Hello, dear readers. I’d like to start with a message I just sent to the Miami-Dade Public Library System. MDPLS recently spent months integrating a new web-based catalog and backend circulation system, and the results are… well, just read my message:

For the past few weeks, I have been excited to see your new catalog system, but I must admit I am a bit appalled at the results. As the Polaris ILS website proudly proclaims, MDPLS is a “world-class library,” and yet your new website system is third-rate at best.

1. The catalog site uses a table-based layout. CSS layouts have been widely supported in all major browsers for at least six years. Table-based layouts use nearly twice as much “code” as CSS layouts to achieve the same result, making table-based layouts much more difficult for machines (including both Google and screen reader software for disabled users) to understand.

2. Worse, portions of your new site’s source code reference “Office 2007″. How is the software for a world-class library system built using a word processor? Likely as a result of this, parts of the website (such as the drop-down menu buttons on the lists of bestsellers) do not seem to work properly in any browser other than Internet Explorer. Users of Mac OS X computers cannot download Internet Explorer and are therefore out of luck. In today’s internet, it is extremely rare to find websites that only work in one browser, and the fact that your new site is tied to Internet Explorer is troubling.

3. The catalog is almost entirely unusable for disabled users! Most links on the page are images without ALT text, and the page includes large amounts of inline JavaScript, which are not only non-compliant with web standards but also unusable by screen reader software. Some areas of your site are only accessible by users who can visually see where the mouse pointer is on the screen. Even on a more subtle level, the “tab” headings of the catalog system use dark blue text against a slightly lighter blue background, a lack of color contrast which makes reading difficult for users without perfect vision. The overall lack of accessibility is blatant and in violation of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 508 has lead to large judgements against corporations who disregard accessibility; see e.g. the $6 million dollar settlement in National Federation of the Blind v. Target Corporation in 2006. I am amazed that a large municipal entity like MDPLS apparently did not even attempt to verify the usability of their website for disabled patrons.

How much did this new software installation, which is decidedly behind the times, cost? Many other library systems around the country have created stellar examples of usable, accessible, and fully-integrated websites. I realize that they are a much smaller system, but I urge you to evaluate the Ann Arbor, MI library website at http://www.aadl.org – a site created entirely with the open-source (and therefore free-of-cost) Drupal software, which also runs major corporate and organizational websites around the world. Drupal is obviously not the only way to create a highly functional and usable website, but AADL serves as a strong example of what library websites can do.

As a regular MDPLS patron, I am deeply disappointed with the new catalog system, and I look forward to your response to these problems.

MDPLS is the largest library system I have ever had the pleasure of using. They have an incredibly large collection and I haven’t had many problems with their services. However, their website has always been sub-par, and my hopes for improvement with their new system have been dashed. I hope that someone at MDPLS reads my message, and I urge you, dear readers, to write to them yourselves through their contact form.

For years, Mac gaming has been primarily focused on iPhone OS devices. A large percentage of App Store sales are for games, and the iPod Touch (and now iPad) is being pushed as a competitor to the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. The Mac desktop, however, was largely neglected. Big PC releases would find their way to Mac months or years later, after an intermediary company had ported the Windows version. Often, these ports had their own quirks and bugs. The Mac was never a first-class gaming citizen.

Steam just might change that, however. For those unfamiliar with Steam, it’s essentially an iTunes for gaming. Users create a Steam account that, through the Steam client software, offers a store for downloadable games, tracks purchases, and installs and updates purchased games. Steam games can even be launched through the client, making it a one-stop solution for gaming.

What really makes Steam special, though, is the amount of support they’ve received from game publishers. Steam offers its own DRM, with periodic online verification. The entire system is tied to a Steam account and handled in a transparent manner – users never have to enter a serial number or install game-specific, system-altering DRM software. As a result, big-name releases are often available for download through Steam on the same day as their retail release.

