You won’t win through frivolous activities such as retweeting, posting a comment, or Facebookery. You’ll win by actually using Authentic Jobs in a way that benefits you. Use the site to set yourself up to find a job or land some freelance work anytime between now and December 4, and you’re automatically entered to win.

The contest makes its participants discover the product it’s promoting. Sure, retweeting and refacebooking to win prizes does spread the buzz, but if you’re confident enough in what you’ve built, it will do the talking. And so will its satisfied customers on Twitter and Facebook.

Plus, it helps to have fabulous prizes at stake.

Does your insanely brilliant product have to shun the marketing machines of Twitter and Facebook? Of course not. But you can always be a little more creative with your promotions, can’t you?

Related reading:

• Skittles + social media = priceless
• Is Simler a new social networking model or something more familiar?
• Facebook chooses consistency over rounded corners
• Web Trend Alert: Virtual business card sites
• Video: TDH on Pownce going Mobile

Two cutting-edge web technologies, two water-related metaphors, two print and electronic book guides. HTML5 and Google Wave seem to have a lot in common these days.

HTML5

The Dive Into HTML5 site is the hub of Mark Pilgrim’s drafts for his book of the same name. He’s uploaded 4 chapters so far, and lays the foundation for building HTML5 pages from the ground up.

Aside from the excellent typesetting—feels wondrous to read it like a classic book, complete with old style illustrations and drop caps from public domain images—web designers and developers will definitely appreciate how the text will remain under a shareable, remixable Creative Commons license even when the dead-tree version comes out.

Google Wave

The Complete Guide to Google Wave site is also an unofficial guide to new Google product Wave. It’s created by Lifehacker editors Gina Trapani and Adam Pash, with 8 chapters and two appendices on maximizing the power of this real-time tool.

It’s published on a wiki, and true to its collaborative spirit and Wave’s, everyone is encouraged to contribute to the Guide. The DRM-free PDF comes out this month; the book version in January 2010.

Grab your copy

Publishing the contents of an entire book online is not new, and it is akin to artists give their music away digitally but charge for the physical version. But it garners attention because it’s not the same format as the constantly-updated blogs that pop up when hot, profitable topics do.

So compared to blogs, does the “online book” metaphor work? The wiki format does seem like a good way to go, but I would think the convenience of blogs both in the front and back ends wins out.

The more important questions however: will others follow in the footsteps of Mark Pilgrim, Gina Trapani, and Adam Pash? Which types of books should have an all-access web counterpart? When is it profitable enough to do so? As a consumer and a lover of all things free, it’s an attractive and admirably fearless choice.

Related reading:

• Really? Everything I Know About CSS Is Wrong?
• The next revolution will come in waves. Google Waves.
• The circus continues: Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer
• rel, rev, and HTML5
• Mozilla forces Internet Explorer into standards compliance with plugins

Actually, since list-style blog posts on design trends and other pretty things have been popular for a few years now, I’m sure the backlash has been happening for a while.

Now, it does make sense to organize your a complex article into easily digestible chunks, especially in a not exactly 100% comfortable to read environment such as the Web. It’s good to keep tabs on great new typefaces and graphics in your arsenal.

However, list articles have gained a bad reputation for other reasons because quality is put on the backburner. And there are a number parties responsible:

1. The marketers: It’s easy to thank SEO for this phenomenon. A significant portion of internet marketing involves social media, and high-traffic sites like Digg just love the list format. It’s killer linkbait.
2. The readers: The problem is lists don’t always contain what people need to truly learn. A lot of these people don’t know any better, and the explosion of lists distracts them from laying the foundations first.
3. The internet: Why? There are great lists out there; people will need to separate the wheat from the chaff. But maybe, it’s the very nature of the Web that mutates the need to find the good stuff into the need to find as much stuff as possible or the quickest, easiest solution to a problem.

Related reading:

• Short URLs, WebKit’s CSS animations & scrollbars, DiggBars: everything old is new (and hip?) again
• Web Trend Alert: Virtual business card sites
• rel, rev, and HTML5
• Linkbait is Boring
• Facebook chooses consistency over rounded corners

There is such a rigid and finite nature to typography that it is staggering to imagine what the implications of a “dynamic font” would be. Is this how future fonts will be made and how they will behave?

