JeffCroft.com

Pro CSS Techniques

I’ve gotten several e-mails lately asking me about the status of Pro CSS Techniques, the professional-level CSS book I’m working on with Dan Rubin and Ian Lloyd. We’re not quite done with the writing, but we’re getting there and it’s shaping up to be quite nice, I think. Bringing Dan and Ian on has been great — both of them not only know their way around CSS, but also are talented writers. I know CSS books are a dime a dozen. I’m hoping to differentiate this one by being a bit more “real-world” than some others and also a bit less preachy about web standards. This is a short excerpt from the book’s Introduction that I believes outlines the approach quite well:

What this book is not

This book is not an introduction to CSS. Although we’ll provide an overview of the basics, we’ll assume you have a simple understanding of what CSS is and how it works. This book is not a comprehensive reference guide, either. Reference guides can be very useful (and CSS references already exist on the market), but they don’t usually deal with context, best practices, and issues of practicality. This book is also not an evangelist for web standards. We believe strongly in web standards, but we also believe in doing what’s practical and effective above all else. This book is not a gallery of clever, experimental CSS techniques. We’re focusing on techniques you can use today in the real world, on real projects, for real clients.

The values of this book

This book is focused around four key goals:

• Maintainability: we’ll provide suggestions on how you can easily write, organize, and store your code in ways that makes it simple to maintain — by you or by someone else.
• Compatibility: we’ll show you how you can avoid browser compatibility issues before they crop up, and how you can work around them when they do.
• Reusability: we want you to get the most out of your styles by taking advantage of the inheritance and specificity built into CSS.
• Practicality: We’ll remind you not to get too hung up on any of these ideals. It’s always smart to try to do something the “right” way, but if they “right” way proves to be impractical, use what works in the real world and move on. The ink is never dry on a website — you can always optimize later.

Pro CSS Techniques is set to be released at the end of November. I hope you’ll check it out.

I’ve learned a lot of things — about CSS, about writing, and most of all, about myself — through the process of writing this book. It’s been a great experience (if overwhelming and time-consuming and tedious at times) that I know will prove to be very rewarding in the long run.

The other book

There’s another book on the horizon, as well. Its details haven’t yet been made public (and I’m not at liberty to do so), but I think it’s going to be really great. It’s a more creative, design-driven book with a different author for each chapter. And while I won’t mention any names, I will say that the author list reads like a who’s who of modern standards-oriented web design. I think they needed me for the sake of diversity. I’m totally the token C-lister.

I believe this book is slated to be released in the first quarter of 2007, but don’t quote me on that. Should be a good one.

Still hiring!

We’re still hiring for a whole bunch of positions at World Online. Some are primarily related to our commercial Django-powered CMS for news organizations, Ellington, and others are primarily for our internal editorial team (running the websites of our in-house news operations) — but the reality is that we all work on a little bit of everything. We’re looking for a systems administrator, a Python/Django programmer, a project manager, a CSR, a salesperson, and a couple of interaction/web designers to work on editorial projects (journalism background a plus, but not necessarily required).

This team had five people (one director, two programmers, two designers) on it when I got here back in January. Today, it has eight (one director, four programmers, three designers). By the end of the year, it should have about 15 (one director, five programmers, five designers, one sysadmin, and three “business end” folks). That’s some amazing growth in one year, and I’m pretty damn excited about it.

So, if you want to work on a fast-moving web team in the news/media industry, get in touch. Feel free to e-mail me if you’ve got questions about the jobs or company that you want to discuss before you apply.

jeffcroft.com redesign in the works (again)

It’s probably a ways off (isn’t there’s a November 1st reboot, too?), but I am lightly working on a re-work of this site in my (not very copious) spare time. As some of you know, the current version of this site is written on an older version of Django (.91). Since that version, a major overhaul of many of Django’s core components has taken place (this was called “magic removal,” and has been done for several months now). I’ve ported my CMS (actually, pretty much re-written it, with much greater Django knowledge and understanding now and some kick ass new features I can’t wait to unveil) to Django’s latest version, but have decided not to move my site to it until I also have a swanky new design to go along with it. So, I’m working on that.

For those wondering, this was something I knew I was getting myself into. The Django team was very upfront about the fact that the “magic removal” process would change a great deal about how Django works. As Django is in it’s pre-1.0 state, backwards compatibility is not guaranteed. But, it’s almost to the 1.0 milestone, so this should be the only time I have to do a major re-write of my CMS code.

Letterpress class

Taking a cue from Jason Santa Maria, Dan Mall, and the pixelworthy crew, Jacob, Matt, Nathan, and myself signed up for a letterpress class at the Lawrence Arts Center. Only had one session so far, but it was great. Really looking forward to talking more about this here.

SXSW ‘07: All reg’d up

Matt, Nathan, and myself will be reppin’ the WOL crew at SXSW this upcoming March. We’re registered and have a hotel room reserved at the Hampton Inn Downtown. I was hoping to take Michelle (my girlfriend) along this year, but that’s not going to work out. Bummer. Anyway,my plan for this year is to hit up more sessions about things I don’t know about, rather than those that I do. Last year I went mostly to sessions on CSS, web design, etc. I’m sure I’ll still find a few of those to hit, but I’m hoping to find more diverse and new things to learn about. It looks like there’s a lot of journalism and new media proposals on the list, so that’s exciting (even though I’m bummed that none of them are Khoi’s). I’m looking forward to once again having breakfast with my blogroll at the Hampton, checking out some great sessions, and then heading to some kick-ass after parties.

Hope to see you all there!

LOST, season 3

I can’t wait. I’m so stoked. I didn’t really follow The LOST Experience too closely, but seeing the Sri Lanka video that came out of it just got me super-jazzed for the new season. If you’re a fan of the show and haven’t seen the video, definitely check it out. The alternate reality game turned out to be far more revealing and interesting than I thought it would be.

I guess that’s all for now. Sorry for the lack of updates — I’ll try to be more regular as I get some of these projects off my plate. Thanks for sticking with me.