The Unheard Word

It’s already two weeks after the event, so it’s about time I put pen to paper (so to speak) and blogged about Web Directions South. (Actually, it’s about time I blogged about anything at all, it’s been so long!)

Plenty of people have talked about the sessions and how much they gained from them. I’ve found it fascinating to see the different areas in which different people found value.

For myself, because of my hearing (or lack thereof) it’s not so much about the sessions: it’s about the people.

For those of us in Perth, this is just a reminder that the Perth WSG meeting will be tomorrow night. Nick Cowie is presenting on making web forms both attractive and accessible. Nick is a great guy who really knows his stuff, and together with the networking fun (and the nibblies! and the cheap drinks available at the bar!) it will be a great evening.

When I say “Set your own standards”, I’m not talking about creating our own web standards here but about the quality of our work.

Marketing guru Seth Godin writes, in his article Better than they deserve:

Letting your customers set your standards is a dangerous game, because the race to the bottom is pretty easy to win. Setting your own standards — and living up to them — is a better way to profit. Not to mention a better way to make your day worth all the effort you put into it.

Did that ever strike a chord with me!

My 17-inch MacBook Pro laptop shares the same screen resolution as my 20-inch iMac. Obviously, to fit the same number of pixels on the screen, those pixels are going to be a lot smaller on the MBP than on the iMac.

I have good eyesight, but there are many sites I view on the MBP where I find I have to bump up the font size because the text is painfully small.

A version of one of my favourite Firefox extensions has now come to Safari. Safari’s offerings still can’t quite match Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar, but with Safari Tidy it’s now possible to see at a glance if a web page validates.

For me, one of the great beauties of working for myself is that, to a large degree, I can create my own challenges. Work doesn’t have to get stale, which has the added benefit of positively impacting my whole life. (Hmmm hang on. My work is my whole life. Hmmm)

Lest We Forget

On ANZAC Day, April 25, 2006, it seems evident to me that we have all but forgotten.

The words of Rudyard Kipling, in a song I learned as a youngster at primary school, are poignant in today’s pro-war world.

Well, if Doug Bowman had a hand in the design of Google’s new public beta of Google Calendar and said it’s a really good appplication to use, even compared to iCal — that was good enough for me and I went to try it.

A big thumbs-down to Google because it doesn’t work with Safari.

It’s been a while since I posted, so this seems a good time to mention that I’ve been invited to speak at TODCon 8 in Orlando, Florida, in May 2006.

A fellow Webweaver is “switching” from PC to Mac, and asked the Mac users on the email list what we consider to be our must-have Mac software aside from what is already pre-installed. So as a follow-up to the Apple Mail post, I decided to compile a list of my favourites.