Posts Tagged ‘webdesign’
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Yumbox started off as a complaint. “There are no decent recipe managing websites out there,” I whined. It’s true. All of the popular ones are too bloated with so-called community features. Now I’m not a bah-humbug recluse type of Tina, but I do want to keep things simple. I simply want to be able to collect, catalogue, and organize recipes, without having to field ads on the left, comments on the right, and watch out! a seasonal feature coming right at you overhead. On the other end of the spectrum, we already have many super pared-down, personal-recipe-collection types of web apps, which initially seemed more to my taste—there was even a mobile version of some for iPhone!—but ultimately none of these were completely satisfactory. They either lack essential features, have an inflexible organizational scheme, or just plain don’t look good.
Yumbox seared all of these flaws with its laser vision, plus it has all the lovely corner-rounding CSS that you could ever want.
So, FOWD. My first conference! FOWD stands for Future of Web Design. If you are a cool British person like the organizers of this event, you can pull off simply saying “foe’d.” (In Americanese this would be more like “fowl’d,” which is aurally less appealing.)
I think I’m going to write 2 separate blog posts. One now for general impressions/thoughts, one later for specific things that I want to retain. This one’s for general impressions. Here goes:
How to describe the day? It was a dazzling mélange of technological wizardry, smart people, and dorky jokes, with a few controversial manifestoes thrown in there. Contests were held, Twitter was leveraged, and WIFI capacity was systemically overwhelmed. The talks were all very fun to watch. Quite a few of them felt like watching my tech/design RSS feeds come to life in high-definition 4D. Which is exciting. (Later on, I got to meet Jason Santa Maria, whose blog I follow. The resolution of Jason Santa Maria’s face is tech-defyingly high in real life. Actually I think I may have freaked him out a bit by poking his arm to verify that he was real.)
For a long time, I’ve gone away from using absolute positioning to structure my webpages and have since relied almost exclusively on floats to position things side-by-side. It seemed that absolute positioning had its disadvantages because it takes elements out of the flow of the page. So if you absolutely position a long block of text or something likewise huge, it can cover and obscure small inline things that follow it. It just makes everything a little bit crazy because suddenly things aren’t stacking up the way you expect, you get z-index issues, and IE6 explodes (IE6 explodes no matter what you do, actually.). But just now I realized one benefit of using absolute positioning over floats in some places: looking good when naked.