Since Steam has been so well-received by Windows users, the release of a Mac Steam client could signal the beginning of a major shift in Mac gaming. Publishers finally have an incentive to release Mac versions of their games, since a proven distribution system is now in place for end users to buy them. Mac market share is steadily growing, and if Steam makes the Mac a viable target for game publishers, Windows will lose yet another competitive advantage.

While reading a book yesterday I made an interesting discovery: a chapter that began on a verso (left-side) page. In a standard typeset book, chapters or other major divisions generally begin on a recto (right-side) page, leaving a blank verso if the previous section ended on a recto page. This book followed that standard everywhere else, so I wondered if this was an accidental oversight on the part of the typesetter or if it was a deliberate act that met some other, unknown publishing requirement.

I thought to myself that in an e-book, these distinctions are entirely meaningless. E-book hardware only shows one page at a time. Even the notion of “pages” is abstracted away, as the user re-sizes text on the fly and the entire book re-flows its own layout to match, adding or dropping page numbers as needed.

So are typesetters out of a job? Hardly. A professionally typeset book exudes quality, even if the writing within does not. Until everyone starts writing their books in a system like LaTeX, typesetters will play an important role in adding value to a finished book, online or not. Even with publishing systems like LaTeX, a good typesetter can still make a book stand out in a way that matches the tone and style of its writing. As with anything else in design, the rules exist so that those who have mastered the rules can break them creatively.

I propose that the e-book can serve as a blank canvas on which an entirely new art of typesetting can flourish. What we have currently is a system that creates beautiful printed books and then translates them into e-books in imitation of the original. Where we need to end up is a system for creating beautiful e-books from the beginning, with their own standards and conventions. As e-books become more popular, I think we will see a revolution in how we conceive of the “book” as an object.

For reference, one need only look to the constant evolutions of the video game industry. Whenever a new console cycle begins, developers’ first impulse is to create games that are very similar to what has already been done, only “better”. As the hardware matures and developers become more confident in working with it, entirely new types of games are created that utilize the best features of the new hardware while casting aside gameplay mechanics and practices that no longer make sense. The end result is a set of games that are unique to that generation of consoles and represent the best of an era.

Printed books have had a long run, but a new cycle is beginning, and I’m eagerly waiting for the end results.

Most of the negative assessments of the device fall into one of two camps. The first camp says that the iPad isn’t anywhere near as innovative as rumor and speculation had indicated, and that the iPad is really nothing more than “a giant iPod Touch.” The second camp says that the iPad is too locked down to be attractive, since it only runs applications that Apple has blessed with inclusion in the App Store – notably excluding any version of Adobe’s Flash runtime. I’d like to address both camps in this post.

The iPad doesn’t have a camera / wash my car / cook me breakfast.

First, Apple products rarely live up to their pre-launch hype, but that doesn’t make them any less compelling or significant over the long haul. Look back to the iPod; when it was first released, I was happy with my portable MiniDisc player / recorder (which is still, to me anyways, the true successor of the cassette tape). The iPod was like any other MP3 player on the market when it was released, and while the Apple hype machine might not have been in full gear at the time, there certainly wasn’t much to be enthused about at the time. But as release followed release, the iPod became a thousand-ton juggernaut in the portable audio market. Apple refined iTunes until it was the best music management software available, on any platform, not to mention the premier online store for buying content. Apple invented the “podcast,” the sonic equivalent of blogging. The iPod itself became ever more capacious, and when it reached 40GB in its third generation, even I was tempted enough to ditch my minidisc collection for a device that could hold my entire music library (at that time, anyways… it’s become much larger since then). The initial product may have disappointed, but it quickly grew into something much bigger than even the most outlandish hype could have predicted.

The cycle repeated itself with the iPhone. Remember the Motorola ROKR? 100-song hardware limit, with a clumsy music-playing interface – an abomination that was quickly forgotten in Cupertino. Then Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. The hype was incredible – desktop-like web surfing, innovative new multi-touch screen, a whole new way of interacting with an iPod. Then the criticism began. Mobile Safari doesn’t have a Flash plugin; the phone is too expensive; there’s no way to write real applications for it; you’re stuck in a two-year contract with AT&T; it’s too slow. Within two years, Apple had introduced the blazing-fast iPhone 3GS at nearly half the cost of the original iPhone, the App Store had outperformed any analyst’s expectations, and Flash started its decline in popularity.

