Why only eight? These were the eight that I listened to the most. These are the ones I felt were simply magnificent. Several quality albums missed the cut—Mogwai’s soundtrack album Les Revenants, my first exposure to CHVRCHES and the new album by Russian Circles that I’m just now getting into, for example. There were also some relative disappointments, like highly-anticipated albums by The National and Statistics that just didn’t grab me.

All that aside, here are the eight albums that defined my 2013:

8. Rogue Wave—Nightengale Floors

This wasn’t my favorite Rogue Wave album. In fact, it might have been my least favorite. But when you’re talking Rogue Wave, that’s still enough to get you on a list like this.

7. The Naked and Famous—In Rolling Waves

I only recently started listening to this one repeatedly. I’m not sure what was holding me up. I loved their last album, though I liked particular songs on it more than the whole thing (not something I do too often). This time around, I feel the album as a whole is better, though there haven’t been individual singles that have grabbed me quite like “Punching in a Dream” or “Girls Like You” did.

6. The Thermals—Desperate Ground

I often complain when bands “change direction” and lose me (Weezer, Radiohead, Wilco, Iron & Wine, etc.). The Thermals, on the other hand, seem completely resistant to change. When I listen to them (which is usually when I’m working and need to get shit done), I often plow through the entire discography, with little notice of when one album ends and another starts.

5. Yo La Tengo—Fade

There are some bands that I’ve loved forever—Yo La Tengo, Teenage Fanclub, and The Posies, for example. At this point, the albums they release don’t resonate with me quite the way they did 10–20 years go, but I’m still so happy to have their music in my life.

Teenage Fanclub bucked this trend in 2010 with the release of Shadows. It was their best album since 1997’s Songs From Northern Britain (an album I consider one of my ten all-time favorites). This year, Yo La Tengo dropped Fade and it was their best since 2003’s Summer Sun at the very least (and perhaps their best since 2000’s And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out).

4. Travis—Where You Stand

Travis’ first album since 2008’s raw and relatively lo-fi Ode to J. Smith was absolutely worth the wait. I don’t know if I should say it was their best since a certain album because 2007’s The Boy with No Name was really fucking good. The Boy with No Name was released after a four year gap while Where You Stand came after a five-year gap. It seems like there ain’t no Travis like a well-rested Travis.

3. Arcade Fire—Reflektor

This is the only album on my list that will get much love in “mainstream” end-of-year lists—even though it’s the weirdest one I picked. When I was younger, I think I erred on the side of acceptance when a band released new material. You know, like “this band is awesome and they recorded it so it must be awesome”. That explains why I actually liked Weezer’s Maladroit when it came out when in reality it was the first in a line of absolute pieces of shit. But now I’m too old for that. If it’s shit, I dismiss it as shit.

Yes, Arcade Fire is an incredibly pretentious band. But they remind me a bit of Oasis in the respect that they can absolutely back it up. The Suburbs was my favorite album of 2010 and actually competes for my choice of Best Album Ever. So, the expectations were high for Reflektor.

Then they released the single “Reflektor”. My reaction was “the fuck?” I mean, I probably listened to it twice before the album came out. It’s not that it was particularly bad. It just wasn’t really anything. I kept waiting for something to happen and it never did. I didn’t even stream the album before it’s release. But when it came out, I got it.

“Reflektor” kicks off the album. My reaction again was “the fuck?” Then “We Don’t Exist” came next. My reaction was, again, boredom. Up third was “Flashbulb Eyes”. That one’s not boring, but it’s more experimental and is clearly album filler. Things were not off to a good start. Then “Here Comes the Night Time” started.

“Oh shit,” I thought.

Arcade Fire was not only back, but that song sounded like the best Flaming Lips song since “Do You Realize??”. It was followed up with “Normal Person”, an absolutely epic track. And I mean “epic” as in actually epic. The rest of the album was a cross between incredible and more monotonous, boring filler. So weird. It turns out that 45 minutes of the album are absolutely incredible. 29 could have, honestly, been cut. It might have been a better album that way.

While there is a lot to dislike about Reflektor, any album that has “Here Comes the Night Time”, “Normal Person”, “Afterlife”, “Oh Eurydice”, and “Hey Orpheus” needs to compete for the top spot.

2. Surfer Blood—Pythons

In late 2011, Surfer Blood released the Tarot Classics EP. I loved 2010’s Astro Coast, but Tarot Classics was incredible. Starting about mid-way through 2012, I kept repeatedly saying on Twitter that Surfer Blood’s next album would be the album of the year in 2013. The album was delayed for what seemed like an eternity, but it finally was released in June. And hot damn was it good.

If I could start a band today, this is probably what it would sound like. Loud, energetic, melodic, harmonies, short and catchy songs… the album is just a power-pop gem.

1. GROUPLOVE—Spreading Rumours

I love this album. My kids love this album.

GROUPLOVE is basically the anti-Arcade Fire. They’re cheerful. They’re humble. And they just love to come to your town and perform a show for you. They also happened to release the album of the year (according to me).

I had a band in the late 1990s. I think the sound and entire essence of GROUPLOVE is what I was going for with that band. I failed miserably, but it’s really nice to hear someone finally pull it off. I had it in my head—I just couldn’t produce it. But they did.

2011′s Never Trust a Happy Song was probably the first time I purchased a band’s debut on the release date. The singles (which they released before the album came out) were just unreal. While Spreading Rumours might not boast singles like “Colours” and “Tongue Tied”, I think it is a better album as a whole. Don’t get me wrong—there are some great singles. Notably, “Raspberry” sounds like a perfectly executed cover of a Pixies song that never existed. “Ways to Go” is a track that took over my household like no other song… since “Tongue Tied”. “Borderlines and Aliens” revolves around a tremendous riff. Hannah takes control on “Didn’t Have To Go”.

Just so much to love. I hope you enjoy it.

While Spreading Rumours was my favorite album released in 2013, it wasn’t my most-listened to album of the year. By technicality, there’s another album that just missed out on the honor. That’s because it was released in November of 2012, but I only discovered it in 2013.

New To Me: The Babies—Our House on the Hill

Let me reiterate—if this album came out two months later, it would have been my Album of the Year for 2013. No contest. I read one review early on that said The Babies were like a cross between The Ramones and bubblegum pop. That pretty much sums it up.

The Playlist

I’ve put together a Spotify playlist featuring three tracks from each of my Top 8 albums.

Also, you should really try out a few tracks by The Babies…

I hope you enjoy it. Happy 2014!

I’m very proud of the work I did at PatientsLikeMe over the last four years (and I’m looking forward to seeing more reach production), I’ve also made many friendships there I know will be life-long. It’s a unique team and one I’ll be a part of forever, in some way. These aren’t easy things to walk away from and it’s going to be a big adjustment for me. PatientsLikeMe and I have been through a lot together and I’ll never forget that.

But the time has come to try something new and HubSpot has presented me a great opportunity. I’ll be joining the Social Inbox team as a Senior Front End Designer, working closely with former PLMer Jeff Dwyer. Jeff is one of my favorite people in the world and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to work with him again.

