I have a 14-year-old niece. She used to want to be a rock star. Before that she wanted to be an act­ress. As of six months ago, what do you think she wants to be when she grows up? What’s the glam­or­ous, eman­cip­at­ing career of choice? Of course, she wants to be a Web designer. It’s such a glam­or­ous business!

~ source: Courtney Love’s views of the music busi­ness and ‘Napster’ (note that this piece is abso­lutely not about web design­ers at all.)

Ha! I wish.

Looking for a good and simple explan­a­tion of the cur­rently usable (and a few more) CSS select­ors? Roger Johansson has taken the time to com­pile them all into a 3 part art­icle. I can thor­oughly recom­mend it to people want­ing a nice over­view of what tools are avail­able to them in Cascading Style Sheets or just want to know what the heck “.new + #import­ant > a:focus:first-letter” means. An oldie but a goody.

Roger Johansson’s art­icle over at 456 Bereastreet on CSS 2.1 Selectors (part 1)

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.

Every day I see evid­ence that we are los­ing our abil­ity to under­stand and appre­ci­ate effect­ive design — trad­ing our appre­ci­ation and under­stand­ing for fet­ish.
~ source: Andy Rutledge

Andy Rutledge, you have no idea how much I agree with you.

I’d like to add that the design of this Journal was an exper­i­ment in design-porn. I found my past designs too aus­tere. I felt it lim­ited my abil­ity to fully express what I wanted to con­vey. I must say that I haven’t quite reached a point where I’m sat­is­fied with the amount of fluff in this design yet.

So get ready for more fluff (and a good cull­ing afterwards)!

edit: Whoops, thanks Bob!

Recently, Engadget invest­ig­ated whether the plural for ‘iPod Shuffle’ was ‘iPods Shuffle’ or ‘iPod Shuffles’ (Yeah, I know, but remem­ber, these people come from a coun­try where they won­der whether the plural for ‘Lego’ is ‘Legos’ or not).

Thank good­ness we’ve now got con­firm­a­tion it’s ‘iPod Shuffles’, ‘cos there was me think­ing it was iPuddles…

Browsing around on Flickr, I came upon a pretty funny screen shot of a Google search ‘ver­lee’.

So many people mis­spell my name on my blog that Google now rewards me for this by mak­ing Verlee also a top res­ult :-D
Originally uploaded by Veerle Pieters.

It reminded me of a funny thing I dis­covered just last week. A search for ‘Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía’ gets me the 4th spot, while I’m only point­ing to Veerle’s art­icle about it. The art­icle it self comes way below that at #12, on the 2nd page.

Why is that so weird? Veerle’s PageRank is 7, while mine is 6!

So what could be caus­ing that? It can’t be the xHTML doc­type and it can’t be the incom­ing links (she’s bound to have WAY more). So I star­ted look­ing at the source of the respect­ive pages. Mine has the con­tent right up there after (the min­imal) nav­ig­a­tion, while Veerle has the whole side­bar in first, before the content.

Although there’d have to be more detailed test­ing, I feel it’s safe to say that put­ting con­tent first — in your source code — is a good idea regard­ing your search engine rank­ing, espe­cially as it’s sup­posed to be more access­ible to screen readers.

This is also the reason I don’t have a ‘skip to con­tent’ button.