Jeff Carlson (.Thought)

TidBITS Redesign Is Now Live!

This has been a long time coming, and now I'm happy to announce that the redesigned Web site for TidBITS is now live. The backend was built by Glenn Fleishman, I did the graphics and HTML/CSS, and publishers Adam and Tonya Engst herded Glenn and I.

We'll be talking more about the redesign in TidBITS in the coming days and weeks, so I won't go into much detail here. But I want to defend myself a little before the Web designers out there and say that the priority was on shipping, so the CSS and HTML isn't as clean as it should be (and it's not quite 100% valid with the W3C's validator); but that will be rectified as we go along.

The last time I did any significant Web design work was when we used tables to do layout (plus a bunch of other ugly hacks). Glenn and I even wrote a 1,000 page book about Web design using Adobe GoLive way back when. Doing the TidBITS site was a clear revelation: there are no tables that aren't comprised of actual tabular data; it's all CSS; and CSS is really a wonderful thing.

Web Design for Print Designers - Resources

My second presentation at the HOW Design Conference was "Web Design for Print Designers." Here are a list of resources I mentioned.

My apologies if you looked for this last night; I ended up crashing hard at about 9 pm (the first night I've slept more than about 5 hours in too many days)!

• A List Apart, great resource for Web designers.
• Article: "Quick CSS Mockups with Photoshop" by Casper Voogt
• CSS Zen Garden, site that really demonstrates the power of CSS.
• Joe Clark's Web site, a rich resource for accessibility information.
• PDF Enhancer, by Apago (for the woman who asked about ways to deal with large PDF files online).

Thanks again to everyone attended the session!

Slate Redesign

I hit Slate just now and see that they've done a redesign; a horrendously bad redesign. I thought at first that the CSS stylesheet hadn't yet loaded, but that's the new look.

Free Real World GoLive 6 PDF

Glenn and I (to be fair, Glenn did all the work) have released the complete contents of our book Real World Adobe GoLive 6 as a 23 MB downloadable PDF. See Glenn's weblog post about why.

Also, in response to this action, Doc Searls wonders, "Since books on software have such a short shelf life, how about if publishers (or manufacturers like Adobe) pay guys like Glenn and Jeff to maintain blogs on the subject?"

I think it's a great question. I don't get any ongoing payment for maintaining a companion Web site, though I think my book advances have been a little more due to agreeing to do a site (I can't quantify it, though). I know I'd certainly like an ongoing check... maintaining a companion site ends up being a lot more work than one would expect, work that you hope is being reimbursed by ongoing sales of your book.

Design Feedback

I'm curious to know what you think about how this page is designed: Is it readable? Is the type too big? Click the comment link below if you have an opinion. Thanks!