Posts in the Personal Category

Okay, everyone else is doing it, so here’s my “headed to SXSW” post.  Baaaa!

I’m getting in Saturday afternoon, just in time to miss Jeffrey’s opening remarks, and will be around through Tuesday.  Early Saturday evening, I’ll be at the WaSP/WD-L/CSS-D/WSM/AIR meetup at Buffalo Billiards; the festivities kick off at 6:00pm, and no RSVP is needed, so drop on by!  It promises to be a madhouse (a MADHOUSE!) of standards and billiards.

On Sunday, I’ll be speaking from 10:00am until 11:00am on the topic of “Emergent Semantics“.  I’ve been scheduled to do a half-hour book signing at 12:45pm that same day; if it’s anything like last year, there will be a few authors sitting at a signing table at the same time.  I’m told there will be copies of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition, the CSS Pocket Reference, Second Edition, and More Eric Meyer on CSS in stock, but you don’t have to buy a copy at the show to get one signed—if you already have a book of mine, bring it and I’ll gladly sign it.  Heck, bring me anyone’s book and I’ll sign it.  I’m easy.

After the signing, I’m planning to sit in on Tantek’s presentation, “The Elements of Meaningful XHTML“.  His talk and mine make a good one-two combination, so if you’ve any interest in either, you might consider checking out both.

Come Monday, I’ll be getting a late start with an appearance on the panel “Where Are The Women of Web Design“.  Before I get raked over the coals again, I’d like to point you to Molly’s post about the panel and its genesis, as well as the comments that followed (particularly this one).  Just after that panel, assuming I haven’t been burnt to a tiny crisp, the SXSW folks have me doing another book signing.  That’ll be from 4:45pm until 5:15pm.

As soon as I’m done there, I have to skedaddle over to the Red Eyed Fly for Vox Nox, an early evening of New Riders authors showing their “B” sides.  Vox Nox, which starts around 6:00pm and is scheduled to end around 8:00pm, is in many ways a sort of mini-Fray Cafe, which is appropriate… because Fray Cafe 5 is going to be held at the Red Eyed Fly on Sunday, the night before Vox Nox.  I have to admit to being a touch nervous about my part in Vox Nox, because the piece I’ve created is deeply personal and I’m not totally certain how the audience will react.  But that’s one of the interesting things about public performance, right?

Tuesday I got nothin’.  No scheduled events at all.  I can just kick back, check out sessions, hang out in the halls, and generally act like I don’t have a care in the world.  Trust me, it’s just an act, but I’ve gotten kind of good at it.  That evening I’m doing whatever, and by the next morning I’ll be gone.

So if you’re going to be in or around SXSW, come over and say “hi”.  Even if you don’t have that much interest in me personally, you should still come by, because the concentration of Web design stars, standards gurus, and forward thinkers assembling at this year’s SXSWi is frankly a wonder to behold.

• Part of the SXSW Herd was published on Wednesday, March 9th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been three replies.

As I mentioned a while back, my friend Dave is running, biking, and swimming in the Strawberry Fields Triathlon this coming Saturday.  For those who missed the original post, the short version is that he undertook this effort to do something constructive in response to his wife’s battle with Stage II Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  His fundraising efforts have been eminently successful: as I write this, he’s up to $10,325.00 in donations, exceeding his original goal of ten thousand dollars.  He’s raised the goal to $12,000, so if you wanted to make a last-minute donation and push the donation thermometer over his stated goal once again, then now’s the time.

To do so would be a fantastic way to help Dave and Kim celebrate a wonderful turn of events.  As Dave wrote last Thursday:

It’s official — Kim is cancer-free! Her scans have come back completely clean and according to her doctor, she requires no further treatment! Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and kind words and generous donations throughout this process. Next Saturday is the triathlon and the closing of this chapter of our lives. Neither one of us will forget the kindness and support we’ve received from treasured friends and total strangers alike — thank you all so much!!

Dave’s told me that the generosity of meyerweb readers was an important part of his meeting his original fundraising goal—so to his thanks, I add my own heartfelt appreciation.

• The Home Stretch was published on Monday, March 7th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Dear DVD Industry,

Stop with the repetitive time-wasting soul-killing animated menu transitions already.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Eric

P.S. Special note to whoever designed the mystery-meat “special features” menus for the Harry Potter DVDs: I hate you.

• Stop Hurting Us was published on Sunday, March 6th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been fifteen replies.

Talking with attendees and hanging out with the speakers at Search Engine Strategies was quite fascinating. 

In the first place, they’re all pretty fascinating people, from where they’ve been to what they’re like now.  In the second place, they’re all working in a field that doesn’t really interest me, except in indirect ways.  A lot of the “white hat” search engine friendliness has to do with strong text copy, building traffic, and all that good stuff.  But to spend my days picking apart search engine behavior?  Not interested.

