meyerweb.com

It’s that time again: the 2010 edition of The Survey For People Who Make Websites is open and taking your input. If you’re someone who creates web sites, whether all the time or some of the time or even just occasionally, please take just a little bit of your day (as I write this, the average time-to-completion is just over 10 minutes) to let us know about you. Furthermore, please spread the word to any groups to which you belong—local SIGs, mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, message boards, and so on. I truly believe it’s important to the profession as a whole to have as many web folks as possible participate.

I was asked a little while back why we do the survey, and my answer surprised me not just for its content but also for how much passion I felt. I said:

I think it’s a vital investigation, a look into our profession that nobody else is even attempting and is… essential if we’re going to be taken at all seriously by anyone other than ourselves.

And even more vital than that, it tells us who we are, collectively speaking. We’re scattered. Many of us are solo. We don’t even know what kind of community we’ve joined. The Survey, though limited and imperfect, tells us something profound and essential about us.

That’s why I’ve wholeheartedly supported this effort from its very outset, putting in hours upon hours of thought and effort into its operation and approving the use of [funds] to pay for professional analysis. This matters.

Other professions have it easy: they require certification or degrees or membership in a professional organization before you can take part. Because of that, they can often estimate to a reasonable degree, or even count directly, how many of them there are. They can go to their membership rolls and survey a few thousand randomly picked members to find out their age, location, experience, salary, and anything else that seems interesting to know.

We who build the web don’t have that luxury. Our profession, just like the medium it serves, has no gatekeepers, no central organization, no clear boundaries. The Survey is our attempt to disambiguate ourselves.

So please, if you’re someone who makes web sites, take ten minutes to tell us about yourself. If you know people who make web sites, please point them to the survey and ask them the same. Thank you.

Just before noon (Eastern U.S. time) today, An Event Apart Minneapolis sold its last available seat. That’s three events so far in 2010 and three sell-outs. If you were hoping to join us in Minneapolis but hadn’t registered yet, we’re sorry we won’t see you there! You can contact our Event Manager to get put on the waiting list, or you can join us for one of the remaining two shows of the year: Washington DC and San Diego.

There are strong reasons to prefer either one. In Washington DC, we’ll have our second-ever A Day Apart, a full day of in-depth learning with Jeremy Keith and Ethan Marcotte taking on the topics of HTML5 and CSS3, respectively. We ran A Day Apart in Seattle earlier this year as something of an experiment, and it was such a huge hit that we immediately decided to add it to a future show. We settled on Washington DC for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that the hotel had the space available to add a third day. So far as we know it’s the last time we’ll do A Day Apart in 2010, so if you’re interested, it’s the place to be.

San Diego, on the other hand… well, it’s San Diego! In November! It’s also the last chance to see our 2010 lineup of speakers, who’ve been consistently hitting it out of the park with insightful thinking and bold challenges to the status quo. We may never again see this particular combination of pure smarts and talent, so if you can’t make it to DC (or you’d rather just hit the beach in advance of Thanksgiving) then come on down.

From mobile design to advanced CSS to the latest in HTML5 to smart content to wonderful design, the sessions at AEA this year have been outstanding. The audience feedback has been really incredible, almost overwhelming. If you haven’t seen this year’s lineup, you should really consider checking it out. We’d love to see you there!

(P.S. Want to hear more about An Event Apart’s origin story, growth, vision, and future? Tune in to The Big Web Show this Thursday at 1pm Eastern U.S.! I’ll be a guest along with Andy McMillan—he of the fabulous Build Conference of Belfast—talking about web conferences and more. And if you miss the live show, don’t worry; there will be a lovingly edited version up shortly after we’re done taping.)

…that having been the original working title for “Prefix or Posthack“, my latest article for A List Apart. (Sort of like Return of the Jedi had a working title of Blue Harvest.) In a fairly quick read, I make the case that vendor prefixes are not only good, they have the potential to be great and to deliver greater interoperability and advancement of CSS.

So far the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, which frankly came as a bit of a surprise. The annoyance factor of prefixes is undeniable, and it’s been my experience that annoyance dramatically hardens opposition regardless of whether or not there are good reasons to oppose. I could flatter myself that the agreement is due to the Obvious Rightness of my argument, but I suspect it’s actually that I merely articulated what most people had already instinctively decided for themselves. Which isn’t a bad place to be.

Anyway, if you haven’t already, feel free to decide for yourself by reading the article—which, I feel like mentioning for no clear reason, is only the fourth piece I’ve ever written for ALA.

All of a sudden, people have been asking me to yak about myself and stuff that I know (or at least think I know). These things tend to come in waves, and right now I’m surfing like a search engine’s crawlerbot.