I’m looking forward to the challenge of working on a new project in a new space and meeting a bunch of new people (as well as working with some people I’ve known for a while like Jeff and Joshua Porter). December 2^nd will be my first day at HubSpot.

I call it… Take a Fucking Piss.

For Percy: It’s 11:00 at night / The insects collectively hiss / You’re sniffing every blade of grass / Just take a fucking piss.

August 16, 2011 9:53 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@adarowski

Adam Darowski

More for Percy: My iPhone display illuminates you / As you inspect that and this / Mosquitos feed on my flesh / Just take a fucking piss.

August 19, 2011 10:38 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@adarowski

Adam Darowski

I walk, stressed about tomorrow / You sniff with an ignorant bliss / the chance to sleep is ticking away / Just take a fucking piss.

August 22, 2011 10:53 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@adarowski

Adam Darowski

Thunder rumbles in the distance / you’re distracted like something’s amiss / youll never get wet if you’re inside / just take a fucking piss

August 25, 2011 9:48 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@adarowski

Adam Darowski

By walking you around the yard / 12% of my vacation I was forced to miss / A cement wall really isn’t interesting / Just take a fucking piss

September 4, 2011 10:52 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@adarowski

Adam Darowski

The temp drops like it passed a cruiser / 80 down to 56 / You don’t give a shit you have a fur coat / just take a fucking piss.

September 15, 2011 10:05 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@adarowski

Adam Darowski

You finally took your fucking piss / I assumed that you were through / With my back turned, you rolled around in some unidentified shit / …

October 22, 2011 10:17 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@adarowski

Adam Darowski

… just get in the fucking tub.

October 22, 2011 10:17 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@adarowski

Adam Darowski

If anyone wants to illustrate, just let me know.

I only found out about this all when checking Twitter before bed and seeing my pal @jayroh tweet:

Arcade Fire. Finally.

Then I was all like “wait, what?” Then I was like “oh, snap”. Then I confirmed via Google News that Arcade Fire had, in fact, won Album of the Year.

I have never owned an Album of the Year.

I have been crazy for this Arcade Fire album since the day it came out. I was only eight seconds into Sprawl II when I paused it to write my first “holy shit” tweet about it. When doing my end-of-year music wrapup, this is how I ranked Arcade Fire on my albums of the year:

1. Arcade Fire — The Suburbs: This album was so good that I’ve spent a lot of time wondering just how good it really is. With the release of The Suburbs, Arcade Fire has released two of the best eight or so albums I’ve ever heard (along with Funeral). Add in Neon Bible and they’ve released three of the twenty best albums I’ve ever heard. Simply remarkable.

I’ve still been thinking about where this album ranks among all the albums I’ve ever heard. Why? Because this album has a chance to be my favorite album of all time. In fact, I think it might be—but I’m hesitant to commit to that because it was so recently released.

What’s the competition? You kinda have to understand my musical taste. In my library, you won’t really find anything before, say, 1986 (you know, the year of Yo La Tengo’s debut album). In fact, the only albums I have before the 1980s are by Big Star, Velvet Underground, and the Sex Pistols. Somewhere, I have some Beatles on vinyl, but only a random bunch of tracks in iTunes.

So, here are the the albums that actually have a chance at being #1 all time for me:

• Arcade Fire – Funeral
• Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
• Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream
• Teenage Fanclub – Songs From Northern Britain
• Weezer – Pinkerton
• Weezer – Weezer
• Yo La Tengo – Electr-o-pura

The list kind of surprised me. I expected to see Mogwai, but for them I suppose it’s more of a consistent career brilliance. I find it very hard to pick and album or two above the others. Siamese Dream was my favorite early ’90s album when it came out and it still is. Weezer’s Weezer (The Blue Album) was like a life-changing event, it had so much impact. I remember hearing The Sweater Song for the first time. I remember buying the cassette. Pinkerton was completely different, but just as good. The critics hated it, but of course they all now love it. For a while, I was obsessed with all thing Matador Records. Electr-o-pura is the greatest release to come from that label.

Since then? Arcade Fire.

And Arcade Fire again.

They had an album in between (Neon Bible), and don’t get me wrong—it was fantastic. But we’re talking only about possible best albums I’ve ever heard. And Arcade Fire has two of them.

Some find it crazy that I actually consider this album as a possible “best I’ve ever heard” type of album. I thought it was a bit crazy at first, too. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s true.

Congrats, you crazy Canadian kids.

Another great feature of Last.fm is the charts over a certain time period. Of course, the “Last 12 months” comes in handy on days like today. So, without further rambling:

My Top Artists of 2010

Rogue Wave had a new album in March and Arcade Fire had one in August. Both were incredible. I’m not surprised to see them in the top two spots. Teenage Fanclub and Mogwai are old standbys. The top five is rounded out by Gustafer Yellowgold, who I happen to be building a site for.

My Top Tracks of 2010

I’m a full album listener. So, this list isn’t really representative of my favorite tracks of the year. It’s just the ones I listened to the most.

The Top 19 tracks are all Rogue Wave (the entire new album!), Mew, and Manchester Orchestra. #20 is Gustafer Yellowgold’s incredible “Getting in a Tree Top”.

Okay, enough of the charts. Here’s the good stuff!

Top 10 Albums of 2010

10. Spoon — Transferece: I’ve been into Spoon for a very long time. While I like their entire discography, my favorite album of theirs is still their first (Telephono, on Matador). But they still put out solid material worthy of a Top 10 appearance.

9. The National — High Violet: This is a couple solid albums by them I’ve found myself listening to a lot. “Blood Buzz Ohio” is just such a ridiculously good track, as are many others.

8. The Album Leaf — A Chorus of Storytellers: I picked up a couple Album Leaf albums this year and they’re the closest I’ve come to something similar to the fantastic Low Level Owl albums from The Appleseed Cast.

7. Teenage Fanclub — Shadows: Teenage Fanclub is my most listened-to band of all time. They came back strong with this solid offering. “Baby Lee” and “When I Still Have Thee” are two of their best tracks in a long time.

6. The Wandas — New Wave Blues: This band won the local radio station’s Rock Hunt. I only started listening to them after the competition, but damn they’re good. “Bending Over Backwards” is definitely one of the best tracks of the year.

5. Band of Horses — Infinite Arms: This may not have been their best album, but it’s still plenty good. It was a lot more mellow than their past work (which did also have some mellow stuff), but they pulled it off.

4. Palmdale — Get Wasted (EP)
3. Palmdale — How To Be Mean (EP)
One of the best things to happen in music this year was the return of Kay Hanley (formerly of Letters To Cleo). Her new band is simply incredible. Palmdale is everything that is wonderful about pop music and nothing that isn’t.

