WordPress vs. Drupal

Sometimes I feel a little lame as a WordPress developer, I’ll admit it. There are SO MANY things that have already been done, it seems like it’s pretty easy to make a great blog / basic CMS site with WordPress.

Anyway, great slide set shared by WPMU that highlights the differences in functionality, approach and what drupal is “doing wrong” compared to WordPress.

Passion, Crushing It, and Elevators

I’ve found myself recommending Crush It, by Gary Vaynerchuk to several people recently. It’s very inspiring, especially the audiobook version, read by him.  In a nutshell: be passionate about something, create a personal brand, live your passion, be patient, make money eventually.

For me, identifying my passion is the hardest part. I LOVE building websites, vinyl, biking, architecture and lots of other things.  I find it SO hard to focus on one thing. The internet has made it way easier to share your passion.

Here is somebody who has definitely found his passion: he loves riding elevators.  And has a youtube channel filled with 536 videos of himself riding different models of elevators.  Yes, you read that correctly.

Absolutely brilliant.  As of this writing he has had over 4.5 million views in total of all of his videos.

Go check him out.

Best Comedy Albums (not my list)

The brilliant and funny Marc Maron has a list today of Five Funniest Comedy Albums that changed my life.

In the comments, he also mentions Albert Brooks’ Comedy Minus One.

And considering that its been long out of print, I don’t feel that badly about posting this link for a place to download it.

I’d have to think a little longer f0r my list.  It would definitely include Emo Philips E=MO^2 as well.

Pixel Perfect

I’ve been doing a bunch of freelance work since moving and am continually amazed at the weird and diverse selections of web projects that I somehow manage to find. Most are pretty fun little projects, building something useful to somebody for something. A lot of these low hanging fruit are building xhtml/css templates, typically for WordPress.

I have a bunch of rules when it comes to these jobs. For example, I only hand over work once I’ve received money. I’d like to think most of them are equally reasonable. The latest addition to the list is use of the terms pixel perfect, especially if they are in bold.

It means nothing, because there is going to be somebody using WebTV, Seamonkey, Shiira or Maxthon (yes, those are all real web browsers) which will render some crazy thing differently that will never, ever be caught in any testing scenario ever.

Is it important to do thing the right way? ABSOLUTELY.

Is it important to test the rendering and graceful degradation of your execution in all modern browsers? OF COURSE.

Will there be some silly reason why you had to compromise? PROBABLY.
(our CMS strips out all span tags!)

Will it look the same in every browsers? Consult the internet:
http://www.dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

There is no certification exam for web developers or designers, so judge us on the work we produce, how good we are to work with, and we’ll do the same.

If I included a line on my resume that I would only drink organic tea at precisely 10:20 every morning, would you hire me or think that I was difficult to work with?

Investing in the Future

I have in my hand a copy of HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith.

It’s concise and fantastic. And I think it represents the direction things are going on the web.
I’ve been doing web development as a full-time job for 7 years now. I remember once I dove in, and first bought Designing with Web Standards [the orange one] and Eric Meyer on CSS.

Since then, I’ve done a ton of work with PHP, some Rails work, a year of JSP/ Struts and a lot of Javascript.
I’ve worked executing the visions of many visual designers. And have designed and created many user interfaces along the way.

About a year and a half ago, I started investing heavily in working with Adobe Flex. At the time, I believed it promised a lot of great simplification in building Rich Internet Applications. At the time, the promise of having the AIR runtime to deploy to a desktop app and a great tool for building rich interfaces won me over. I went to one spectacular conference, met a ton of great people, and built some cool projects. The biggest draw at the time was the ability to make desktop apps in AIR work nearly the same as applications viewed in the browser in the Flash plugin. Sure, maybe one day it would work in Mobile devices too.

Anyway, I’ve had a bunch of transition in my life and have been re-evaluating and re-focusing.

I think that with runtimes like Adobe AIR and Appcelerator’s Titanium Desktop and Mobile, investing heavily in HTML5, CSS3 and all of the badass things one can do with Canvas. Anyway, I’m done wasting my time with Flex, and I’m more excited about the future of web standards and browsers than I ever have been.

It’s a good thing A Book Apart isn’t selling this book in stores, because it’s readable in about 30 minutes, and not anything you’ll ever refer back to. I’m glad I bought my copy, and I’m happy to pass it along to anybody who wants to buy me a sandwich. I recommend it, but more for what it represents than what it actually contains.

I’m looking forward to a few new publications coming out in the next several months, and think that the new service from Think Vitamin is a much better resource to start learning.

I hope to continue to become even more expert in the DOM and browser-based web technologies.