I predict a similar cycle with the iPad. Every “major” concern that would supposedly keep people from buying an iPad – its lack of a camera, the inability to make phone calls on 3G-equipped models, or the continuing lack of Flash support – will become a non-issue within two years. Sure, entirely new issues will arise during that time; witness the complaints about the App Store approvals process or the outrage at AT&T’s service that accompanied the growth of the iPhone. But the iPad will in all likelihood sell like hotcakes within one to two years, even if its initial launch is underwhelming, simply because Apple doesn’t sit around on their laurels when they release a new product line. Apple tweaks, prods, and perfects their devices, and if they still don’t sell well, only then does Apple lose interest (see the AppleTV or Mac Mini).

The iPad is a locked-down DRM love-fest.

Sad but true. The only way to get an application onto a standard-issue iPad will be through the iTunes App Store, meaning that if you consider the iPad a computer, it’s about the most locked-down computer to be sold in the history of computing. If Apple doesn’t like your app, it will not find its way to an unmodified iPad, period. The lack of a disc drive or even a USB port further solidifies that, and the iPad’s non-traditional filesystem won’t even let you shoehorn an unauthorized application onto the device. Note that I haven’t even mentioned content yet, the traditional place for talk about DRM. No, the iPad’s DRM limits what can come into the device as much as (if not more than) what you can copy off of it. No wonder the Free Software Foundation is up in arms.

All the same, devices like the iPad really are the future of computing. It’s certainly powerful enough to run nearly any traditional desktop application, along with relatively complex games (though it’s not any real competition to something like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3). It has the world’s easiest application installation process; click a button, potentially charge your credit card, and the application is on your device and ready to use. And since every developer in the world is forced to use the same application installer, you will never see the confused jumble that is Windows (or, to a lesser extent, even Mac) application installs, with product activation, serial numbers, and actual installer programs. The iPad “just works,” in an actually meaningful way, and that’s all most people care about. If the Web conforms more closely to Apple’s vision, which, thankfully for Apple, is also the vision of Google and others, then many users may not even need a “real” computer to complement their iPad. The stereotypical computer-literate family member who keeps all the family’s computers in good working order will become a thing of the past, because the iPad is built so that it cannot be broken. It can crash now and then, sure, but no one will ever need to “re-install iPhone OS” or make sure that they have the most recent browser or plugins.

I make only one caveat to the above paragraph: Apple, and computer manufacturers in general, cannot use the iPad approach for everyone. Plenty of people use computers because they enjoy keeping a well-maintained system, much like car enthusiasts who truly enjoy fixing up their cars with their own two hands. And specialists – designers, developers, and researchers – will always need the unparalleled flexibility of a general-purpose operating system. The geeks will be all too happy to recommend the iPad to their relatives, so long as they can keep the shiny toys for themselves.

Yeah, but what about Flash?

Over the years, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Adobe. I first learned web design by using my school’s copy of Dreamweaver; without that experience, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. At the same time, Dreamweaver keeps designers weak by holding their hands and creating shoddy look-alikes of well-implemented sites.

The Flash Platform is exciting because of its power and its near-universal install base. ActionScript 3.0 can do an awful lot, and the Flash runtime can execute some fairly complicated code (like full 3D gaming) at a reasonable speed. But Flash is, and likely always will be, proprietary. Adobe makes its income selling the tools that allow developers to target the one and only Flash runtime. If Adobe opened up Flash development, you would see multiple Flash runtimes for everything from supercomputers to toasters, and a proliferation of Flash development tools as well. This would be incredibly good for Flash adoption – it would have the opportunity to unseat JavaScript as the go-to scripting language of the Web – but it would bankrupt Adobe.