Of course, a lot of people would find what I do eye-wateringly boring, so I’m not casting stones here.  Just saying that it’s interesting to spend time with people who are smart, funny, motivated, and gladly doing something very different from what I’m used to doing.

That said, I observed some interesting differences between the search engine crowd and the Web design/standards crowd.

• There’s a dark side to the search engine business that just doesn’t exist in the standards crowd.  The “black hat” SEOs, the ones who are comment spamming and keyword stuffing and link farming, don’t just lurk in the shadows.  They’re right up front, sitting on panels and buying booths in the exhibit hall (not to mention doing a little in-person spamming).  They don’t pretend to be anything but what they are.  The honesty is refreshing, but it’s something that doesn’t have a direct analogue in Web design.  The closest we get is coding to a specific browser, and that isn’t evil so much as it is amateurish and short-sighted.  I don’t think there’s really any comparison.

  The existence of that dark side creates an entirely different dynamic in the search engine field.  People are always watching to see if someone’s white hat is covering up a black hat, to see who’s shifted from one camp to another.  From what I heard, people have gone both directions; some black hats have gone to white over time.  And vice versa.

  This fact also seems to have created a gossip stream that completely dwarfs anything I’ve ever encountered in the standards design field.

• In a similar vein, there’s an incentive to keep one’s knowledge to oneself in the search engine business.  Suppose you’ve uncovered something about search engines that nobody else has figured out.  That’s a competitive advantage, and there’s a financial incentive to keep it to yourself.

  In the standards design field, it’s almost the other way around.  If you come up with a new technique, you’re better off publishing it and adding to your reputation.  You could keep it to yourself, of course, and that would stay secret until the first time you used it on a public site.  At that point, the secret will be there for anyone who views source to figure out and use for themselves.  Writing it up instead and sharing it with the world adds to your reputational capital, which might lead to more work—so there’s a financial incentive to share.

  That’s not to say that everything search engine experts uncover is kept secret: they do plenty of publishing and sharing, and consultants in the field are constantly referring clients to each other as needs change.  That’s sort of a flip side to what I’ve observed in the standards design field, where referrals seem to be (comparatively) infrequent.  I’m not complaining, mind you.  Just observing.  But when someone creates a unique approach, it’s more likely to benefit them by being held close to the chest.

• The field is dominated by the search engines.  Whatever they do, the experts have to adjust to keep up.  If Google alters its algorithm, a top-ranked site can drop to 100th place in an instant, and a ninth-page site can vault to the first results page.  The playing field is always shifting, always in flux.  Slow flux, but flux nonetheless.  It’s actually a lot like Web design was back in the late 1990s, when browsers were updating their rendering engines on a regular basis, instead of in cycles that can be reasonably measured in fractions of decades.

  So there’s the threat that today’s winning strategy is tomorrow’s loser.  In the standards design space, not really the case; or if it is the case, it’s only on much longer time scales.  Sure, CSS will likely be a discarded relic some day, but it’ll probably be quite a while—several years at the very least.  Comment spamming could become obsolete next week, were the engines to figure out a way to programmatically detect and penalize it.  (nofollow doesn’t quite count, but it’s a start.)

• On a related note, there’s a lot more mobility in the search engine space.  People work as independent SEOs, then go to work for a search engine, then shift to an SEO firm, leave that to work for a large corporation… and so on.  Not everyone, of course, but enough to add lots more grist for the gossip mill.  In the standards design space, most of the leading names are working for themselves, and show few signs of changing.

• The last observation is perhaps the one that drives everything that I’ve mentioned: the money.  There’s a lot of money on the table in SEO, way more than in standards design.  Sure, a big design job can be worth many thousands of dollars.  An effective SEO can make many more thousands, possibly millions if he or she gets the right job.  They can increase a company’s traffic, and potentially their revenue, by large percentages.

  Certainly, standards design can save companies money, and it can increase revenue by making a site more responsive due to smaller page weights.  That’s useful, and it’s important.  But the money being thrown around on SEO is… well, it’s a lot.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, none of this is meant to be a condemnation.  Sure, the spammers are loathsome parasites, but there are a lot of SEOs who aren’t spammers.  They get companies better rankings through the basics I mentioned before.  In a lot of ways, they seem to be content, usability, and community-building consultants all rolled up into one.  Those are all useful, needed services, and it’s kind of interesting to me that all those things are hiding behind the term “search engine optimization”.  Well, not hiding, exactly.  You see what I mean, though, right?