2. Rogue Wave — Permalight: When this album came out in March, I thought for sure it was going to be the album of the year. This was the year that Rogue Wave jumped to a new echelon in my music library. Permalight was a bit of a departure from their previous work. It had a bit more pep to it. It was livelier. But, personally, I had a shitty 2009. Rogue Wave’s 2009 was probably even shittier. They needed this. And so did I. Remarkable album at the right time.

And finally…

1. Arcade Fire — The Suburbs: This album was so good that I’ve spent a lot of time wondering just how good it really is. With the release of The Suburbs, Arcade Fire has released two of the best eight or so albums I’ve ever heard (along with Funeral). Add in Neon Bible and they’ve released three of the twenty best albums I’ve ever heard. Simply remarkable.

This album also contains the best track of the year—Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).

Late to the Party

Every year, I also pick the best album that wasn’t released in the past year, but I recently discovered it in the past year. In this category, there were four standouts. My first purchase by The Album Leaf was Into the Blue Again and it’s excellent. Manchester Orchestra’s Mean Everything to Nothing got a ton of airplay, too.

This is another case where I thought for sure the top album would be an easy choice. Then I stumbled upon the eponymous album by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. That album was simply incredible. Yet, it couldn’t knock Mew from the top spot. So, the Late to the Party Award goes to Frengers by Mew.

Happy New Year!

Hope you have a great one!

Let me say up front—the gorgeous illustrations were not done by me. They were done by Morgan. I just framed them with a nice new site. The illustrations come from the Gustafer Yellowgold DVDs. They are “moving books” (lightly animated illustrations) set to music recorded by Morgan and his band.

And it’s fantastic.

So, how did I become the new web guy for Gustafer Yellowgold? I was already a huge fan when I recorded my kids singing and dancing to the classic Gustafer track “Getting in a Treetop”. Of course, I YouTubed it:

Who happened to find this little movie on the internet? Why, Gustafer, of course! Actually, it was found by Rachel Loshak, who does booking and management for Gustafer (and also happens to be Morgan’s wife and an amazing singer/songwriter/bassist herself). From my YouTube profile, she ended up on my site, saw that I did web work, and asked me to give Gustafer a hand. It couldn’t have been easier. My kiddos are lead generation machines!

So, what did I do?

• Axe the Flash. This was priority #1. The old site was done completely in Flash, which made it very difficult to maintain.
• Better popups. The Flash pages triggered new windows when you clicked on items in the artwork. I opted for a jQuery-powered lighbox instead. Now you don’t have to leave the page or worry about window management to watch a video/see an image/etc.
• New layout. The old site was optimized for 800×600. I instead optimized for 1024×768, and the stats show that even that is conservative.
• Lots of updated content. With everything now done with HTML/CSS/images, we were able to do a big content overhaul on the site. There are new places to explore (like the Pterodactyl’s cave!), more videos, more music, more games, and more… everything!

There’s plenty more to come, too.

This coming Sunday (October 24), I’ll finally get to meet Morgan and Rachel in person, as they’ll be performing at Club Passim in Cambridge, MA. You should come! (or at least try to win free tickets!)

Lastly, here are a few of our favorite songs:

Getting in a Treetop, the original…

Butterpond Lake, a great one from the most recent album…

Pinecone Lovely, I love hearing my little guy sing this…

And finally, Your Eel, the one we sing before bedtime…

Check out the site, and come on Sunday if you’re nearby!

Yesware is a web-based email application geared towards salespeople. The app is still under development, so I was brought on to create a simple marketing site (okay, really just a page so far) to establish a presence. Today, a screencast I recorded was added to the page.

It’s a simple site that will see more added to it over time. The team—Matthew Bellows and Cashman Andrus—has been great to work with. I’m very excited to see how Yesware evolves.

Okay, first things first.

What is Dribbble?

Dribbble is a site where designers can share small screenshots of what they’re working on. “Shots” (or, individual screenshots) are limited to 400×300 pixels (it’s like 140 characters, but for images). Dribbble also happens to be run by two of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, Rich Thornett and Dan Cederholm. One of Rich’s first tasks when moving to Dribbble full time was to create an awesome API. He certainly succeeded, and Liiikes is just one of many apps to take advantage of the API already. (You can see more examples at Rebbbounds.)

And… What is Liiikes?

I’m a baseball stat geek. Dribbble is full of basketball metaphors, but it’s also full of numbers—shots, followers, likes, pixels, etc. I wanted to see how we could use these numbers to see who was posting the highest quality content to Dribbble.

Also, Dribbble is not a completely open community—you need to be invited, or “drafted”. So, there’s this interesting dynamic that everyone on Dribbble is there because someone else brought them in. I wanted to see who was responsible for bringing in the best talent, so I’m calling those folks Dribbble scouts.

I’ll admit, the scouts idea was inspired by Craig Henry. I drafted Craig into Dribbble (we have some mutual friends and I saw he was seeking an invite). Turns out, he’s a mega-superstar on Dribbble and I was proud that I drafted him.

Both the top players and top scouts are rated by “Likes Above Average”.

What’s Likes Above Average?

From the site:

Likes Above Average (LAA) is the metric used to build the Liiikes leaderboards. Inspired by the Wins Above Replacement model that’s all the rage in the baseball sabermetrics community, LAA calculates how many more likes a Dribbble player receives than the average player.

Craig Henry happened to rate as the #2 player on all of Dribbble, with 49.0 LAA (I’m writing this with pre-launch numbers… LAA totals can and do change daily). This puts the MVP of Dribbble as Anton Zykin (with an LAA of 53.5). Anton has posted 36 shots and received 2,162 likes. That’s a lot of likes.

With the help of Craig, I actually turned out to be the #11 scout (as of 9/23):

It should come as no surprise that the #1 scout is Mr. Dan Cederholm.

Thanks, Jeffrey!

I also wanted to thank my good friend Jeffrey Chupp, my developer partner on Liiikes and the guy who sits to my left at PatientsLikeMe, for helping me take this rather arcane idea and turn it into what I think is a pretty sweet app. I already knew from my day-to-day work that Jeffrey was an awesome developer to work with, and that certainly was true during the development of Liiikes.

Remember, it’s just a number.

I know likes aren’t a true measure of the talent or value on Dribbble. Take baseball statistics—the league leader in home runs isn’t necessarily the best power hitter. He just happens to be the guy who hit the most home runs. Likes aren’t a true measure of talent. It’s merely how many times someone clicked the like button, however you want to interpret that.

So, please enjoy Liiikes! I’d love to know what you think.

Update: Here’s Jeffrey’s blog post about the Liiikes launch.

