Recent pick­ings on the web have been rather fruit­ful lately, so I decided it’d be a good time to share them:

~ The proper way to use the Photoshop Colour Replacement Tool over on Veerle’s journal is a rather good read.

~ iTunes Library Updater: The best — and only? — way to prop­erly clean your iTunes lib­rary on Windows. Worked won­ders for mine.

~ Veerle’s journal itself. Recently redesigned, it’s received a lot of com­ple­ments and atten­tion from across the web. Seeing as how the design is well thought out on so many levels, that’s not surprising.

~ If Microsoft was in charge of the iPod pack­aging, what would it look like? A rather nice video visu­al­ising the dif­fer­ent mar­ket (and thus mar­ket­ing) Microsoft and Apple have.

~ High qual­ity (print qual­ity even!) PhotoShop brushes ran­ging from a ‘Fresh Foliage’ col­lec­tion to ‘Worn’ ones (linked at the bot­tom) by Jason Gaylor. It’d be an under­state­ment to say they’re good.

~ WTF 2.0 About how it’s not about cool stuff, but how to make money from cool stuff. And how mobile (unsur­pris­ingly) got thrown out of the web 2.0 mix, but is mak­ing bucket loads of dosh.

That’s all folks!

Sooo…guess who’s occupy­ing the top-spot, the prime loc­a­tion, the num­bero uno place at Yahoo! for the search ‘Webdesign Portfolio’ ?

But what does one write on such an occa­sion? Is “I’d like to thank my fam­ily, my friends, the guys at gameover.com, my cli­ents, Programmers Notepad, all the nice people at Adobe — oh and Johnny, couldn’t have done it without you! *cue tears* ” really over the top? A tad too much eh?

Well, how about “Thank you for this token of your recog­ni­tion of my hard work and pure SEO, but I refuse to believe that my Journal is a bet­ter web­design port­fo­lio than my Portfolio. It’s not right I tell you, It’s not right!”. Is that bet­ter? Make me seem like an ungrate­ful so-and-so? Hmm, you’re prob­ably right..

So what does one say on such a joy­ous occa­sion?

Not that we didn’t see it com­ing, but just to let you know: WordPress 2.0 is out! New fea­tures include a redone admin cen­ter — I’ll play with it later. Asymtomatic has provided a nice list of changes. WordPress.org itself has received a makeover too; it actu­ally looks pro­fes­sional now. Good stuff. As always, muchos kudos to Ryan Boren, Matthew Mullenweg, and the Shuttle crew (if my info’s correct).

Get your WordPress 2 at the new down­load centre.
A new K2 Beta for WordPress 2.0 is avail­able too — K2 Beta One Revision 133 is at Binary Bonsai, as always.

Meet Breton, a very sens­ible bloke, who just pro­duced the most insight­ful com­ment I’ve ever read about Web 2.0. In a post on JeffCroft.com called “Web 2.0 != AJAX”, he said the following:

So… web 2.0 is about focus­ing on user exper­i­ence and best prac­tices? How is that dis­tinct from what a web designer is sup­posed to do any­way? Does it mat­ter what tools you accom­plish it with? Yeah it’s great that all this new tech­no­logy is avail­able now. But it doesn’t mean that people that weren’t thought­ful and skilled at usab­il­ity before, will sud­denly become amaz­ing design­ers thanks to all these lovely new frameworks.

It just seems like we’re all just excited about these new amaz­ing things we can do with JavaScript/Ruby/CSS that we come up with all these hypey buzzwords to make it seem access­ible to lay­men (and fail at that), and then drape it with a veil of legit­im­acy by try­ing to describe it as some­thing more, deeper, and newer, than just good design prac­tices com­bined with a good know­ledge of tech­no­logy.
~ source: Breton over at JeffCroft.com

He took the words out of my mouth he did.

Of course, the pur­pose of Jeff’s ini­tial post was to make clear that web 2.0 doesn’t mean Ajax. It doesn’t — but they’re both silly buzzwords nonetheless.

