Recent articles in personal (page 9 of 12)

1. May 25, 2006 Web Standards Group tonight

   I'm speaking at the Melbourne Web Standards Group tonight about techniques for producing rounded corners on the Web. Come along if you're in town---free pizza for all!

2. May 23, 2006 Don't Look Now

   Would those unfortunate souls who follow my previously nonexistent Flickr postings please avert their eyes? I figured I should put that 2GB/month of storage I get from my Flickr Pro account to good use, so I've started uploading my entire library of digital photos, starting with those I took in 2000 when got my first digital camera. By and large, they are neither skillful nor pretty. What they are is a record of my past that I would hate to lose in the event of crime or calamity, so onto Flickr they go. I promise to keep the espeically hideous ones private, and as for the rest? Well, the goatee was a passing phase. Let's leave it at that, shall we?

3. May 19, 2006 Kev Eats Vegemite

   Haven't been listening to Lost Out Back? Check out our latest episode, in which I try Vegemite for the very first time. Can you guess if I liked it? If you're not hip to this whole Podcasting groove, you can sign up to be notified by email every time we post a new episode so you can listen to it online.

4. May 9, 2006 Impro: Heaven or Hell

   This Saturday, May 13th, I'm performing in Heaven or Hell, part of Impro Melbourne's Unforeseen Stories, a series of long-form improvised theatre performances. Heaven or Hell was developed and performed at last year's Comedy Festival, so it promises to be a funny show.

5. May 3, 2006 Keeping Up is for Suckers

   Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog is always great reading, particularly if you're interested in how people take in information. Though it has a definite tilt towards the world of Java development, most of the articles speak in general terms about learning and design -- you won't see any code here. Kathy's recent article The myth of "keeping up" really hit home with me. Loosely speaking, my day job is to monitor the entire realm of web technology. Realistically, this is one of those areas that is bigger than one person's brain. Even if I spent 24 hours a day reading about the latest web technology (let alone reporting on it), I wouldn't be able to keep up.

   So... it's time to let that go. You're not keeping up. I'm not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything. Sure, you'll find the guy who is absolutely cutting-edge up to date on some technology, software upgrade, language beta, whatever. But when you start feeling inferior about it, just think to yourself, "Yeah, but I bet he thinks Weezer is still a cool new band..."

   I never liked Weezer anyway. Kathy offers plenty of good advice for being selective and efficient about what you choose to stay on top of. She mentions jumping on aggregators, tools that collect information from many sources and distill it down into an efficient view. My aggregator of choice is BlogBridge (I even contribute code to the project, which is open source and cross platform), which has a whole range of subtle but indispensable tools that allow me to filter my information intake according to the amount of time I have available on any given day. Another item of advice that Kathy offers is to track down an expert in any field you want to learn and get a breakdown what things you absolutely must learn, what things you probably should learn, what things would be nice to learn, and what things you can ignore. Kathy goes on to suggest that technical publishers like SitePoint (where I work) should be thinking about these issues too, rather than just pumping out bricks of undigestable knowledge.

   There's an opportunity for all of us to help our users (or start a business around helping people reduce the info overload/pressure-to-keep-up stress most of us feel).

   I personally think SitePoint is doing a pretty decent job of this already, but there is always room for improvement.