So Adobe has to walk a fine line. They have to push for adoption of Flash wherever possible, promoting it as an essential part of the Web like HTML or CSS, but at the same time they have to keep Flash protected from any attempt to open-source it or otherwise reveal its complete inner workings. It’s a strategy that makes Adobe act like it has multiple personalities, threatening open-source developers reverse-engineering Flash for being too open, but criticizing Apple’s exclusion of Flash from its mobile devices for being not open enough.

What will the outcome be? Ultimately, I don’t think potential iPad buyers are going to care about the lack of Flash. Adobe will either find a way to make Flash web-accessible while still remaining proprietary, or Flash will wither and die. You can see the beginnings of the first option in Adobe’s CS5 demonstrations, where Flash CS5 was shown compiling Flash apps into native iPhone OS apps, and Dreamweaver could convert interactive charts from Flash components to HTML5 components. If Adobe’s money-maker is tools for designers and developers, I think Adobe will be making its tools as useful and relevant as possible – and I think that means embracing HTML5 and finding ways to make Flash content work within that scope.

Rant mode off.

The iPad really is a unique device, even if it is nothing more than a giant iPod Touch. When the iPad evolves into a notebook replacement, the computing landscape will be changed forever, and I believe that such a change is inevitable. In two years, we will look back at the iPad announcement and tell ourselves that the whole time we were asking the wrong questions and focusing on the wrong things. It really is going to be a game-changer, even if I don’t find myself all that enthused about buying the first generation.

But Firefox has always had its issues. The great Firefox memory hole has consistently shrunk with each new release, but it still exists, bringing the browser to a grinding halt with disturbing regularity. Page rendering speeds have improved over the years, but they haven’t necessarily kept pace with the increasing complexity of application-weight websites.

I want a browser that gets out of my way. Pages should load quickly and render perfectly, there shouldn’t be any delays switching between tabs, and the browser should have useful tools for analyzing and inspecting site source code – all while remaining stable and using a minimum of operating system resources.

So, lately I’ve been doing all of my browsing (and development) with Google Chrome. I started using Chrome last year on Windows out of sheer curiosity, but quickly dropped it and returned to Firefox. But Chrome, too, has been growing and evolving, along with the WebKit engine that it runs on. WebKit has the best CSS3 support of any browser, letting me test out all the newest techniques without waiting for Firefox to add support. Chrome is now quite solid, even in its developer releases, and incredibly fast. And while there are times that I miss the Firebug extension for Firefox, WebKit’s “Inspect Element” pane has evolved into a quite capable replacement for my purposes, especially when combined with new Chrome extensions like Pendule.

Am I done with Firefox? Certainly not. Firefox is the world’s second most popular browser, and for good reason; Firefox dramatically raised the bar for what users could expect from a web browser, and it continues to improve through regular releases year after year. It is still the browser that I would recommend to anyone for general use, and I will continue to test every site I create in Firefox (along with Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer). When using Chrome, I miss the ability to search Google, Wikipedia, and more from a tiny search box in the upper right (Update: I just needed to “Edit Search Engines“), and Firefox’s add-ons feel a lot more robust than Chrome’s extensions.

But at this time, for my own use, Chrome has supplanted Firefox.

(P.S. – I’m still looking forward to the impending Firefox 3.6. I may be switching back if I’m suitably impressed. It’s so wonderful to live in a time where we have real competition between browser makers!)

Image from Google Blogoscoped

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot over the last few days, and I keep coming back to the same answer: get working. The best thing any designer can do is not to sit around on your laurels, but to keep coming up with fresh, exciting designs.

So, that said, I’d like to announce here my own New Year’s resolution:

Produce two new design mocks every week for a year.

That’s 104 quality designs for my portfolio, guaranteed. And by “design mock” I mean a functional, but small, website – not just a Photoshop comp but something that actually shows my skills.

What are your plans for 2010? Leave a comment about your brilliant ideas for next year.

Photo by  ீ ๑ Adam

Wasn’t that interesting? The part that most struck me was when Rodriguez writes the following:

[W]ho will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.