Since the September that never ended (the point where the unwashed masses — us — got on the inter­net), the web has been rife with buzzwords. New buzzwords came and old buzzwords went, or worse, kept on linger­ing wait­ing to be revived (I’m look­ing at you Web 1.964beta). Amongst all this mad­ness some people, try­ing to put some sub­stance into the buzz, have tried to redefine them.

A recent example of this is Cameron Moll’s recent art­icle on A List Apart. I must note here that rede­fin­ing wasn’t really the point of the art­icle, but some (read: quite a lot of) people (mis)took it as such. In this art­icle Cameron talks about re-alignment versus redesign of web­sites, explain­ing that an incre­mental approach to design­ing an exist­ing site is quite a good thing. You can think of it as evol­u­tion versus revolu­tion; the former might seem slower, but it does bring a lot more refine­ment than the latter.

Good advice right? Well I’d say so, but cer­tain people got hung up on the use of re-align, say­ing it brought a new word with new buzz, thus cre­at­ing con­fu­sion. People, get over it. New ways of using words to express ones ideas bet­ter are being cre­ated all the time. It’s the way lan­guage works. Just say­ing that restyl­ing vs. redesign already means redesign vs. re-align is ridicu­lous. Redesign used to be a broad term, being used for little tweaks as well as full-blown new designs of an exist­ing site. However, as time passed, redesign became syn­onym­ous with the full-blown new design of an exist­ing site. The May 1st Reboot and CSS Reboot events have pretty much cemen­ted this into the col­lect­ive mind of the web (no I’m not going to say blogosphere..yuk!). Ironically, this slag­ging of re-align only increases it’s expos­ure as a buzzword so I really feel they’re shoot­ing them­selves in the foot. Others have dif­fer­ent reas­ons for call­ing it harm­ful.

That same Anne (who I had the pleas­ure of meet­ing at the last Happy Clog meet­ing) men­tioned in the a former post that xHTML has quite a num­ber of down­sides. As these include for­ward and back­wards com­pat­ib­il­ity, they’re quite hefty. The upsides how­ever seem to be zilch at present (except­ing, maybe, search engine optim­isa­tion). HTML, on the other hand, seems to be get­ting a proper spec, writ­ten with the web in mind. I myself have half a mind to change over to HTML 5 once the spec’s fin­ished. Note that this is simply a recon­sidered pos­i­tion and has noth­ing to do with inflam­mat­ory dead horses.

Moving on to the curi­ous post on SimpleBits about using ‘CSS patch’ instead of ‘CSS hack’ to get rid of the neg­at­ive con­nota­tion that’s asso­ci­ated with the term ‘hack’ (even though it has noble begin­nings, one can’t deny that due to server crack­ers being known hack­ers, hack has a neg­at­ive mean­ing now). Thus it’s handy to use another term when you’re explain­ing your hacks to Pointy Haired Bosses. This doesn’t mean that CSS hacks should be endorsed or encour­aged, in my eyes it’s still a last resort.

So do I dis­agree with everything in those twin-posts? Nah, Web 2.0 is just as mean­ing­less as three (or was it four?) years ago. After see­ing the OSCON key­note by Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 I have some hope that server-side client-focussed (i.e. stuff requires noth­ing extra of the user but does make life easier for them) innov­a­tions like Identity 2.0 seems to be get as much atten­tion as the client-side stuff (like remote JavaScript).

That’s another thing. JavaScript has become cool, nay, accept­able again! After the night­mare that was DHTML, we’ve now got a foot­balling cleans­ing acronym for ‘cool JavaScript stuff’ called AJAX. (Thanks Adaptive Path!) Even though they saw it as ‘a new approach to web applic­a­tions’ it seems that everything con­nec­ted to JavaScript has the tend­ency to over hype bey­ond belief. Compared to DHTML (Dynamic HTML) AJAX does have one sav­ing grace. It provides a method of shov­ing more heavy lift­ing to the server-side where, in my mind, it belongs (cer­tainly if the mobile web ever takes off).

So are there any buzzwords worth slag­ging hard? Absolutely.

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