When I joined PatientsLikeMe, I wondered if I was going to be so eyebrow-deep in CSS that I wouldn’t be able to work on anything else. Once again, I was wrong. In this latest (3-week) iteration, I worked on the following:

• Got to dig into incredibly painstaking detail to solve some browser bugs on one of our client tools. You see, this UI has more z-index and absoute positioning than I’ve ever seen—and it all happens inside of a table—and it has to work in IE6! So, yeah. But I solved it, it was worth it, and a weird IE8 bug is actually what gave me the most trouble.
• Worked with Aaron to record a movie that is playing at our booth at this year’s Transplant Games.
• A new screencast for our Treatment Evaluations.
• Marked up and modularized a couple signup page options so we can mix and match in A/B testing.
• A redesign and rebuild of our PatientsLikeMeInMotion page (not yet pushed live).
• Solved a little problem of how to show admins who is seeing what in-app updates.
• A blog post about Campfire and Fluid on the PatientsLikeMe Tech Blog.
• Set up the Tech Blog with a .fluid class that gives us fluid images.
• Some survey form validation styling.
• Some post-TinyMCE anal retentive markup cleanup on our Partners site.

Once again, I really dig the in-house designer/developer thing. You’d think it involves working on the same thing over and over, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

There isn’t much out there in social media that’s new anymore. If you’re not familiar with Dribbble, it can be summed up as a Twitter for designers. Instead of “what are you doing, in 140 characters or less?” it’s “what are you working on, in 400×300 pixels or less?”. It’s awesome. I like it.

Dribbble has some common social networking features like following, commenting, and liking. But it differs from other social networks in one very interesting way—it’s not open. You need to be invited—or “drafted”—into Dribbble. Keeping with the basketball theme, there “leaderboards” of the most followed users on Dribbble. I’ll never make that list. There was a time in my life where I might have tried to make that list. But that’s not happening now.

But I’ll always have this—I drafted Craig Henry into Dribbble. And the site has recorded it. To me, I am one of the most successful Dribbble scouts.

Here’s the complete list of my “draftees” (I love that they track this):

As you can see, Craig is developing quite a following. He’s won contests on Dribbble… he’s sold prints because of Dribbble… he’s basically in the running for Rookie of the Year. And like a pro basketball scout, with every bit of success he achieves, I smile a bit.

Make sure you check out Craig’s work on Dribbble. It is quite remarkable. Feel free to check out mine while you’re at it. Oh, and if you want to keep an eye on another up-and-comer with a great outside shot who is cool under pressure, make sure you check out another one of my draftees—Chris Gillis.

I wrote a wee bit more about the project on the portfolio page for it. Here’s a full screenshot so you can take a look:

Visit site »

(full size image)

That was hard, huh? Keep listening.

I used to blog a little bit about baseball on this site. In order to keep the focus here more on tech (and to encourage myself to write more about baseball), I launched another site, BaseballTwit, just for my baseball obsession in late 2008. I also launched a companion Twitter account: @baseballtwit.

A bit over a year later, I have to admit that BaseballTwit is my favorite place to blog. I love writing about catchers, relief pitchers, and especially my new favorite stat, Wins Above Replacement (WAR).

Now, in addition to writing at BaseballTwit, I’ll be writing for my favorite baseball blog—Beyond the Box Score. Beyond the Box Score (@BtBScore on Twitter). A great deal of baseball research focuses on projecting future performance. I like analyzing the past, comparing players across eras, making Hall of Fame debates, etc.

This past weekend, my first post went up. I drew them in with Alex Rodriguez, then quickly went all 19th century on them, talking about Cap Anson. The post is called “Inevitable in 2010: Alex Rodriguez and 100 WAR” and discusses the fact that Alex Rodriguez will not only leapfrog Anson into the Top 20 all time in career WAR (for hitters), but he’ll also be the 20th hitter to reach 100 WAR for a career. I then talk about how remarkable Anson’s total is, given he played exclusively in the 1800s and dealt with smaller schedules, league volatility, and—quite frankly—a life expectancy (at the time) not much higher than his final playing age.

There’s no set schedule for when I’ll write, but I’ll try to stay on a somewhat weekly schedule. I have to say, I’m really enjoying the new gig! The first post already generated quite a few interesting comments. What will I write about next? Let’s see… the post will discuss a pool of 14 players that includes Ken Griffey, Scott Rolen, Mike Cameron, and Eric Chavez (among others). Care to guess?

Five minutes later, I sounded like a grumpy old man with this:

Great. People are connecting their Twitter to Google Buzz. Now I can ready your fucking status message SIX times instead of five.

Yeah, every time I try to type “read you”, it always comes out “ready your”. Ignore that. But here’s the point. We’re all on a bunch of social networks. We have them connected to each other. It’s getting ridiculous. I was checking out a friend’s Facebook page last night. There were actually two status updates of the same Flickr photo that was pumped through Gowalla.

Gowalla. Let’s start there. I don’t give a fuck that you’re at Stop & Shop. All the times that I post about my kids taking a crap? That’s me paying you back for Flickring your tweet of a Gowalla Facebook status that you’re getting milk.

Maybe I’m just jealous that I don’t go anywhere.

But anyway, as a hyperconnected kind of guy, I try my best to keep up with my friends. The duplicate postings make this so much harder and much more irritating. I bitched about this before when Ping.fm was all the rage (what the hell happened to them?). You become tempted to not care what anyone is doing, but then you’re losing out completely.

The truth.

I have my Twitter and Facebook accounts linked. I don’t feel good about it. But I actually don’t have a ton of friend overlap there. Facebook is a mixture of family, high school friends (I apparently had a couple more than I realized), guys from my baseball sim league… and a few folks I keep in touch with on a daily basis via Twitter. So, those folks—the ones I’m probably connected to the most—see my stuff twice. Sometimes that’s okay… you don’t usually get to read EVERYTHING people post to Twitter, so it can be a good safety net.

What Facebook does have is excellent filtering tools. You can easily make lists of people you don’t see updates from on other networks. I do this. I have all of my Facebook friends in at least one list. The ones that tend to post to Twitter I just don’t check as often (even then it is really to make sure I didn’t miss anything).

There has to be a better way.

I thought FriendFeed was going to solve this. I really did. They allowed you to feed all of your public data into one stream. Theoretically (and I’m not sure if they ever did this), they should be able to cut the duplicates out and make life easier. They even had a pretty innovating feature called “imaginary friends” where you could make a fake FriendFeed user stream for your friends that didn’t have accounts. So, if my friend was on Flickr but not anything else, I could add his photos to my stream, for example.

It just didn’t work, though. And I’m not sure why. The imaginary friend feature was a lot of work and wasn’t intuitive. You also couldn’t consume non-open data (like Facebook status messages). That was a pretty big drawback. You still had to check Facebook.

What we need.

Moments after that first tweet/rant, I followed up with:

Someone make a tool that aggregates Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. and removes the dupes. Make it slick. You’ll be rich.

We’re smart people. Someone should be able to build something that automatically fetches (and updates) your connections to your social networks—Twitter, Facebook. Buzz, Flickr, etc.—and trims the dupes. Bonus points for allowing you to merge the contacts from these different networks so you can tell it they are the same person (which could also help distinguish between real dupes or a friend reposting something by another friend).

Maybe this tool could be Google Buzz. I’d be pretty happy if it was. I’m already a Gmail user. One reason I think Buzz stands a fighting chance is that I don’t have to leave my email app to check my other communications. That’s actually quite compelling.

I wish I had the time to figure this problem out and make an app. But the job keeps me busy and the three kids keep me busier.