For many of us, the world online has become more important than the city around us. It is no wonder, then, that newspapers – once the epitome of locality – are in a sorry state. Rodriguez argues that this is a loss of an entire way of life – that in the future we will have “one and a half cities: Washington, D.C. and American Idol.” The death of the newspaper is to him the death of the American city as a whole, the elimination of any uniqueness that a particular tract of land might have. The result is a café full of drones locked in a “wi-fi séance,” none of them talking or even looking at one another.

I can certainly see where Rodriguez is coming from, but I must disagree about the ultimate effects. The Chronicle began as the… chronicle, you could say, of a small town. Everyone knew everyone else, and the newspaper served as the codification and persistent memory of the place. As cities became larger and larger, newspapers by necessity became more and more selective about what qualified as “news” and about whose goings-on deserved to be recorded and shared. The “spirit of a place” became more about the spirit of the place’s most important people than about the everyday actions of ordinary people.

The Internet, and social media in particular, is re-defining the boundaries of the “small town” mode of living. Newspapers faced limitations of reporter salaries, materials, printing costs, and delivery for papers that would have to become much thicker in order to keep the same kind of focus. The burden of producing the news, however, has largely shifted to the consumers of the news themselves, as if the New York Times took submissions (and published!) from anyone willing to send them a story. Plus, since computers are very good at sorting and filtering records, consumers of social media are not required to thumb through hundreds of pages of newsprint. This lets social media act as a focused lens on the goings-on of select groups of people, while still having coverage broad enough to support hundreds of cities. A one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it newspaper that purports to cover an entire city (and surrounding metropolitan area) can’t hope to compete with the customized, precision focus of social media. To use Seth Godin’s phrase, newspapers are no longer a “Purple Cow,” they are now simply an average product for average people. And no one likes to think of themselves as average.

Yes, the shift to social media has definitely taken a toll on notions of place and space. But how accurate were those notions to begin with? Cities, like nations, are imaginary concepts; there is no physical line in the sand to separate the city from the plain, everyday land around it, anymore than there is a physical line in the ground demarcating one country from another (the proposed fencing-off of Mexico notwithstanding). If you live on the fringe, then people on the fringe are part of your community; it’s not that you are part of a city and your neighbors are not solely because of what side of an imaginary line they live on. Cities, then, function solely as generalized markers on a scale of place – it’s more convenient to tell someone that you live “near Atlanta” than to give them latitude and longitude coordinates (too narrow) or “in Georgia” (too broad). As the population of the US becomes more mobile and fluid, this is becoming the main purpose that cities serve. The majority of people I’ve met since moving to Miami are similarly not from Miami; everyone brings their own ideas of community and we throw them in a pot and stir them up, and I wouldn’t call the result “Miami culture” because I still don’t know what “Miami culture” would even be. In that sense, I’ve already lost track of place. My “place” is now the people I communicate with online, regardless of where they are – I’ve drawn my own imaginary lines to indicate who is and isn’t part of a city of my own making, of my own newspaper. And that social media “newspaper” works in much the same way as the original San Francisco Chronicle – I get a codified, recorded history of everything that happens in my “city.”

What about you, readers? Are you still firmly rooted in place-ness, or have you cut free of your physical shackles? (How’s that working out for you?)

Photo by Mike Bailey-Gates.

Get inspired elsewhere

Sometimes burnout is a simple matter of doing exactly the same thing for too long. Even if you absolutely love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, having one every single day can get boring. So, the first technique to get yourself out of a funk is mixing up your routine. Try a different workspace; go outside if you’ve been spending all your time indoors; read websites, magazines, or books that you wouldn’t normally touch. Often these kinds of activities will trigger some part of your brain that has just been sitting around, helping you look at the work you need to do from an entirely different angle and getting you involved and interested again.

