Posts in the Personal Category

When you have children who are new to walking, getting things out of a car while in a parking lot can be a nerve-wracking experience: you know that your kid is capable of walking in any direction, and also that they’re not really aware of the dangers a parking lot can contain.

Following the philosophy of “don’t baby-proof the environment, make the baby proof for the environment”, we had two parking lot rules that worked out pretty well, used for different stages of development.

1. Hand on the car.  When out of the car, one of the child’s hands must always be touching the car unless a parent is holding their hand.  This sets a bound on how far away they can get from you.
2. Feet on the yellow line.  The lines separating parking spaces are treated as if they’re balance beams.  The child can walk along the line, but not step off of it, unless a parent is holding their hand.  This keeps the child between cars and away from the flow of traffic.

Obviously, these require training periods, and during that training you have to keep an eagle eye on the kid.  And of course you can’t rely on these rules to keep your children completely safe in a parking lot — only you can do that.  In our experience, though, it greatly reduced our stress levels even in busy Christmas-time lots; plus, it was another way to stress the importance of both safety and obedience.

• Parking Lot Safety was published on Friday, June 1st, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Hacks and Parenting categories.
• There have been seven replies.

I get asked from time to time for my number one tip for new parents.  My answer is always a single word.

“Earplugs.”

Seriously.  Get some earplugs.  They don’t have to be fancy; the squishy yellow foam plugs you can get in a cardboard holder for a dollar work just fine.  If you already have some fancier in-ear jobs for rock concerts or woodworking or whatever, those are good too.

Because as much as you love your new baby, and as much as you will work to keep them calm and happy, there will almost certainly be times when they are hurting or uncomfortable or just generally upset and unable to be soothed.  No matter how much you cuddle and sing and swaddle, they will scream and cry.  Some kids will do this rarely.  Others will do it all the time.  (A friend of ours tells how her eldest child screamed more or less non-stop from the day she was born until the day she walked.)  I don’t honestly know which is harder to handle, but I do know that the screaming worked its way through my eardrums and into my brain to induce a panicked pseudo-flight-or-flight response.  It was cumulatively, enormously stressful.

Earplugs do not shut out the cries completely.  You will not be denying your baby’s distress or placing unwarranted distance between you and your child.  Earplugs simply take the raw, serrated edge off their cry, giving you some mental space to cope with it and be a calmer and therefore better parent.  It lets you hang in there longer, putting off the point where you have to put the baby in the crib and walk away for a few minutes.  (And that’s okay too; the baby won’t die if you take five to regroup.)  That means more direct contact with your baby, and possibly a shorter time to a calm baby due to longer, more continuous periods of parental contact.

So: earplugs.  Probably the highest-ROI parental purchase I ever made.

• Plugging Up was published on Friday, April 27th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Hacks and Parenting categories.
• There have been eight replies.

Last Thursday, I had the rare honor and privilege of chatting with Jen Simmons as a guest on The Web Ahead .  (I’ve also chatted with Jen in real life.  That’s even awesomer!)  As is my wont, I completely abused that privilege by chatting for two hours — making it the second-longest episode of The Web Ahead to date — about the history of the web and CSS, what’s coming up that jazzes me the most, and all kinds of stuff.  I even revealed, toward the end of the conversation, the big-picture projects I dearly wish I had time to work on.

The finished product was published last Friday morning.  I know it’s a bit of a lengthy beast, but if you’re at all interested about how we got to where we are with CSS, you might want to give this a listen:  The Web Ahead, Episode #18.  Available for all your finer digital audio players via embedded Flash player, iTunes, RSS, and MP3 download.

My deepest thanks to Jen for inviting me to be part of the show!

• The Web Ahead, Episode #18: Me! was published on Monday, March 5th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Interviews categories.
• There have been three replies.

The moment I hit “Publish” on this post, I will have crossed a major base-ten barrier:  this is the one thousandth post published here on meyerweb.  When I started putting up little missives back in December 1999, the idea was to communicate with my friends and family about what was going on in my life, and to maybe open a dialogue with the few people I hoped might read the forthcoming Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide.    (We expanded the acronym CSS in the title for fear potential readers might not know what “CSS” stood for — a legitimate concern back in 2000!)  Posts were written in the first-person plural, of all things, and there were no comments or search.  In fact, the whole thing was an unholy agglomeration of XML, XSLT, and shell scripts that somehow spit out HTML into quarterly archive pages — in chronological order, I’ll have you know.

Years later, I migrated to WordPress (mostly because I knew Matt personally, back before he started hobnobbing with Richard Branson and storing fruit in Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and all that), turned on comments, and never looked back.  As more and more sites have disabled commenting, I’ve left that door open and have yet to regret it.  Curating the comments has become easier to manage in the last few years as the number of comments per post has dropped, but I still believe it’s a worthwhile effort.  I was never here simply to talk; a good conversation beats a great soliloquy any day of the week.

