My favorite part: “Conclusion: Terminate Relationship.”

This is a great commentary on the way we communicate with each other online. That little slider graph on the right side says it all. Lots of typos and emoticons, no capitalization or brevity. Who wants to have to hit the shift key every time there’s supposed to be a capital letter? Actually that’s a serious question. I never use capitalization in off-the-cuff emails, chat, or texts. It’s a total waste of time. I figure I’ve probably saved over an hour just in the last six months by not using capital letters.

The thing that makes me sad is that at my company we’re still mostly using IE6. IE6!!! That means when I develop web applications I have to make them compatible with Firefox, IE6, IE7, and now IE8, which all render websites differently. IE8.1 says it has the ability to render websites in different compatibility modes, but I’ve tried this feature before and it doesn’t work. Well, I should point out that it does work for 90% of the markup, but the 10% of the markup that it doesn’t render correctly is always inevitably the 10% of the markup that ends up being the culprit. Let’s just say I’ll believe the compatibility mode feature when I see it. And even then, I’ll probably actually open up the other browsers and check just to be sure.

Microsoft: thank you for attempting to make a fast, compatible browser. I will never forgive you for IE6, but thank you anyway.

*UPDATE:* I guess this was an April Fools joke. I did think the server-side code decompiler was weird – I sort of glossed over that section. Anyway, way to fool me the day before April 1st, Smashing Magazine. Smashing Magazine – 1, Brianmcculloh.com – 0.

I have been putting off this upgrade for a while, but I was forced to do it when my hosting account got suspended and I realized I needed to optimize and upgrade my Wordpress databases. I believe Wordpress has some trouble indexing really old posts, and someone apparently tried to access a post that was over a year old, giving me a CPU error. At least that’s what my hosting support told me.

Anyway, take a look at this screenshot of the new dashboard. It’s beautiful. You can write posts directly on the dashboard. I like how it puts your drafts right in front of you to remind you to actually finish them. Look at that. Apparently I was going to post about the Large Hadron Collider a while back. I wonder what in the world I possibly had to say?

Go to Settings >> Themes to sample all the different Gmail themes. My personal favorite is Terminal:

The worst part about it is, he is thoroughly clueless as to current web standards. I doubt he has ever heard of XHTML. You can imagine his resistance when it was time to pass the reigns to me – a proper web developer – and I told him it would take a few weeks to turn his design into a table-less, properly written symphony of valid XHTML and CSS.

Since he had seniority over me and had a good reputation around the office for creating pretty nice-looking web pages that get the job done, it was hard for a brand new employee like me to get my point across. “You just don’t use tables for page structure anymore” is all I could tell him. His point was that it works. My point was that it’s wrong.

That’s when I turned to the interwebs for reinforcement. Every so often a very well-written article comes along on one of the web design blogs I read regarding exactly this sort of thing. Today I found another one of those articles, and if you are a new web developer at a company with its feet firmly planted in deprecated web standards, an old lazy web developer that needs a swift kick in the arse, or somewhere in between (as I now am), you should take a gander at this article from Smashing Magazine. And if you don’t already subscribe to this blog, you should do that too.

Here is the article: 12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean.

It’s really not anything new, it’s just a very well-organized summary of all the things we should already know, conveniently packaged into a brief blog post complete with shiny code screenshots!