Just start at all costs

Many times a so-called “burnout” is really procrastination. Your work is overwhelming you, and as a result your natural inclination is to step back and wait for the situation to change. The problem with this approach is that the only thing changing is the amount of time left until your deadline – which is getting smaller, not larger. The trick to getting out of this situation is just starting, and not focusing on the totality of what needs to be done. Get yourself to spend 10 solid minutes working on something, and chances are good that you’ll get into a rhythm and be able to finish a sizable chunk then and there. If not, go back to procrastinating for a bit and then commit yourself to 10 minutes of work again.

Have you had a break lately?

Sometimes burnout is just a sign that you really need a break. If you’ve been pushing yourself hard for months, without any time for yourself, take a mini-vacation for a day or two to give your brain a chance to think about all the non-work things that it has been saving up while you work. Then, when you come back, you’ll be refreshed and ready to go.

Preventative medicine

All of these tips can be used before a burnout happens as well. Spending time now and then exposing yourself to new and different things, and committing yourself to tiny bursts of work when you don’t really feel like doing anything, will help keep you in check before burnout even rears its ugly head. Take care of your brain, and it will take care of you.

Are there any tips I’m missing? What are your strategies for avoiding a work meltdown?

Photo by megwills

1. Espresso – I picked up a copy of this program as part of the MacHeist bundle. It’s an IDE for web design, handling HTML/CSS editing (with autocompletion), a built-in WebKit browser for previews as you work, FTP syncing, and project organization. Plugins called “sugars” even let you extend Espresso’s support for other languages. If they added preview support for PHP, it would be even better, but as is it’s still hard to beat for productivity.
2. Mail.app / iCal / Address Book – The Mac OS dream team. Newer versions of Mail.app finally have solid support for Gmail over IMAP, and it integrates smoothly with iCal and Address Book for managing tasks, appointments, and contacts. Together they do everything I might use a more heavyweight program or webapp for.
3. Photoshop CS4 – Some designers prefer to use Fireworks for creating site mockups and graphical elements, but Photoshop is the tool I turn to again and again. I usually start by creating a mockup in Photoshop, and then slicing out discrete graphical elements, tiling backgrounds, and gradient fills for use in Espresso.
4. NetNewsWire – This program quickly became my RSS feed reader of choice. It syncs with my Google Reader account, and it has fast and intuitive keyboard controls that let me get through mountains of news in a fraction of the time it would take with even Google Reader’s webapp.
5. TweetDeck – If you’re a Twitter power user, you will use this program. End of story.
6. iTerm – A fast and flexible replacement for the built-in Terminal.app, iTerm supports tabbed terminal windows, a fullscreen mode, and keyboard shortcuts for switching between tabs, letting you turn your Mac into something much closer to bare Unix when you need to work with a remote server, without having to boot a Linux virtual machine.
7. WriteRoom – A distraction-free writing environment, WriteRoom hides all of the clutter of your computer and lets you focus on writing – without even having to worry about formatting. Great for when you just want to get words out and edit them later.
8. Klok – This program isn’t perfect, but it’s still the best time-tracking program I’ve ever used. Set up projects and then click a button to start tracking time for that project; click again to stop. Klok will then automatically make weekly and monthly timesheets for you, along with pie charts showing you the ratio of time spent on your various projects. Having all of this work done for you makes invoicing a snap.

These eight programs are far from the only software I use on my Mac, but I’d consider them the “must-have” list that I would rush to install on a new computer. What software can you not live without? Whether Windows, Mac, or Linux, leave your own list in the comments below; I’ll make a round-up of crowd favorites in a later post.

Photo by guidosportaal

We don’t make movies to make money. We make money so we can make more movies.

Whatever you do – whether you’re a designer, a writer, a coder, anything – this needs to be your mindset. You have to love your work so much that if you won the lottery today, you would still show up for work tomorrow because you would feel you were missing out if you didn’t.

If that is not how you feel – what are you doing with your life?

Essentially, there are two ways of looking at the boxes. One way is to look at the assembled whole and say “what was I thinking?”and throw the entire lot of it into some kind of mental (and physical) garbage can – “out with the old, in with the new.” The other way is to embrace that history, to recognize what about it made it so special and to take that forward into new experiences in the future.