That and all my spare time is spent reading that you’re picking up the fucking milk.

The comments about Jamie’s presentation were incredibly positive, which made us all very happy. What made us sad, though, was that we couldn’t actually see the presentation ourselves. Finally, that has changed.

The first batch of TEDMED videos have been posted, and Jamie’s talk was one of the first. Check it out below to see what it is that we’re working so hard towards.

Upon joining PatientsLikeMe, I learned that I’d be shaking up this comfy part of my life as well. PatientsLikeMe is also a Rails app, but the views are built in Haml and the site’s CSS is built with Sass. (We use Git for version control, but that’s a post for another time.)

What the heck are Haml and Sass?

According to Haml’s About page, Haml is:

Haml is a markup language that’s used to cleanly and simply describe the HTML of any web document without the use of inline code. Haml functions as a replacement for inline page templating systems such as PHP, ASP, and ERB, the templating language used in most Ruby on Rails applications. However, Haml avoids the need for explicitly coding HTML into the template, because it itself is a description of the HTML, with some code to generate dynamic content.

And Sass is described on its About page as:

Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows. Sass both provides a simpler, more elegant syntax for CSS and implements various features that are useful for creating manageable stylesheets.

While it felt a bit overwhelming to learn a new way to do what I’ve been doing for years, Haml & Sass definitely make sense for me. I’m a designer/developer, but definitely approach things from more of a development side. I get just as excited (if not more) about a clean document structure and re-use of style elements as I do about a gorgeous look and feel. Anything you want to do in HTML & CSS is possible with Haml & Sass—it’s just a more efficient way of getting there. And there’s so much more!

What do Haml and Sass look like?

The best way to get what it’s all about is to take a look at some code. Here’s a codeblock of HTML/ERB, taken directly from the Haml tutorial page:

<div id="content">
  <div class="left column">
    <h2>Welcome to our site!</h2>
    <p><%= print_information %></p>
  </div>
  <div class="right column">
    <%= render :partial => "sidebar" %>
  </div>
</div>


Here’s how that block would look in Haml:

#content
  .left.column
    %h2 Welcome to our site!
    %p= print_information
  .right.column
    = render :partial => "sidebar"


Pretty badass, huh? Much cleaner. I thought I’d miss writing full markup. But I’m also a huge fan of nicely indented, properly closed markup. The fact that Haml’s indentation is what defines the document structure is awesome. You don’t have to hunt for closing </div> tags and whatnot. I recommend reading that entire tutorial (it’s quite short).

While Haml is really cool, Sass is what I’m really psyched about. I work in Sass a lot more than I work in anything else now, and I’m still discovering ways that it vastly improves my CSS development.

Here’s what a very simple bit of Sass code looks like:

h1
  height: 118px
  margin-top: 1em
.tagline
  font-size: 26px
  text-align: right


Pretty much expected, this would render as:

h1 {
  height: 118px;
  margin-top: 1em;
}
.tagline {
  font-size: 26px;
  text-align: right;
}

“Huh? What’s the benefit there?” you might ask. I mean, all it does is remove the semi-colons and braces!

Oh, but wait.

Things that make Sass kick ass

Buckle up for this part. Today, I want to tell you about three thing that will blow your CSS-writin’ mind.

1. Nesting
2. Variables
3. Mixins

Nesting

In one of my recent (and favorite) style sheets, I started using much longer selectors not only to ensure my styles are targeting the right elements, but also to be visually manageable in my style sheet.

Take this block of styles targeted for a specific page on the site:

body#home.partners div#content h1 { margin-bottom: 20px; }
body#home.partners div#content h2 { background: url(../images/press-head-bg.png) repeat-x top left; border-top: 1px solid #4097E5; padding: 8px; }
body#home.partners div#content p { font-size: 90%; }
body#home.partners div#content div#main dl { position: relative; min-height: 160px; }
body#home.partners div#content div#main dt { margin-left: 170px; border-top: 2px solid #4899E9; padding: 4px 0; }
body#home.partners div#content div#main dt a { color: #000; font-weight: bold; }
body#home.partners div#content div#main dd { margin-left: 170px; font-size: 85%; }
body#home.partners div#content div#main dd.logo { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; margin: 0; }
body#home.partners div#content div#main dd.logo img { border: 1px solid #999; }

Yeah, I one-lined it. I’ve been into that lately. But Sass doesn’t support it (yet, but it’s coming).

One of the reasons I like one-line CSS is that it’s easy to read the selectors. But why keep typing the same things over and over? The same thing can be accomplished in Sass with this:

body#home.partners
  div#content
    h1
      margin-bottom: 20px
    h2
      background: url(../images/press-head-bg.png) repeat-x top left
      border-top: 1px solid #4097E5
      padding: 8px
    p
      font-size: 90%
    div#main
      dl
        position: relative
        min-height: 160px
        dt
          margin-left: 170px
          border-top: 2px solid #4899E9
          padding: 4px 0
          a
            color: #000
            font-weight: bold
        dd
          margin-left: 170px
          font-size: 85%
          &.logo
            position: absolute
            top: 0
            left: 0
            margin: 0
            img
              border: 1px solid #999

Longer? Yes. Easier to read? Hell yes.

This is pretty straight forward. If you indent an element under another element, you’ll chain them together. The output in CSS can get larger as you nest deeper and deeper, but the Sass file becomes much easier to manage. Your web development brethren may gasp if they peek at your stylesheet, but you’ll be able to write and manage it much faster in the Sass file.

One thing in the above code block that might look unfamiliar is the &.logo. What “&” means is “repeat the parent selector”. In this case, one parent is dd, so the selector becomes dd.logo. You can do many different things with this, such as putting &:hover after an a or even putting * html & nested beneath a selector to target IE6.

Wait, what? Mix IE hacks in with your main CSS? Yes, I realize that this invalidates your CSS and goes against some “best practices”, but trust me—it’s easier to manage. When you keep browser hacks in a separate style sheet, you forget about them until you’re actually thinking about that browser. A seemingly harmless tweak to your main stylesheet might break something in your IE stylesheet. But outta sight, outta mind and you don’t know it until a user complains. By keeping the IE hacks along with the main CSS, you can see how your change might affect other browsers.

If you’re still worried about invalidating your stylesheet, well… that means you haven’t even tried CSS3 yet. So, really, I got nothing for ya here.

In your Sass, I’ve started targeting different versions of IE along with the standard style like this:

h1
  padding: 1em
  *padding: 2em / targets both IE6 and IE7, does not target IE8
  * html &
    padding: 3em / resets IE6 in case it needs to be different from IE7

The * right before the selector will target IE6 and IE7 but leave IE8 alone (well, technically all browsers read that as an invalid line an ignore it… except for IE6 and IE7). The trusty * html hack will only target IE6. A slash, as you probably guessed, starts a comment in Sass. This IE targeting method may not be the prettiest thing in the world, but it keeps everything in one place so you easily manage all browser styling at once. When you change the padding of the h1, it provides you with a reminder to check other browsers where you served targeted tweaks.

