code-maintanence is a matter of one rsync / scp / svn (dependant on how clever I end-up being - so it's probably going to be scp then) and I can get back to actually providing meaningful blogposts.

In the meantime, I've decided that no-styling is better than the previous design. Having looked at the nice, clean, new design for the past week, I feel almost sick seeing what is still being shown to the world at large. So I decided instead that the page-innards would be more tasteful. This also brings the site temporarily into sync with my MySpace design.