Archive for May, 2003

Heading down to Fast Company’s annual RealTime event being held this year in Miami. Should be interesting — it’s my first time going to one of these in the 2.5 years I’ve worked at FC. Have never been to Miami for any length of time before either, so I’m looking forward to that.

Wow, a fantastic little vacation to Moose Meadow Lodge in Waterbury, Vermont. It rained probably 75% of the time, but good times were had nonetheless.

After following, what we thought were, fresh moose tracks into the woods for a few hours with no luck, we finally met a moose on the side of the road. Several times. Turns out this moose stayed in pretty much the same spot on the side of the highway for the better part of a full day. In fact this same moose was still there at 9pm that same night, drinking water in the gutter and lifting its head as we drove by. I took some other pictures as well. Click the moose for a slideshow.

I can’t recommend the Moose Meadow Lodge enough — hiking trails, stocked pond, easy access to Stowe, Montpeiler, Burlington, Ben & Jerry’s factory, etc., great hosts and great food.

A couple more days off before going back to work. It’s going to be hard after an unwind like this…

Tomorrow we’re off to unplug for a few days in Vermont. Four days of… well, it looks like rain. But that’s ok. We’ll make the best of it. I’m hoping to get some Scrabble playing in. See you next week…

Today while crossing the street, I mouthed the words “thank you” in a very Clay Aiken-like manner to the kind motorist that allowed me by. I couldn’t belive myself. I didn’t, however, flutter my eyelids. Man that is annoying. If you have no idea what I’m talking about… be thankful.

Thanks to those who wrote in regarding my earlier curiosity about the separate styling of the number generated within an ordered list. The good news: you can do it with CSS2. The bad news: it’ll only work in Opera. Oh well. I could wrap the content of an li tag with span and be done with I suppose — for now.

Kalsey Consulting Group has posted an interesting method of displaying CSS tabs with submenus using nested unordered lists. What’s nice is that the un-styled version makes a heck of a lot of sense when it’s done this way. Apparently a lot of the CSS was based on my earlier Simplified CSS Tabs example. Cool.

I’m sure it’s possible, isn’t it? I’ve searched high and low and can’t seem to figure out if it can be done. Should be simple — and I’m hoping it is: Can the number that is generated by an ordered list be styled seperately from what is contained within the li tag with CSS?

For instance, I’d like to bold the number, but not what’s in the li. Giving font-weight: bold to the ol doesn’t do it. And giving font-weight: bold to the li tag just bolds the whole thing. I realize I could add a span in there, but that seems uneccesary.

Seems like a completely logical thing to do — give the number special treatment like bold or a different color or font size.

I’m waiting for someone to make me feel stupid. And hoping…

In an effort to help the CSS Zen Garden grow, I’ve submitted my own theme, and Dave Shea has kindly accepted and posted it. It was fun working on this — mostly because the structure was already there. You only need create your own CSS file.

While I didn’t set out to create it in an A List Apart style, it did turn out that way. Perhaps the stroked fonts…

Anyhow, I was inspired to contribute to the garden — it’s already a great resource to point people, and hopefully it continues to grow.

On a related note, there’s an interesting post regarding XBL and the Zen Garden over at Dave Hyatt’s blog. Dave even demonstrates in plain English a simple example using XBL and CSS. Looks interesting, although only supported by Mozilla. I’m still a fan of XSLT because it is more standardized — but realize its limitations.

Part of the comments to this post talk about the extra span tags throughout the Zen Garden’s XHTML. They are there so that the multitude of designers that work on it can have the utmost flexibility. Sure they’re not necessary — in fact I didn’t use many of them. But that’s not the point of the excercise.

Great: when you see a band live and it’s better than the record. No-so-great: when the live show doesn’t live up to the record. Unfortunately, when we went out last night and saw The Libertines, it was more of the latter. Their record is very excellent — old school Clash-esque punk, with little hidden melodies. But the show was a little too much on the sloppy side.

It was still nice to get out and see some music though.

Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden is a fantastic idea for several reasons. Like others have been saying today, it can and will hopefully be a place to direct people who doubt the ability of building a site with web standards and CSS that is also a pleasure to look at.

It can be done, and now there is “tranquil” place to do so. I especially like that he’s named it a Zen garden — a calm place to soothe the naysayers. I’m hoping to add something eventually, that is if I can come up with a design that’s worthy of being alongside what is already there.