Last thing about nesting, you can also use it for properties like font, border, margin, etc. Like so:

h1
  border:
    color: black
    style: solid
    width: 1px

That would produce:

h1 {
  border-color: black;
  border-style: solid;
  border-width: 1px;
}

Of course, you may prefer to write this out in shorthand (h1 { border: 1px solid black;), but there are times when doing it this way can come in handy.

Anyway, let’s move on to some more awesome.

Variables

There was a time when I thought variables in CSS might be the only thing that could make it any better. And variables are indeed awesome. Variables are a great way to store values that you’ll use over and over again, such as colors, fonts, graphics, or anything else reusable in your project.

Here are some variables we set for colors that indicate severity:

!severity_normal = #CCC
!severity_none = #1DAE49
!severity_mild = #FEDC32
!severity_moderate = #FF8F02
!severity_severe = #D93019

To call one of these values, simply do this:

a
  &:hover
    background-color = !severity_mild

Huzzah!

Now try this—it’ll blow your mind: Just set your target page width. Then use that variable and perform simple operations on it to calculate the widths of your layout’s columns!

!page_width = 1000px
…
#main
  width: !page_width * .7
#sidebar
  width: !page_width * .3

This turns into:

#main
  width: 700px;
#sidebar
  width: 300px;

Looks simple, but IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES! But there’s actually one more thing that will really rock your world…

Mixins

If Sass mixins were a rock band, I’d have the tee shirt. What are they? The description from the Sass tutorial says:

Mixins are one of the most powerful aspects of Sass. They allow re-use of styling – properties or even entire rules – without having to re-write them or move them into a non-semantic class.

To define a mixin, just write =mixin-name with some Sass nested underneath. To use it, write +mixin-name where you want it to be expanded.

Mixins can be incredibly simple or very complex. Here’s a pretty simple one:

=alternate_font
  font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode'
  letter-spacing: -.03em

Say you’ve set a default font on your body, but want to apply an alternate font here and there. Instead of adding those fonts every time, just put it as a mixin. This could also be done as a variable, but since we’re also tweaking the letter-spacing, it is better to do it with a mixin. The best part of mixins like this one is that they eliminate the need to add frivolous class names that are only used for style targeting.

Let’s apply it:

h1
  +alternate_header_font

And that will render as:

h1 {
  font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode';
  letter-spacing: -.03em;
}

You can also pass arguments within mixins. If you’re into rounded corners, ever get tired of defining the -moz and -webkit properties every single time?

Try this instead:

=border_radius(!radius)
  :border-radius = "#{!radius}px"
  :-moz-border-radius = "#{!radius}px"
  :-webkit-border-radius = "#{!radius}px"

Then when you want to round the corners of an element, just add this:

#sidebar
  border: 2px solid #666
  background-color: #CCC
  +border_radius(8)

That will add 8-pixel rounded corners for all (supported) browsers. I recently worked on a design that was so well-rounded you could call it Alan Trammell. This mixin alone would have been a breeze to use and very much welcomed.

Okay, one more example because this was a very handy one I used the other day. I had a couple links I wanted to place a divider pipe between. You know, the type of treatment you often see in footers. I saw that Cris had already written a mixin for it called “divider_pipe”, and it looked something like this:

=divider_pipe(!x_position=0, !y_position=50%)
  background:
    image = "url(/images/divider.gif)"
    repeat: no-repeat
  position = !x_position !y_position
  &.first
    background-image: none

You catch that? Awesome! Basically, you just apply it to the li in Sass, like this:

#footer
  ul
    li
      +divider_pipe

What that will do is place the divider on the left side of each li, but also look for an li with a class of “first” and turn off the background image for that one. Perfect! Once all our target browsers support pseudo-elements, we’ll be able to simply use a :first-child, but until then, this worked like a charm. You’ll notice you can also pass in some arguments here to alter the x- and y-positioning of the pipe on the fly.

Sass mixins can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. They can be used for just one rule you want to add over and over (without adding frivolous class names). They can be used for content boxes you use over and over that you need to receive arguments, variables, and all sorts of custom rules. Mixins are as powerful as you want to make them.

And what do I think?

Haml is pretty simple. I like it because it leads to a clean document structure, proper indenting, proper tag closing, etc. But Sass is the real life-changer, here.

I’ve gotten used to Sass enough that I keep forgetting to put semicolons in my plain ol’ CSS. While the nesting makes Sass incredibly easy to manage for the developer, it does lead to some less than beautiful output. But I think that is a fair tradeoff because it makes things so much easier to manage.

The same can be said for managing targeted browser tweaks inline with the standard Sass. It’s not the traditional way of doing things in CSS, but keeping it all together ensures less conflicts in the end.

In a way, I’ve needed to let go of some of the artificial “best practices” instilled in me while learning CSS. But the reality is that Sass comes with a whole new set of “best practices” that, in my opinion, lead to better results.

And that’s what matters most.

But this post is for documenting 2009. So, I’m going to throw some lists at you—everything from most viewed posts to most-listened-to music. Happy New Year!

Most Viewed Posts in 2009

1. Google Transit Comes Through: Best Customer Service EVER: Yeah, this post again. I wrote this at SXSW in 2007. Even in 2009, it brought in 4.5 times the eyeballs of my next most popular post.
2. How To Use Twitter and Not Be a Douchebag: How’s that for a linkbait title? This one generated some good discussion in the comments.
3. My Favorite CSS Techniques: This is probably my favorite blog post I’ve written. I’ve developed some new chops since then… perhaps it’s time for a “Volume 2”. This is a 2008 post that made it on the 2009 list.
4. The Blog is the New Resume: This one’s from 2007 and still generates a good amount of traffic. My most-commented post ever.
5. Using Fluid.app to Bring Google Reader for iPhone to your Desktop: Wow, another from 2008. I guess I didn’t write many posts this year that got eyeballs. In fact, only one of my eight most viewed posts this year were actually written this year. Which leads me to another list:

Most Viewed Posts in 2009 that were actually written in 2009

1. How To Use Twitter and Not Be a Douchebag: 2009′s greatest hit.
2. Emphasized Links: What comes first, the a or the strong?: My blogging shifted to geekier markup & style observations, tips, and tricks. I’m happier with the content, but the eyeballs dipped significantly. I think it’s quality over quantity, though.
3. Stop iPhone from (Incorrectly) Auto-Linking Phone Numbers: You know, if you have this problem. I love the Edgar Martinez shoutout here.
4. Fluid Images (and How to Make Them Look Nice in Internet Explorer 6 & 7): Nice little trick if you’re doing some fluid design.
5. The New MacBook: On the lack of FireWire and what that means for Migration Assistant: Seriously, people read this one?

