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Yesterday, I moderated a panel discussion on HTML5 and Flash at FlashCamp Seattle, a nice little event put together by the smart people at Universal Mind. It was a good time. For a web standards-oriented designer/developer like myself, it was cool to see how the other half lives and what drives them. There are a lot of good and ...

A year ago, two exciting location-based social games launched at South By Southwest Interactive, the annual geek-fest that is something of a mecca for web nerds. After playing with both down in Austin, I wrote a blog post entitled A look at Foursquare and Gowalla. Although the post didn’t generate a ton of discussion, it is still consistently near ...

Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot of my free time working on a personal project centered around a social activity I’ve become pretty passionate about: karaoke. Karaoke? Yes, karaoke. Why? Because it’s fun, dammit. I could write a whole separate post on why I love karaoke and what makes a great karaoke performance, but ...

In the days since the iPad’s announcement, there’s been an ongoing discussion going on in web circles about what its lack of support for Flash means for that technology, for Adobe, for video on the web, and frankly, for the web as a whole. I’m not really sure why this debate didn’t rear it’s head ...

I’m not going to front: when I saw the iPad introduction today, I was initially disappointed. I was really hoping for revolutionary way to interact with a device — a whole new multi-touch interface. I was expecting this, and the fact that the iPad is, really, just a big iPod touch was a bit, well, underwhelming. Then I remembered something ...

Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs, the best place for web professionals to find jobs and employers to find web professionals, has a long-standing tradition of giving back to the world. It also has a long-standing tradition of New Year’s promotions — and this year we’re tying the two together.

God dammit, people. You suck at this social networking thing. Allow me to educate your asses on how to suck less by outlining ten things that annoy the fuck out of me on Twitter:

Since I couldn’t fit my thoughts in 140 characters, this is a short post prompted by a discussion on Twitter today about development resources at web agencies. First, let’s define “agency.” When I say “web agency,” I mean a company that does web work for clients. This does not include internal teams, such as the web staff at ...

If you’ve been visiting this site for a while, you know that I’m a member of the Advisory Board for Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs — almost certainly the best place for web professionals to find and post job opportunities. In the name of transparency, this means, roughly, that I help Cameron out with advice and other little things ...

Tonight, an interesting thing happened. A guy I don’t know contacted me via the contact form on this very site. I’m not going to the name the guy, his company, or his product, but this is more or less what he said:

Hey Jeff! I just started following you on Twitter and I really like your site. I ...

As I mentioned here before, I’ll be speaking in New York in a couple of weeks at DelveUI, a two-day event filled with sessions from some of the best UI designers on the planet, including Lou Rosenfeld, Jina Bolton, Scott Jehl, Andrew Maier, Jamey Kosoy, Jason Santa Maria, Ryan Stewart, Theresa Neil, Robert Hoekman, Joshua Porter, Anders Ramsay, and ...

Today is my last day at Blue Flavor.

For the past couple of years (and then some) I’ve worked with some of the brightest minds in the web community on all sorts of exciting projects. I’ve learned a ton about myself, the way agencies work, dealing with clients, and developing web experiences in the real world — a world ...

I’m excited to be speaking at the inaugural Delve workshops in Brooklyn August 5th and 6th. DelveUI is a 2-Day Masterclass on Designing (Web) User Interfaces. Think of Delve as the antidote to the bloated conference experience — small, affordable, and frequent versus overwhelming, occasional, and costly. Each Delve consists of a series of two-hour masterclasses. That’s just long ...

A couple months ago, one of the first couple times I hung out with my latest BFF @alixito, we jointly had the brilliant idea to do a week-long tour of Seattle plethora karaoke bars, hitting one each night for seven straight days. Today, Alix and I announce the first edition of Seattle Karaoke Tour, taking place from June 13th through ...

Last night, while work on a very cool client project for Blue Flavor, I took a short break to make the following tweet: “It’s amazing what you can do in very little code when you apply object-oriented principles to CSS. Wish more front-end devs understood OOP.”

I got a surprising number of responses from people asking what I meant ...