I don’t think that metaphor made any sense at all.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve had to say so far:

• The Geek Talk: Eric Meyer — a brief e-mail interview I did a week or so back. Want to know my favorite color? Applications? What I think of CSS3? What I intend to do this year? A recent inspiration? Read and enjoy.

• The Pipeline, Episode #19 — a half-hour interview with Dan Benjamin. We talked very little about CSS and a lot about how I got started with the web, why I’m still with it nearly two decades later, and why I believe quality is everything. This was a very interesting interview because I went into it entirely cold: we didn’t discuss topics, length, or really anything at all beforehand. We just jumped in. Refreshing, maybe a little unnerving, but a lot of fun, not least because Dan is a master interviewer. Probably one of the most personal interviews I’ve ever done.

…and speaking of Dan, he’ll be the co-host (along with Jeffrey Zeldman) in my next public appearance: Episode 12 (Thursday, 15 July 2010) of The Big Web Show. The incomparable Andy McMillan and I are the scheduled guests and the topic of conversation will be web conferences—what goes into them, how to found one, how to help it grow, and so on. I’m really looking forward to it, being especially interested in what Andy has to say about his experiences with the Build Conference, and I hope you are too!

Earlier this week I presented a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo titled “HTML5 vs. Flash: Webpocalypse Now?” which seemed to be pretty well received. That might be because I did my best to be unbiased about the situation both now and into the future, and also that the audience was very heavily weighted toward web stack practitioners. Seriously, out of 100-150 audience members, about six raised their hand when I asked who was developing with Flash.

Many people have asked if the slides will be available. Indeed so: head on over to the session page, which I encourage attendees of the talk to visit so that you can leave a rating or comment on the session. The 5.4MB PDF of my Keynote slides is available there whether you attended or not.

While I was at the conference I was also interviewed by Mac Slocum on the topics of the HTML and Flash, and that’s been put up on YouTube along with interviews with Brady Forrest and Ge Wang (both of whom are awesome). I haven’t watched it so I don’t know how dorky I come off but I’ll bet it’s pretty dorky.

I indulged in a little good-natured ribbing of Adobe at the front of the interview (I kid because I love!) but the rest of it is, as best I recall, a decent distillation of my views. I’m hoping to get a few more detailed thoughts written and published here in the next week or two.

Many thanks to Brady Forrest and the entire Web 2.0 crew for having me on stage and getting me out to San Francisco. It’s always a great place to visit.

A friend and I have decided to build a web service/site/whatever the kids are calling them these days. A thing on the web to help you out from time to time.

As a result, we’re looking for a web host with great service, reliability, and scalability, and I was curious about your experiences. Here are a few details on what we need:

• A managed server where patches are applied automatically. Neither of us are Linux experts, and we want something secured for us without us having to worry about whether some patch breaks the system.
• mySQL with phpMyAdmin. (Don’t judge.)
• PHP w/cURL, mySQLi, and mCrypt, as well as an editable php.ini file.
• Apache!
• Some sort of CVS (Subversion and the like) built in.
• Bonus: some experience on the hosting side with the ability to escalate to Memcached and other noSQL techniques.

The mySQL and PHP bits are of course incredibly common, but still, no point not mentioning those requirements. In our case, the bigger issue is really “Who can we trust to provide support for what may turn out to be a reasonably large-scale service?” So the features aren’t nearly as important as the reliability and trust.

Thus: what say you, friends? Who rates as a great place to plant a web service seed that could one day grow into a mighty forest? Let me know!

It’s been a week since I got back from An Event Apart Seattle 2010, and I’m still aglow about it.

I know it’s something a cliché for conference organizers to say “it was the best show we ever done did!” but damn. It really was. That’s down to the speakers, of course. We’ve done our best to find great speakers with interesting things to say, and I’d like to think we’ve done just that. This went to a new level, though.

You know how a band can have one of those nights where somehow, everything seems to go just right, where every jam riff builds on the others, where the music hits an indescribable groove, where the energy feeds on and multiplies itself until everyone in the place gets charged with it? That’s what happened in Seattle, building throughout the whole show. You could just feel it, buzzing in the room and through everyone there. Every time a speaker finished I’d say to myself, half in gratitude and half in awe, “That is the best talk I’ve ever seen that person give.”

That was only half the experience, of course. The other half was the audience itself, our amazing and wonderful attendees, who are as much colleagues as anything else. They’re whip-smart, professional, veteran members of the industry. That’s the demographic Jeffrey and I set out to address, and they’ve come to learn from and teach and challenge us to excel at every show. Several speakers, some of them long practiced at the art of public speaking, have told me that they get uniquely nervous before going onto the stage at An Event Apart. I absolutely agree. To return to the band metaphor, it’s like doing a show for your fellow musicians. While that’s comforting in a collegial way, it’s also nerve-wracking in a way other shows aren’t.

