JeffCroft.com

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 ...

There are a lot of things to complain about when it comes to the launch of Apple’s MobileMe service, which is still in an on-again-off-again state more than 40 hours after it was supposed to be available. I’ve done my fair share of complaining, though, and I’m done bitching about the launch. For now, I’d like ...

I’ll keep this one short. Michelle and I have left our digs in Seattle and are moving ourselves into an apartment in Kansas City, Missouri this afternoon. Meesh and I absolutely love Seattle, but unfortunately, there are some personal matters we must tend to back here in the Midwest. We hope to move back to Seattle just as soon ...

Yesterday, our friends at 37signals started an interesting discussion on their blog with a post entitled Why we skip Photoshop. But the post actually has very little to do with the actual tool (Adobe Photoshop), and is really more related to workflow.

37signals doesn’t do a visual composite phase in the process of developing their products. Instead, they jump ...

The wonderful Paul Boag from Headscape interviewed me for the latest episode of Boagworld, almost certainly the best web design podcast on the planet. We talk about my “controversial” views on web standards, Blueprint CSS, and more.

Unfortunately, I hate my voice, and it sounds even worse when propped up against Paul’s sexy British accent. Oh well — I think ...

In my experience, most in-house web teams basically employ two types of people: designers and developers. Sure, some people call them different things, and there are definitely exceptions, but generally speaking, we’re split into these two camps.

For the most part, our technical responsibilities are split up as such: “designers” do the client-side things (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc ...

In the past couple weeks, I’ve received a few e-mails from folks wondering why my blog has been less active than in the past. The answer is pretty simple: I’ve been busy, and I haven’t had much time to write.

However, I wanted to take a moment to point out that I post links almost every single ...

It’s no secret that I love to talk. If you don’t believe me, just ask my friends.

In particular, I like talking about the aspects of our industry I’m passionate about in front of engaged audiences. Last year, I spoke at some of web design’s biggest events, including South By Southwest Interactive, Future of Web Design ...

Wow, it’s hard to believe South By Southwest Interactive, the annual geek-fest for interactive professionals in Austin, TX, is only a few days away. We at Blue Flavor are all excited for another year of great sessions, great networking, and great fun. Keith and Nick will be speaking, and the entire Blue Flavor crew will be in attendance.

The ...

Your markup validator, whether it’s the one on the W3C site or one built into your favorite coding tool, is a debugging tool. It should be used as such. Its job is to find errors in your code, so that you can fix them (or at least be aware of them).

Your markup validator, whether it’s the one ...

Last night, when I finished up the latest redesign of JeffCroft.com, I was tired of being on the computer and didn’t feel like writing much more than a somewhat-flippant “here it is” message. Today, after a good night’s sleep and reading 50+ comments in response to the new design, I’m prepared to talk a little more ...

Yes, it’s a pretty drastic change for me. Yes, it only really works correcty in Safari (get over it). Yes, I did it pretty quickly. Yes, this redesign also constitutes an entire rewrite of my Django-based CMS. Yes, it no longer starts with www2. Yes, there are parts that are still unfinished. Yes, it's a bit of an ...

Today, I finally got around to reading the brouhaha over IE 8 and it’s version-targeting system. The last blog entry I read was Jeffrey Zeldman’s In defense of version targeting, a response to Jeremy Keith’s Broken — and I started to write a lengthy comment. At some point, I realized the comment would make a better post here ...

“Solutioneering” is a term our Creative Director, D. Keith Robinson, came up with back in the early days of Blue Flavor. Essentially, it means putting solutions before problems. In technical fields like web design and development, solutioneering is especially prevalent. However, this approach rarely yields good results.