Super Ginormous

Month: August 2012

  • Upcoming Conferences

    I’ll be attending at least two web conferences in the next two months. (And possibly a third.) First up: A Web Afternoon in Charlotte, NC on 22 September. Then there’s Converge Florida in Tallahassee, FL on 4-5 October. In both cases, these are events that were successful enough in their home towns – Atlanta & Columbia SC respectively – that they’ve taken their shows on the road.

    I like to describe A Web Afternoon as a half-day of awesomeness. (Tickets are only $49 if you snag one before 19 September. Follow @webafternoon on Twitter and there may even be promo codes to make your ticket even cheaper.)

    Converge FL is an exceptional two-day conference. The first day is full of workshops. Day 2: awesome speaker after awesome speaker. Speakers include Leslie Jensen-Inman, Chris Coyier, Cameron Moll, Carl Smith, Jina Bolton, J Cornelius… and the list goes on. Tickets are still available for $250.00.

    So what am I doing at these conferences? I’ll be live-tweeting from them. If you can’t attend either, follow @webafternoon or @convergese on the day of the events. Closer to each event I’ll share official hashtags and alternate accounts for both just in case I get rate-limited.

  • Back to Basics

    I haven’t given up on Tersus. I’m trying to get into the habit of posting more and I felt like having an incomplete theme was too much of a distraction for me (and for anyone else who might stumble across my site). In the meantime, I’ve switched to using the wonderfully designed, Twenty Eleven Twenty Twelve theme. Will it stay this way for long? I hope not. If it encourages me to write more, maybe.

    Speaking of habits, I’m working on becoming more productive. How am I hoping to accomplish that? I’ve installed RescueTime on my Mac and it tracks my web browsing and app usage and has a running dashboard available that I can view and see exactly how productive I’ve been each day. The other thing I’m doing is using an app called SelfControl. SelfControl lets you create a blacklist of distracting sites. Once its running, you can’t turn it off.

    I’m hoping  these two changes will help me stay more focused and, in turn, I’ll get more shit done.

  • An Afternoon in Charlotte

    Web Afternoon

    A Web Afternoon is making its way to Charlotte, NC next month. Registration is now open for this mini-event, and if you act fast (before August 25) you can snag a ticket for around $30.

    Why go to A Web Afternoon? It’s a half-day of awesomeness. The half-day format won’t kill your weekend or keep you away from work. You’ll see high-quality speakers for less than it’d cost to take a date to the movies.

  • CSS Preprocessing Resources

    A few weeks ago, I posted a link to Chris Coyier’s “Get Yourself Pre-Processing in a Few Minutes.” If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s well worth the five minutes of your time. Why should you use a CSS Pre-Processor? For me, it’s simple: it saves time and reduces the effort it takes for me to write lots of complex CSS. Below are some links to help you get started. If you know of any links, applications, etc that ought to be added, let me know!

    CSS Pre-Processing Languages

    • Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.
    • LESS “extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the client-side (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) and server-side, with Node.js and Rhino.”
    • xCSS – an object-oriented CSS Framework.

    Applications

    • Codekit – (Mac) – Use for Less, Sass/SCSS, HAML, Jade, Optimizing Images, etc. (My personal favorite.)
    • Scout.app – (PC/Mac)
    • Compass.app – (PC/Mac/Linux)
    • WinLESS – (PC)
    • SimpLESS – (PC)
    • .less – (PC) – Less CSS for .Net

    Further Reading

    Frameworks