And some that nobody read, but I wish they had

1. Selective Degradation of Modern CSS for Internet Explorer: Come on people, selective degradation? Cross-browser web development? This is good stuff!
2. Why Text on the Web is Getting Smaller: Short but sweet post. I loved this one.
3. From One Great Organization to Another: Moving on to PatientsLikeMe: One of my big news stories of the year—gotta include this one.
4. The Heart of the Redesign: CSS Pseudo-elements: I had a big redesign this year and this post documented the main theme—pseudo-elements!
5. Transparent Window App: Using Fluid.app to Compare Mockup and Markup: The few people that understood this trick thought it was pretty sweet. Good enough for me.

Finally, my favorites from the BatchBlue Blog

I used to blog quite a bit for BatchBlue. Here are my three favorite posts of 2009 over there.

1. Life by Design: The difficult one where I let the BatchBook user base know I was moving on.
2. With Each Sticker, a Story: I love this one. When I got a new laptop, I told the story behind each sticker on my old one.
3. 5 Things for the Small Business Owner to Look For in a Web Development Agency: Too often I see small businesses with sites that were poorly built. This post was meant to help this a little.

User stats

Here are some numbers about the folks visiting this here blog in 2009:

Browser usage

1. Firefox (73.7%)
2. Safari (9.7%)
3. Internet Explorer (9.0%)
4. Chrome (4.8%)

Operating system usage

1. Windows (67.4%)
2. Mac OS (25.6%)
3. Linux (5.2%)
4. iPhone (1.2%)

My year in music

I listen to a ton of music while I work, play, blog, dance with my babies, etc. Here are some stats about the music:

Most-listened to artists on Last.fm

1. Mogwai (616)
2. Teenage Fanclub (551)
3. Rogue Wave (476)
4. Yo La Tengo (439)
5. MGMT (407)
6. The Airborne Toxic Event (406)
7. SteveSongs (326)

And the most-listened-to track of 2009 was “Time to Pretend” by MGMT. That one gets double credit for being on the Oracular Spectacular LP and the Time to Pretend EP, both of which received heavy airplay from me this year.

Best new album

Gotta go with the eponymous album from The Airborne Toxic Event. Really dig that one. Yo La Tengo, Silversun Pickups, Metric, and Doves all had excellent albums.

Late-to-the-party album

The best album I finally discovered in 2009 that was released before this year was Oracle Spectacular by MGMT (from 2008). I was also quite impressed with Etiquette by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone (which is from 2006).

Once again, Happy New Year!

@font-face in Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer, somewhat shockingly, supports @font-face. I did most of my testing with the Open Type Format (.otf). Microsoft actually developed this with Adobe, yet doesn’t even support it in their @font-face implementation. Lame, I know. However, they do provide a free tool to convert your .otf fonts into a format Internet Explorer can use.

@font-face in Chrome

Since Google Chrome is essentially WebKit, I was surprised to see that @font-face isn’t supported. But in a great post by Paul Irish called Bulletproof @font-face syntax, I saw that Chrome will work with an SVG implementation. I didn’t try it, but it sure sounds cool.

There are a lot of web fonts out there

Font Squirrel has released hundreds of @font-face kits for free download. These kits include four font formats (making them compatible in Internet Explorer and Chrome) and the HTML and CSS to drop into your web site. Easy, breezy, beautiful web fonts. Well, except for the many, many ugly fonts on that page…

Typekit flashes the fallback fonts briefly while your pretty fonts download

Not really Typekit’s fault, but as the Javascript loads your custom fonts, your users will briefly see the fallback fonts (the fonts you told Typekit to use in the event that the user’s browser doesn’t support Typekit). In some cases, this could actually cause new linebreaks and other jarring shifts. Usually it won’t be anything serious, but it will likely be noticable. Kind of a bummer. Looks like they’re working on a solution, though.

Have you played with web fonts? Anything you ran into you’d like to share?

There are a lot of terms out there for “making sure things work nicely in every browser, even if it doesn’t work or look exactly the same in all of them”. I was thinking about the approach I took on a recent project, the Criminal Justice School Guide. I suppose it is kind of like progressive enrichment… but with a bit of graceful degradation thrown in.

What does that mean? Well, first of all the case for this approach was an easy one to make when working with a client (Avenue100, and directly with an old friend and colleague Tracy Shaw) who gets web standards. What I did was take a mockup and build the design in CSS using the very latest CSS techniques. Only then did I take a look at the design in other browsers.

The difference between what I did on this project and some others is that I only fixed major design elements. If it wasn’t a big deal, I shrugged it off. LET ME TELL YOU it was a great feeling. “Does that corner really need to be rounded? Nope!” This way the browser hacks are kept to a minimum (and quarantined in separate style sheets) and the site is ready to play ball when Internet Explorer finally is.

Let’s call it… “selective degradation”.

Today I want to look at four areas of the design, see how they look in Internet Explorer vs. a real browser, and show the markup and style examples.

1. Search field

The first task was to create a search form that sits over a partially transparent rounded box that also sits on top of some other geometric shapes. It’s easy enough to cram all of that in a background image and let the form sit on top of it, but why do that when you can produce a more bulletproof approach that allows the rounded box to grow with the form (if need be). Here’s how I styled the form:

form#search {
  float: right;
  background-color: rgba(183,180,170,.4);
  padding: 10px 20px;
  margin: 16px 12px;
  border-radius: 10px;
  -moz-border-radius: 10px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
}


The floating, padding, and margins are all standard stuff. The background-color and border-radius, however, are not. border-radius, of course, will round the corners of the box. Only it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer (even IE8!). How about the background-color? That’s RGBa, which allows you to define a background color WITH a transparency level. Of course, IE8 can’t figure that out either.

So, what should we do? Well, just like I said right away. Cram it all in a background image. So, here’s the fix:

div#header { background: url(../images/ie/header.png) no-repeat right top; }

All versions of IE are served a header that has the rounded, semi-transparent box as part of the background image. It’s not as bulletproof, but do users of Internet Explorer really care about that? Nope. Problem solved.

2. Rounded content window

See that rounded top of the content box? That’s a pretty important design element, so let’s keep it rounded for everyone. Easy enough to do in Firefox:

div#content {
  clear: left;
  background-color: #FFF;
  border: 2px solid #EAEAEA;
  margin: 0 12px;
  padding: 12px;
  border-radius: 10px 10px 0 0;
  -moz-border-radius: 10px 10px 0 0;
  -webkit-border-top-left-radius: 10px;
  -webkit-border-top-right-radius: 10px;
}

The part that rounds the corners, again, is the border-radius. Notice that -webkit-border-radius doesn’t adhere to the nice shorthand that -moz-border-radius and border-radius do. That’s why you get nice long attribute names like -webkit-border-top-right-radius. That’s a mouthful!

So, what has to happen to get these corners in IE? It’s actually a little bit complex, to be honest. Here’s what I did:

div#content {
  padding: 0 12px 12px;
  border-width: 0 2px;
}

So, here we removed the padding and border from the top of the content box. Then:

ul#navigation {
  overflow: hidden;
  background: url(../images/ie/content-rounded-top.png) no-repeat left bottom;
  margin: 0 12px;
  padding: 10px 0 0 14px;
}

We instead added the rounded corners as a background-image on the bottom of the navigation menu above the content box. We added some extra padding to make up for it.

ul#navigation li {
  padding-bottom: 12px;
}

Finally we added some padding to the bottom of the list items themselves. And that did the trick!