On Thursday, my friends at Airbag launched Twitshirt, a simple but awesome service that lets you print the text of a Twitter posting on a tee-shirt. On Friday, the app was gone, replaced by a message stating, “we’re reversing the polarity.”

Why? Because some people — and notably some people who turn out to be very influential in the Twitter ...

Two highly-anticipated, location-based, IRL-style “games” for iPhone were launched at South By Southwest Interactive this year, and I thought I’d take a few moments to report on my experiences with each one.

First up is Foursquare, a sequel of sorts to the popular Dodgeball mobile tool, which was purchased by Google a few years ago and then killed ...

After reading the comments on my last post, about my beefs with Django’s URL template tag, it sounds like I made an assumption that was incorrect: I had understood that the {% url %} tag is now considered a best practice, and using the get_asbsolute_url method in templates is now considered a less-than-best practice.

Turns out, most people agree with me ...

I don’t like Django’s {% url %} template tag, and I'm about to tell you why. But first, let's have a little history lesson so we understand why the {% url %} tag exists and what problem it attempts to solve.

I’ve been involved in Django since the .90 release, or nearly three years. As long as I’ve ...

I’ll keep this short. Maybe.

I think it’s important, as Obama himself said, to remember that this man getting elected doesn’t change anything in terms of our economy, the war, terrorism, and other major issues that confront our country. I firmly believe Obama will be a harbinger of change for those matters, but it’s going to ...

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been honored and excited to speak at five events in three continents. It was a lot of work and a lot of travel, but worth every bit. I’ve had the time of my life, met a ton of great people, and share and gained more knowledge than I ever could have ...

As regular readers have no doubt noticed, I am a listing partner for Cameron Moll’s terrific Authentic Jobs. In the interest of transparency, that means I put AJ job listings on this site, and also sit on a sort of board of advisors for Authentic Jobs, in exchange for a small cut of the profit.

For anyone who doesn ...

Even at a progressive, Web Standards-friendly agency like Blue Flavor, the topic of which browsers to “support” comes up. Clients ask us, “Will our site be supported by IE6?,” for example. And even in the Web Standards community, there’s still a lot of talk about “dropping support” for IE6, and the like.

But doesn’t this whole idea of ...

Michelle and I will be spending some 20 hours this Friday and Saturday traveling from Kansas City to Sydney, Australia, and I couldn’t possibly be more excited about it. Since I was a kid, Australia has been at the very top of my list of “places to go someday,” and the fact that I get to do it with ...

Today, it was brought to my attention that HTML 5 Editor Ian Hickson, in an August 27 interview with TechRepublic outlined a timetable for the “new” spec, which began life back in 2003. Hixie suggests HTML 5 will reach the “Proposed Recommendation” stage sometime in 2022. Go ahead, read it again. It’s not a typo. Two thousand twenty two ...

Yeah, I’m going there. I want to talk about frameworks again. Bear with me…

I know I’ve discussed this topic at great length before, but it keeps coming up, and I still don’t have a very good understanding of all the positions people have taken on the topic. Last time I discussed this, I jumped to my ...

This is just a brief post to let jeffcroft.com RSS readers know about something you may have missed: I’ve started a podcast, of sorts. Not so much a “show,” these are simple audio conversations between myself and other web designers and developers.

Last week, I participated in a “callcast” on Kevin Fricovsky’s blog, How I Work Daily ...

Django’s templating system is one of its strongest points, in my opinion, and one of it’s coolest features it the “fallback” system used for locating templates. When used wisely, it can allow for a situation in which you can literally design an entire site by creating only one HTML file.

In Django’s settings.py file, you configure ...

As any regular reader of this site knows, I’m an avid user, fan, and evangelist of Django, the popular web application development framework written in Python. I first got into Django about two and a half years ago, when I joined the team at (what was then called) World Online, the interactive division of a Lawrence, KS news media ...

As you may know, part of my job at Blue Flavor entails speaking at conferences, giving workshops, and so forth. This fall, I’ve got several events lined up, and I wanted to let you all know about them.

First, I’ll be giving a workshop on building Django apps on September 8th in London. I’m again working with ...