In thinking about all of this stuff and what it actually means to me, I think my personal reaction is to take a middle path. I installed that big box of DOS games using Boxer on my Mac, and as I play through them here and there, I study them – what was it that made me enjoy them so much, and what parts of them should have been done differently? What were the truly timeless games, and what games should be forgotten?

The same applies to nearly everything we come across in our daily lives. We can endlessly analyze the things around us in terms of what does and does not make them “work” in a functional or aesthetic sense. The trick is to always be questioning, and to always look for influences that can be put to use in future work.

For the record, definite classics include TIE Fighter, X-COM: UFO Defense, Syndicate, and SSI’s Stronghold; weak games include Magic Carpet (though it was certainly revolutionary for its time) and Cyberia (with a “C”), even though it did have a pretty good soundtrack by Thomas Dolby.

What about you, reader? Anything interesting influencing your work lately? Any recollections of DOS games or AD&D that you’d like to share? Leave a comment below and tell us about it.

P.S. – The title of this post comes from the song “Fascination” by La Roux. Another way, besides DOS and D&D, that the 80′s are coming back into my life.

While all of these are important, and it’s always good to have an idea of how much you don’t know, it’s also important to have the courage to put the skills you acquire into practice. Learning and studying can become a shield that we hide behind instead of doing real work and putting ourselves out there to get real work.

Perfect apostrophes

Merlin Mann once shared the story of his sudden book deal with O’Reilly on an episode of “43 Folders.” Merlin decided that he would keep his final drafts in a binder – which required him to research and buy a binder, a three-hole punch, paper to put in it, and more. Binder at the ready, he decided that the binder didn’t look real enough without a cover insert, so he designed his own O’Reilly animal-themed cover to put into the binder’s front cover. But something wasn’t quite right – the apostrophe he had used in his “O’Reilly” logo didn’t match up with the one used on real O’Reilly books. After spending half a day looking at fonts trying to find “the perfect apostrophe,” he finally realized that his belief that he needed the perfect set of tools, perfect knowledge of what he needed to do, had wasted three entire days – and he only had a short time in which to write the book.

The moral of the story is obvious. Working to improve yourself is a great goal – it leads to better work and happier clients. But focusing all of your time and energy on improvement is ultimately a waste, because it doesn’t give you any real experience. You will never know everything there is to know, because “what you need to know” is always changing, especially in a fast-paced industry like web design. Ultimately, you can probably learn more by taking on client work that is a bit outside your comfort zone than by sitting around reading all day. Don’t chase the perfect apostrophe when you could be chasing client work instead.

My apostrophes

I’ve been guilty of chasing the perfect apostrophe myself. I’ve been doing web design as a “side job” for years, and I’ve hesitated to make it my full-time occupation. Even now, I worry that my work isn’t good enough for me to look for new clients, and that I should be improving my skills even more. Meanwhile, designers with no concept of usability or architecturally sound coding are cranking out mediocre websites left and right. Anyone who has researched clients for web design knows the incredible number of really terrible sites that businesses and individuals have paid for. To truly practice the principles I hold dear, I should be making those sites – and making them far better than what they are now – instead of telling myself I’m not yet good enough.

How about you? Are there any perfect apostrophes in your life? How are you getting around them to do the best work you possibly can? Leave a comment below!

As you can probably tell, “Crush It!” has changed the way I think about what I do online. My blog is no longer something I get to every week or two “when I have time;” it’s a daily activity for me, and I’ve come to take a lot of enjoyment from it. After all, why wouldn’t writing about the thing you are most passionate about be fun? Maybe you don’t like writing; you could still start a podcast, or record videos for Youtube. The point is that you need to build up a stockpile of evidence that you have a passion, material that shows the whole world that you really care when it comes to what you’re talking about, content that demonstrates you’re taking the time to become an expert in your field. Even if “your field” is stickers, or baby clothing, or statues of ants.