3. Rounding of inner content boxes

You see how some boxes inside of the content box have rounded corners, too? You know what I decided to do about these? Nothing. Not an important design element. NEXT!

4. Partially transparent stripe

The stripe that goes over the photograph is a pretty major design element as well. Once again, RGBa comes to the rescue:

div#home-banner div#title {
  float: left;
  margin-top: 172px;
  padding: 8px;
  width: 625px;
  color: #FFF;
  background-color: rgba(0,54,99,.6);
}

RGBawesome, indeed.

Et tu, IE? You guessed it. Just put the blue stripe in the image itself and serve that one to IE.

div#home-banner { background-image: url(../images/ie/law-and-justice-ie.jpg);

Note that this approach doesn’t make sense if the image changes often. This one, luckily for me, does not.

There you have it. It was a great feeling to build the site with only modern browsers in mind. This allows you to structure the markup and style in the best, most semantic way possible. Then, you can fill in only the necessary gaps, improving the user experience in lesser browsers.

I’ve only been with PatientsLikeMe a little over a month, but already I’ve been treated to the exciting launch of a brand new community: the Epilepsy community.

According to The Epilepsy Foundation, about three million Americans are affected by epilepsy and seizures (with 200,000 new cases every year). We’re excited about providing tools for epilepsy patients that will allow them to track their seizures, research and report on drugs and other treatments, communicate with other patients on the forums, and (perhaps most importantly) find patients just like them experiencing the same types of seizures (and see what’s working for them).

The community is currently in beta and is open to U.S. residents. We’re currently working on features and improvements and that will make the community even more useful for a lot more patients. So, if you or anyone you know suffers from epilepsy, please let them know about the community. By entering their information, not only can patients find support from others like them, they are also contributing valuable data for the purposes of research.

Also, if you know anyone affected by ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, HIV/AIDS, Mood Conditions (Anxiety, Bipolar, Depression, OCD, TSD), Multiple Sclerosis, or Parkinson’s Disease… please let them know about PatientsLikeMe!

While I was with BatchBlue, I recorded a ton of how-to screencasts. I had a process down that I thoroughly documented on the BatchBlue Blog (in a three part series). I used ScreenFlick, a simple screencasting tool for the Mac. I loved it’s simplicity.

When I joined PatientsLikeMe, I wasn’t sure if screencasting would be a part of my job anymore. Rather quickly though, I was called upon to help pick software to capture some screen animations for our presentation at TEDMED. Panning and zooming was important, however—and that’s something ScreenFlick doesn’t do.

I had heard folks rave about ScreenFlow (again just for the Mac) a while back, and it looked gorgeous. The panning and zooming was a key feature, but foolishly I assumed those features would involve heavy duty editing. I preferred recording and being done with it.

Boy was I wrong.

My goodness, ScreenFlow is a dream to work with. Turns out the cropping, panning, and zooming can all be done after the fact (on your full-screen recording) with minimal effort and incredible ease of use. Plus, all the transitions are non-destructive, so you can experiment and ditch what doesn’t work while preserving your original recording. It’s much more like iMovie than ScreenFlick in that respect.

Shortly after the TEDMED presentation went over quite well, we decided the release of the new Treatment Reports on PatientsLikeMe would benefit from a screencast. I’ve embedded it below. I used ScreenFlow and the YouTube HD upload (for the first time as well). I’m very happy with the quality YouTube can churn out now for a screencast. Plus, it makes it much easier for folks to know when a new screencast is up!

Please, let me know what you think. I’m always looking to improve my screencasting!

I increase the font size of at least 1/3 of the web sites I visit.

You can joke about my declining eyesight all you want. But you can’t ignore this:

What 12px Text Used To Look Like

On a 14.1″ PowerBook G3 (Pismo)

What 12px Looks Like Now

On a 15.4″ MacBook Pro

Why?

Pretty shocking huh? Why is the text getting smaller? Because notebook screens are staying the same size (or getting smaller) while screen resolution gets sharper.

My beloved PowerBook G3 Pismo had a 14.1″ (diagonal) screen. It had a 4:3 aspect ratio and maxed out at 1024x768. The actual height and width of the screen was 8.44″ tall and 11.25″ wide.

My new MacBook Pro has a 15.6″ screen. It has a 16:9 aspect ratio and maxes out at 1440x900. The actual height and width of the screen is 8.16″ tall and 13.06″ wide.

So, the new MacBook is wider, but actually shorter (over a quarter of an inch shorter, in fact). Despite the screen being shorter, it still vertically displays 132 extra pixels. So…

The pixels are getting smaller.

12 pixels on the new MacBook Pro translates to 0.109 inches. On the Pismo, 12 pixels measured at 0.132 inches. Doesn’t sound like much, but when you start stacking line of text upon line of text, it adds up. And I start page zooming.

For more on this topic, visit the Large Font Coalition.

Here’s how it looks.

So, to recap the markup of the h1 is:

<h1>Adam Darowski</h1>


And the CSS is:

h1 { font-size: 450%; line-height: 1.2; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; margin: 0 20px 20px 40px; text-indent: -55px; }
h1:before { content: '<h1>'; font-size: 50%; }
h1:after { content: '</h1>'; font-size: 50%; }


The good news is Internet Explorer 8 is the first version of IE that will actually will show the content contained in the pseudo-elements.

The Problem

The bad news is it looks like this:

Wait, why is it so tiny? The problem seems to lie in the h1:before, h1:after { font-size: 50%; }. If you remember, I took my h1 and boosted the size to 450%. Then, for the “exposed markup”, I dropped the font-size to 50% of that. Looks like the difference is:

• Firefox, Safari, and Opera treat the content generated by the :before and :after pseudo-elements as part of the h1. Because of this, the font-size: 50% is adjusts the font-size: 450%, making the “exposed markup” render at 225%.
• Internet Explorer 8 treats then content generated by the :before and :after as outside of the h1. In this case, the font-size: 50% is instead applied to the base text size (which in my case is font-size: large). This is why it looks so tiny.
• Internet Explorer versions 7 and older are still reading HTML for Dummies and haven’t caught up.

The Solution

Once I figured out what was happening, the fix was super easy. I created an IE8 style sheet an used a conditional comment to add it to my page. You target IE8 the same way you did older versions:

<!--[if IE 8]>
  <link href="style-ie8.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->

Then in that style sheet, I simply added a pixel-based font-size for the pseudo-elements.

h1:before, h1:after { font-size: 30px; }

Why pixel-based? Simply because IE8 won’t screw it up. It’s not ideal, but neither is Internet Explorer. Here’s how it looks:

So, if you ever generate content with :before and :after and resize it with percentages (I mean, who doesn’t do that every day?), that’s your solution.