And the conversations! Over lunch, in the hall between talks, at the party, it was non-stop talk with smart, funny, insightful colleagues who know their stuff through and through and are as keen to learn more as they are to share what they know.

So I can’t thank our speakers and attendees enough. You are all incredible. It was an honor and a privilege just to be there in your combined presence.

One of the things you discover as a speaker and, especially, a conference organizer is this: Keynote generates really frickin’ enormous PDFs. Seriously. Much like Miles O’Keefe, they’re huge. We had one speaker last year whose lovingly crafted and beautifully designed 151-slide deck resulted in a 175MB PDF.

Now, hard drives and bandwidth may be cheap, but when you have four hundred plus attendees all trying to download the same 175MB PDF at the same time, the venue’s conference manager will drop by to find out what the bleeding eyestalks your attendees are doing and why it’s taking down the entire outbound pipe. Not to mention the network will grind to a nearly complete halt. Whatever you personally may think of net access at conferences, at this point, not providing net access is roughly akin to not providing functioning bathrooms.

So what’s the answer? ShrinkIt is fine if the slides use lots of vectors and you’re running Snow Leopard. If the slides use lots of bitmapped images, or you’re not on Snow Leopard, ShrinkIt can’t help you.

If the slides are image-heavy, then you can always load the PDF into Preview and then do a “Save As…” where you select the “Reduce File Size” Quartz filter. That will indeed drastically shrink the file size—that 175MB PDF goes down to 13MB—but it can also make the slides look thoroughly awful. That’s because the filter achieves its file size reduction by scaling all the images down by at least 50% and to no more than 512 pixels on a side, plus it uses aggressive JPEG compression. So not only are the images infested with compression artifacts, they also tend to get that lovely up-scaling blur. Bleah.

I Googled around a bit and found “Quality reduced file size in Mac OS X Preview from early 2006. There I discovered that anyone can create their own Quartz filters, which was the key I needed. Thus armed with knowledge, I set about creating a filter that struck, in my estimation, a reasonable balance between image quality and file size reduction. And I think I’ve found it. That 175MB PDF gets taken down to 34MB with what I created.

If you’d like to experience this size reduction for yourself (and how’s that for an inversion of common spam tropes?) it’s pretty simple:

1. Download and unzip Reduce File Size (75%). Note that the “75%” relates to settings in the filter, not the amount of reduction you’ll get by using it.
2. Drop the unzipped .qfilter file into ~/Library/Filters in Leopard/Snow Leopard or ~/Library/PDF Services in Lion.

Done. The next time you need to reduce the size of a PDF, load it up in Preview, choose “Save As…”, and save it using the Quartz filter you just installed.

If you’re the hands-on type who’d rather set things up yourself, or you’re a paranoid type who doesn’t trust downloading zipped files from sites you don’t control (and I actually don’t blame you if you are), then you can manually create your own filter like so:

1. Go to /Applications/Utilities and launch ColorSync Utility.
2. Select the “Filters” icon in the application’s toolbar.
3. Find the “Reduce File Size” filter and click on the little downward-arrow-in-gray-circle icon to the right.
4. Choose “Duplicate Filter” in the menu.
5. Use the twisty arrow to open the duplicated filter, then open each of “Image Sampling” and “Image Compression”.
6. Under “Image Sampling”, set “Scale” to 75% and “Max” to 1280.
7. Under “Image Compression”, move the arrow so it’s halfway between the rightmost marks. You’ll have to eyeball it (unless you bust out xScope or a similar tool) but you should be able to get it fairly close to the halfway point.
8. Rename the filter to whatever will help you remember its purpose.

As you can see from the values, the “75%” part of the filter’s name comes from the fact that two of the filter’s values are 75%. In the original Reduce File Size filter, both are at 50%. The maximum size of images in my version is also quite a bit bigger than the original’s—1280 versus 512—which means that the file size reductions won’t be the same as the original.

Of course, you now have the knowledge needed to fiddle with the filter to create your own optimal balance of quality and compression, whether you downloaded and installed the zip or set it up manually—either way, ColorSync Utility has what you need. If anyone comes up with an even better combination of values, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. In the meantime, share and enjoy!

Translations

• Belorussian courtesy Patricia Clausnitzer
• German courtesy Andreas Beraz

Update 2 Aug 11: apparently there have been changes in Lion—here’s an Apple forum discussion of the problem. There are two workarounds described in the thread: either to open and save files with ColorSync Utility itself, or to copy the filter to another folder in your Library (or install it there in the first place, above).