It’s also true that, as my life has gotten more complex and my responsibilities have grown, my frequency of posting has dropped in the last few years (I believe that’s at least part of the reason for the drop in comments).  Speaking at an increasing number of conferences, founding and developing An Event Apart with Jeffrey, taking our family’s size from two to five, and trying (trying!) to keep up with the inbox and friends online — all ate into my blogging time.  I allowed it to happen, of course, in the most natural and unconscious way possible: I simply didn’t focus on blogging.  A lot of my focus I let flow into watching social networks stream crumbs of information past me, and occasionally tossing in my own crumbs, partly just to see where they flowed.

I will of course continue to put time and energy into An Event Apart and writing and above all my family, but I am reclaiming in the name of blogging the pieces of my attention I ceded to Twitter and Facebook and all that jazz.  This site, in the last 12 years, has (like an old friend) seen me through failure and success, horror and beauty, war and peace, through death and new life and all the things that greet all of us every day.  It deserves more of my focus, and that’s what I have committed to give it.  I’ll be returning to my old mix of technical and personal material, writing about CSS and standards right alongside child-raising and kitchen faucets.  You can follow along via RSS, or if you prefer a patchier approach you can watch for post announcements on Twitter.  Whatever the balance of content, whatever the post topic, I can most definitely assure you that I will continue to abuse parenthetical asides, lead off paragraphs with “Anyway”, employ British-style punctuation rules, and make jokes so obscure only I get them.

Prior to hitting “Publish” on this post, the archive of “Thoughts From Eric” (the official title of the blog portion of meyerweb) contains 400,409 words, according to WP Word Count.  This post contains 608.  Here’s to the next 598,983.

• Adding a Comma, Expanding a Place was published on Wednesday, February 29th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been five replies.

After the blackout on Wednesday, it seems that the political tides are shifting against SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act — as of this writing, there are now more members of Congress in opposition to the bills than in favor.  That’s good news.

I wil reiterate something I said on Twitter, though:  the members of tech community, particularly those who are intimately familiar with the basic protocols of the Internet, need to keep working on ways to counteract SOPA/PIPA.  What form that would take, I’m not sure.  Maybe a truly distributed DNS system, one that can’t be selectively filtered by any one government or other entity.  I’m not an expert in the area, so I don’t actually know if that’s feasible.  There’s probably a much more clever solution, or better still suite of solutions.

The point is, SOPA and PIPA may soon go down to defeat, but they will return in another form.  There is too much money in the hands of those who first drafted these bills, and they’re willing to give a fair chunk of that money to those who introduced the bills in Congress.  Never mistake winning a battle with winning the war.  As someone else observed on Twitter (and I wish I could find their tweet now), the Internet community fought hard against the DMCA, and it’s been US law for more than a decade.

By all means, take a moment to applaud the widespread and effective community effort to oppose and (hopefully) defeat bad legislation.  When that’s done, take notes on what worked and what didn’t, and then prepare to fight again and harder.  Fill the gap between battles with outreach to your elected representatives and with efforts to educate the non-technical in your life to explain why SOPA/PIPA were and are a bad idea.

Days of action feel great.  Months of effort are wearying.  But it’s only the latter that can slowly and painfully bring about long-term change.

• Vigilance and Victory was published on Friday, January 20th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Culture, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

Though I certainly do not support SOPA or the PROTECT IP Act (the complete, rather contrived acronym of PIPA), I will not be blacking out meyerweb.  This is largely because the vast majority of my readers already know about these bills, and very likely oppose them; as for anyone who visits but does not know about these bills, I feel I’ll do better to speak out than to black out.  (Which is not a criticism of those who do black out.  We all fight in our own ways.)

Instead, I will reproduce here the letter I attempted to send via contact form to my state Senator this morning, and which I will print out and send by regular postal service later today.

Senator Brown:

I grew up in Lexington, Ohio.  I moved to Cleveland in pursuit of a career, and found success.  Through a combination of good luck and hard work, I have (rather to my surprise) become a widely recognized name in my field, which is web design and development.  Along the way, I co-founded a web design conference with an even more widely respected colleague that has become one of the most respected and successful web design events in the world.  This business is headquartered in Ohio — I live in Cleveland Heights with my family, and I intend to stay here until I either retire to Florida or die.  Politically I’m best described as a moderate independent, though I do tend to lean a bit to the left.

As you can imagine, given my line of work, I have an opinion regarding the PROTECT IP Act which you have co-sponsored.  The aims of PROTECT IP are understandable, but the methods are unacceptable.  Put another way, if you wish to combat piracy and intellectual property theft, there are far better ways to go about it.

As someone with twenty years of technical experience with the Internet and nearly as many with the web — I started creating web pages in late 1993 — please believe me when I say the enforcement mechanisms of the bill are deeply flawed and attack the very features of the Web that make it what it is.  They are akin to making a criminal of anyone who gives directions to a park where drug trafficking takes place, regardless of whether they knew about the drug trafficking.  You don’t have to be in favor of drug trafficking to oppose that.

This is not a case where tweaking a clause or two will fix it; correction in this case would mean starting from scratch.  Again, the objection is not with the general intent of the bill.  It is with how the bill goes about achieving those aims.