Related reading:

• FontStruct knows how to sell itself
• Wisdump redesign concept, part 2
• What’s on your Web Typography wishlist? The W3C is asking
• Web Trend Alert: Virtual business card sites
• The ugliest websites in the world

To commemorate the closing of internet dinosaur and free web hosting service Geocities today, October 26, geeky web comic XKCD “redesigned” its site to match the horrible aesthetic (or lack thereof) rampant during the ’90s. Low-fi images (including the requisite “under construction” sign), web-safe colors, <table>s, <blink>, <marquee>, a hit counter, and a “best viewed in Netscape Navigator” disclaimer—it’s all in there. I think the only thing missing is an actual comic about Geocities itself.

Is it safe to say we are finally rid of those horrible-looking and horribly-functioning things now that Geocities is gone? We will always have that side of the spectrum. But it’s a good reminder of how far we’ve come:

1. IE6 is now the most outdated browser instead of the most modern. (That doesn’t make its continued existence a good thing though.)
2. If you disable images and stylesheets, webpages will make sense.
3. Descriptive hyperlinks matter (mostly to curry favor with Google, but still).
4. Despite Yahoo!’s terrifying propensity to run its acquisitions to the ground (worried about Flickr and Delicious yet?), it’s easier and cheaper than ever to run your own website.

Still, the timeless adage remains: back up and be prepared! You never know when life will go Geocities on you.

Related reading:

• Eric Meyer dissects WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008
• Campaigns to kill the web browser that just won’t die: Internet Explorer 6
• Which IE6 compatibility fix are you?
• Web Standards Project will draft a web design curriculum framework
• The ugliest websites in the world

I don’t think that Simler will be a Facebook or Twitter killer, but there are several features that interest me enough to not stop thinking about it. (That’s gotta be a good sign right? Knowing how that went for Twitter?)

• Instead of reading and discussing topics with your friends because they are your friends, Simler lets you find the topics (tags) that interest you, so you can consume and create content under them. You could say it’s a reformatted message board or chatroom, so is it really a new thing?
• The tagging concept keeps me on the fence as well. I like the idea of trying to define yourself with these keywords, but the novelty wears off when you realize it’s not much different from the way we list interests in virtual profiles and slambooks. And what does it mean when I add the IE6 tag to my profile? It definitely does not mean I like using it! What about the “Awkward Silence” tag? Eventually it will become a race to see who comes up with the wittiest name.
• I’m not sure it will actually scale. Will there be a way to organize the tags a user collects as time passes? Surely some people’s egos will find anything less than a thousand tags to be insufficient to describe their interesting selves. Then again, the Twitter era answer to that is: when there’s an API, there’s a way.

Simler poses interesting questions regarding how we pursue our interests on the Web. Do you join groups because your friends are in it? the cool kids are in it? or because you’re interested in the discussions? Are you tired of the insipid updates filling up their live streams? Should you take a more active role in choosing the content you see? Is the level of control for doing so enough?

Related reading:

• Web Trend Alert: Virtual business card sites
• Skittles + social media = priceless
• The next revolution will come in waves. Google Waves.
• The Authentic Jobs “no retweet necessary” contest
• Facebook chooses consistency over rounded corners

A gallery that only cares about what your site looks like when it’s printed? Ironic, but that’s what printFancy is all about. Remember those niche design inspiration galleries? This site is obviously another example of that. But that’s not all.

Unfortunately, the fact remains that people still print webpages so they can read them in a more comfortable manner; it’s not very environment-friendly, and frankly, weird behavior to people who are in front of the computer 24/7. (Weirder than using IE6.) But it’s a web designer’s responsibility to accommodate that need. No excuses. Even if sometimes, it does feel like creating a whole other website (except if you’re a minimalist, I guess).

And when you manage to create an effective print version of a site, then printFancy is another opportunity to show it off, another incentive to excel in design. Which is not just about creating something looks pretty, but something that fills a need. In this case, the need to print sites out.

(Then maybe the gallery can have a section like this, and one wouldn’t have to hold a laptop the way Jason Santa Maria did.)

Related reading:

• More niche design inspiration galleries popping up (do we really need them?)
• Unmatched Style’s video podcast: the next step for inspiration galleries?
• Web trend alert: Single Serving Sites
• Web trend alert: image bookmarking sites
• Two lightweight CSS grid frameworks: the 1KB and the 1-liner

Kottke’s unread posts notification in the title bar

It’s not just web applications like Gmail or Twitter that can enforce the “push” instead of “pull” format that is associated with the real-time web. If you spend a significant amount of time browsing Jason Kottke’s site you’ll probably notice the title bar changing when a new post gets published.

