Category: Web Development

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.

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.

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

• Get Yourself Pre-Processing in a Few Minutes
• Using the LESS CSS Preprocessor for Smarter Style Sheets
• An Introduction to LESS and Comparison to Sass
• SASS vs. LESS

Frameworks

• Twitter Bootstrap – (Less)
• Foundation 3 – (Sass)

Politicians shouldn’t be allowed to legislate that which they do not understand. I’m all for copyright protection, but SOPA is too far-reaching. In a nutshell, big companies will be able to censor anything they feel violates their copyright.

[vimeo width=”100%” height=”400″]http://vimeo.com/31100268[/vimeo]

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

This petition on We the People: Your Voice in Our Government, nearly 50,000 people have signed a petition asking our President to VETO the SOPA bill and any other future bills that threaten to diminish the free flow of information. People that work on the web have probably been more vocal about this issue than most, but this will impact anyone who uses the web in the United States should it pass.