If you would like to discuss this with me further, I would be delighted to do whatever I can to help, but in any event I strongly urge you to reconsider your co-sponsorship of the PROTECT IP Act.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Eric A. Meyer (http://meyerweb.com/)

Partner and co-founder, An Event Apart (http://aneventapart.com/)

If you agree that the PROTECT IP Act is poorly conceived, find out if your senator supports PIPA.  If they do, get in touch and let them know about your opposition.  If they oppose the bill, get in touch and thank them for their opposition.  If their support or opposition isn’t known, get in touch and ask them to please speak out in opposition to the bill.

As others have said, postal letters are better than phone calls, which are in turn better than e-mail, which is in turn better than signing petitions.  Do what you can, please.  The web site you save might be your own.

• Standing In Opposition was published on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Culture, and Web categories.
• There has been one reply.

Back on Tuesday, A List Apart opened the 2011 edition of The Survey for People Who Make Web Sites, the fifth annual effort to learn more about the people who work in the web industry.  If you haven’t taken it yet, please do so!  It should take about ten minutes

I’m proud to have been a part of this effort since its inaugural launch back in 2007.  It’s a major undertaking, mostly in analyzing the data and turning that into a detailed report, but it’s more than worth the time and effort.  Before the Survey, we really didn’t know very much about who we were as a field of practice, and without it we wouldn’t have as clear a picture of who we are today.

There have been growing pains, of course, chief among them UCCASS, the survey software we’ve been using since the outset.  Its limitations and lack of updates finally pushed us to find another platform, and we chose to move over to Polldaddy.  Many thanks to the Polldaddy team for giving the survey a home and helping me figure out the best strategies for recreating the survey.  (And also for putting up with my occasionally testy feature and support requests.  Sorry, gang.)

Due to differences between UCCASS and Polldaddy, we ended up restructuring the survey into two distinct paths.  I think this change actually speeds the process of taking the survey.  I’m pretty sure just about anyone could get through it in under ten minutes.

Unsurprisingly, participation in the survey has dropped over the years; last year’s survey had a bit more than half as many respondents as the first-ever survey back in 2007.  Tellingly, the actual results have been pretty consistent over the years.  I’d really like to see how those results stand up to an increase of respondents, so please:

• If you haven’t taken the survey yet, kindly set aside ten minutes and do so.
• If you have taken the survey, thank you.  Now, spread the word!  If you could post a quick link to any mailing lists, web forums, newsgroups, or other professional communities in which you participate, it will be an enormous help.  The more practitioners we have answer, the better the results.

As always, the survey will close a month after it opened; and as always, a detailed report will be published — feel free to peruse the reports from 2007 (PDF), 2008, 2009, and 2010 — along with anonymized data sets for independent analysis.  Together, they form a picture, but one that is still being drawn.  Please help us to add the most essential detail — you!

• The Survey, 2011 was published on Friday, November 18th, 2011.
• It was assigned to the Projects and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

[[ MARK IS FINE and his work is not lost.  Please see the update and addendum later in the post.  — E. ]]

Just yesterday, I took a screenshot of the title page of Dive Into HTML5 to include in a presentation as a highly recommended resource.  Now it’s gone.  That site, along with all the other “Dive Into…” sites (Accessibility, Python, Greasemonkey, etc.) and addictionis.org, is returning an HTTP “410 Gone” message.  Mark’s Github, Google+, Reddit, and Twitter accounts have all been deleted.  And attempts to email him have been bounced back.

This is very reminiscent of Why the Lucky Stiff’s infosuicide, and it’s honestly shocking.  If anyone is in direct contact with Mark, please let me know that he’s okay via comment here or by direct e-mail, even if his internet presence has been erased.  As much as I hate for the world to lose all of the incredible information he’s created and shared, that would be as nothing compared to losing the man himself.

“Embracing HTTP error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things.”

 — Mark Pilgrim, March 27, 2003 (diveintomark.com)

Update 5 Oct 11: Jason Scott just tweeted the following:

Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring.

The communication was specifically verified, it was him, and that’s that. That was the single hardest decision I’ve had to make this year.

So there you have it.  I’m sorry to have helped annoy Mark, am very glad he’s well, and sincerely hope that we can all give him the privacy he desires.  And with that, I’m going to sleep now.  Thank you, everyone.

Addendum 5 Oct 11: Several people have asked me if I know why Mark took this step.  I don’t.  I have three comments in the moderation queue all claiming to be from Mark, only one of which even approaches sounding credible, and none of which have any sort of verification.  Unless Mark contacts me directly, or changes his server to return an explanatory note instead of or along with a 410, or something similar, I’m as much in the dark as anyone else.  If he’d like to talk with me about it, he’s certainly more than welcome to do so, but he’s under no obligation to explain himself to me or anyone else.

Mirrors of Mark’s work have started appearing (see the comments for some of them) and so his legacy, if not his presence, will not be lost.  I am assuming that he has simply withdrawn from digital life, his reasons are his own, and that if he feels interested in explaining those reasons he will find a way to do so.  Regardless, his path is his own and we should leave him to walk it as he chooses.

• Searching For Mark Pilgrim was published on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Tech categories.
• There have been one hundred eight replies.