When you’ve got the content machine rolling, you will also want to connect with people. Become active on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Don’t just wait for people to contact you for your advice – actively find and interact with people who are talking about your field. Writing in your blog is like starting a new conversation, but you also need to be tapping into the millions of conversations that are already happening around you every day. Twitter Search can help you immensely in this process. I’ll be writing more about how to use Twitter tomorrow, but the idea is that being an expert is worthless if all you do is sit in your cave alone all day (I’m talking to you in the back row. Yes, you.)

There’s also the world of other people’s blogs. Unless your field is incredibly niche, you’re bound to come across other people just as interested in your topic as you are. Seek out those blogs, read what their authors have to say, and leave comments on their blogs. And don’t just say “Great post.” Say something meaningful! Tell the author why you agree or disagree; point the author at other resources on the web they might not know about; ask questions. If you are sincerely interested in what they have to say, then let them know that in your comments. These people are not your competition. You’re both interested in spreading your passion, so help each other out as much as you can. Be helpful, be friendly, but most of all, be you.

It all comes down to authenticity. Be the authentic you, because people can tell when you’re faking. When someone follows me on Twitter and I follow them back, if I get an automated direct message saying “Thanks for following me! Check out my blog here,” I immediately put them in a “not a real person” folder in my head. I don’t have time to deal with someone whose only interest in me is marketing their product / service at me. I’m not interested in reading your blog if you don’t even acknowledge me as a real person. I already get enough junk mail every day, and if you are talking to me like you’re junk mail, you will end up in the same place – my trash can. Be the real you, say the things you would say if you were talking in real life. Don’t try to “filter” your online identity, because filtered comes across as fake, and no one likes fake.

To sum it all up, for the last week I’ve been hustling. I’ve been posting to this blog every day (except Sunday, but I think that’s just a transitional phase and I’ll be up to 7-days-a-week posting soon), I’ve been actively seeking out similar people on Twitter, and I’ve been engaging with other bloggers around the world. That is on top of my normal work day, because sharing my passion is that important. Has it been paying off? Definitely. It’s only been a week, and I’m already receiving twice as many visitors per day to my blog, and my followers on Twitter have gone from about twenty to over 100. Will I be cashing in anytime soon? No. Right now, I’m just enjoying the ride, and I plan to continue that for as long as I possibly can.

How about you? Have you been crushing it yourself? Do you want to after reading this post? Leave me a comment below and I’ll be in touch.

P.S. – I’m in the process of making a new theme for this blog. Expect something similar, but much better, ETA TBA.

Five years ago, blogger Dave Winer and New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz made a bet. “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007,” Winer wagered, “weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times Web site.”

When it came time to judge the bet, blogs outranked the Times on four out of the five chosen stories, making Winer the winner. But the real news out of the bet was the site that trounced them both — Wikipedia.

Yes, that’s right. As anyone who’s searched for a hot news item on Google can attest, Wikipedia knows all, and it is consistently at or near the top for nearly any topic in the news. But Matt doesn’t claim that newspapers should be replaced by Wikipedia. He argues that the path to salvation for the troubled newspaper industry is in hyper-local wikis:

Imagine if the work of the hundreds of reporters dispatched daily to cover a city didn’t merely fade into an obscure archive, but added day after day to the work that came before it. An online news site in the era of Wikipedia would be a living archive, adaptable to suit any context, growing to encompass all aspects of life in a community.

Those words were written in February 2008, but they are actually coming to fruition in some places. The Ann Arbor News has transitioned away from being a daily print publication to twice-weekly, and re-focused itself as being “of, by and for the community.” Anyone can register for an account at annarbor.com and begin posting commentary. This is how newspapers can once again become relevant – by acting as the centralized, local place for members of the community to interact and feel welcome. It’s the same formula that made Craigslist such a popular site – and that killed newspaper classifieds in the process.

Granted, AnnArbor.com is not really a wiki at all yet. It’s more of a blog at this point, but that’s still a step in the right direction. If the community embraces this concept, then the staff of AnnArbor.com may one day become the framework upon which community interaction happens, nothing more than a catalyst for wider discussion – which, to me, is exactly what a newspaper should be.