I added a new feature to kottke.org over the weekend: live updating on the home page. If you leave kottke.org open in your browser (with JavaScript on) and I post a new link, the page will display a message urging you to refresh to view some new posts. The page title changes too, so if you have it up in a tab, you can tell at a glance if something’s new. Right now the page checks for new posts every ten minutes, but that could change depending on server load, etc. Thanks to Twitter Search and Tumblr for the inspiration.

Developer hack: Kottke didn’t give details on how he did it, but this script is doing the work.

Infinite scrolling

Paginated websites make digesting content more manageable, but sometimes you just want to consume as much as possible too. Imagine devouring as many Google search results and Flickr images as you can.

Infinite scrolling—at least the hacks mentioned below—load the next page when you’re done browsing the current one. The next and previous page links are still there, so you have both options to choose from.

User hack: install Greasemonkey and the AutoPagerize user script.

Developer hack: use the jQuery plugin or the WordPress plugin.

FFFFOUND!’s keyboard navigation

Don’t underestimate the efficiency of the keyboard. At image-bookmarking site FFFFOUND!, using the keyboard is the best way to get around.

Developer hack: install paging_keys_js.

Related reading:

• The next revolution will come in waves. Google Waves.
• Google Chrome: time to reinvent the web browser
• Encouraged Commentary, JavaScript, and the great experience
• Web trend alert: Single Serving Sites
• Short URLs, WebKit’s CSS animations & scrollbars, DiggBars: everything old is new (and hip?) again

There’s little else on each page except a rectangular area found dead-center, filled with icons representing the tons of new ways we can be contacted, befriended, stalked. We have the Web 2.0 era and all the insanely creative social media icon designers to thank for this phenomenon. (Sometimes blogs and other related sites are linked to in these cards, but who has time for those anymore?) If you don’t have the chops to whip up your own, services like Card.ly come to the rescue.

But that’s just the visual side of the metaphor being brought online. Business cards are meant to be exchanged because of the information they contain, so what good would these sites be without technological mojo? We have great frameworks like vCard, hCard, and perhaps the open identity systems like OpenID and oAuth. We also have companies working in the mobile space or have devices of their own (more here).

Then there are the lifestreaming apps, like FriendFeed, Tumblr, and chi.mp, which blur the lines between keeping one’s social accounts in one place and keeping up-to-date with said person at the same time.

How does one unassuming professional looking to establish an online presence actually choose from these possibilities? Social media evangelists pretty much recommend we get on everywhere, as many as and as much as we can help it. The goal is to be ubiquitous rather than obscure.

I have to wonder when we’ll ever reach true unification. Home phone. Work phone. Fax. Mobile phone. Email address. IM handle. Static homepage. Blog. MySpace page. Facbeook profile. LinkedIn profile. Facebook Fan Page. Twitter username. Then this—all of this.

How do you identify yourself offline and online? Do you pick one, or unload a bunch of URLs, aliases, and digits on your potential new client/drinking buddy/love-of-your-life? Is this whole business card business even a suitable metaphor, or yet another idea startups can cash in on? And we’re not even bringing up identity theft here.

Related reading:

• Skittles + social media = priceless
• Is Simler a new social networking model or something more familiar?
• Web trend alert: Single Serving Sites
• The Prettier Side of Aggregation
• Facebook chooses consistency over rounded corners

Noah Stokes rants about the lack of professionalism in the web design industry. There are several reasons listed, ones involving IE6, Smashing Magazine posts, mentoring, and passion. But this first point got me thinking:

First, stop thinking your client is stupid. Your client is not stupid. I don’t care if they want an all Flash site sized at 800×600 with a dancing unicorn for the navigation. You may laugh at them behind their back, just remember, they laugh at you when OMG, your precious Tweeter is down. We are in the services industry. Get used to it. Your client is your lifeline. Show them the respect they deserve, even if they don’t deserve it.

Admit it: we’ve all mocked our clients and snickered at their choices at some point. A lot of us continue to do so.

There’s a lot to be said about the trials our kind face—dozens of comic strips tell the tale, Dilbert being the most prominent. But when did it become “cool” to act all holier-than-thou over project specifications? What sparked this trend to act like this misunderstood artist, this “chosen one” enduring torturous quests in the epic battle versus this monster of a client? Is it specific to this industry or happening elsewhere too?

Related reading:

• What’s your Internet like? (Hint for dealing with clients)
• Ten years of creating a better web: Google and A List Apart
• Opera teaches good web design with its Web Standards Curriculum
• Donate to Australian bushfire victims by buying SitePoint eBooks
• A “website designed by…” link is like a Louis Vuitton monogram