The last observation is more personal: it was quite an experience attending a conference where I was largely unrecognized.  There were developers there who knew my name, and who were on the standards bandwagon, but the majority of attendees were not developers and had never heard of me, or Zeldman, or Shea, or Bowman, or any of the other names known in our field.  Which is only to be expected: I had never heard of most of the big names in their field.  So I was largely an outsider, and that was a refreshing change of pace.  It served as a (possibly necessary) ego check, and let me look at the Web from an entirely new angle.

So my thanks to Danny, Chris, Grant, Shari, Amanda, Tim, Matt, and the other folks who helped orient me to this new arena, discussed points of common interest and divergent aims, and made sure I didn’t feel too terribly out of place.

• Search Engine Strategies New York was published on Saturday, March 5th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Standards categories.
• There have been six replies.

Since Dave recently shared his upcoming conference schedule, I feel strangely motivated to do the same with my schedule.  Memetic infection or just a case of “me too, me too!”?  You decide.

• Search Engine Strategies New York — I’ll be appearing on the panel “CSS Myths, Mistakes, & Reality” with Shari Thurow and Matt Bailey, as well as representatives of Yahoo! and Google.  My role is to quickly explain the benefits of standards to an audience that may have ltitle to no knowledge of said benefits.  The session will be 90 minutes, to provide plenty of Q&A time.

• SXSW Interactive — I have three scheduled appearances in Austin, none of which have anything to do with CSS.  The first is Emergent Semantics, a look at how to add semantic information to the Web today using already-available features of XHTML.  The second is the panel Where Are the Women of Web Design?, an exploration of why there are so few female “leaders” in the Web design space, and how we might encourage more.  Last, I’ll be one of the performers at Vox Nox, a New Riders event that features several authors performing pieces that aren’t technology-related.  It will unfortuantely overlap a bit with 20×2, but not too badly.

  The SXSW folks have also scheduled me to do two book signings, one on Sunday and the other Monday.  If you’re going to be at the conference, bring a book to sign, or buy one there and get it signed.  Just think—the signature alone will add at least a dime to the book’s worth, although the personalized inscription will knock it back off.  That’s how it goes.

• NOTACON 2 — held right here in fabulous Cleveland, Ohio, I’ll be giving two talks.  One will be The Construction of S5; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM, about the evolution of S5, looking at various design decisions and the joy of DOM scripting.  The other talk is Humanely Wielding a Clue By Four: Reflections on Managing a Massive Mailing List, an overview of what I’ve learned as List Chaperone for css-discuss, and what I think makes a good community manager.

• WWW 2005 — and away I go to Chiba, Japan!  For the conference, I’ll be presenting a half-day tutorial on standards-oriented design trends and techniques.  I may also be presenting a poster, if it’s accepted by the poster committee, but I won’t know for a few weeks.  I’m also planning to speak at the Tokyo PC Users Group, and am still scouting for consulting opportunities while in Japan.  If you’re interested, please let me know!

Looking further into the future, I’m currently scheduled to speak at conferences in September and October.  I’ll have details on those as the time draws closer.  You can stay up to date with my public speaking schedule over at Complex Spiral Consulting, and yes, I really should turn it into an RSS feed.  Some day…

• Upcoming Events was published on Saturday, February 19th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Speaking and Tech categories.
• There has been one reply.

A recent post by Ferrett about sneaky marketing via faux-stained envelopes reminded me I had a similar trick envelope sitting around to be scanned and posted. See that faint impression of a slightly askew credit card on the right half of the envelope?  It looks just like the envelope got run through a rubber-wheel sorting mechanism, or maybe dropped and run over with a cart before being picked up, and the credit card being shadowed with dirt or something, right?  There’s no card in the envelope.  Inside this bit of chicanery is a “Pre-Approved Acceptance Certificate” that will let me transfer balances to a whole new card that they’d be just too darned happy to send me.  Also a Fee and Rate Information pamphlet.  That’s it—all paper.  That faint card shadow is a bit of graphic design, nothing more.

Oh, they’re good: too clever by half.  Especially since, having seen this trick, I’m less inclined to do business with these jokers in the future.  And I’d like to point out that the jokers in question are not Visa, except by indirection.  The presence of their logo in the upper left corner implies that they sent it, but they didn’t.  It’s just an offer for a Visa card through Bank of America.

I’ve actually gotten a few more nearly identical envelopes by now, so the trick doesn’t work quite as well; all I have to do is flex the envelope to tell if there’s a card in there or not, which I actually do with all envelopes I’m preparing to throw away.  But what really twists my grin is the corporate branding in the masthead of the enclosed letter exhorting me to take advantage of the limited-time no-hassle offer that they did their level best to trick me into reading: “Bank of America — Higher Standards”.

Um… maybe not.

• Very Sneaky was published on Wednesday, February 9th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been twenty-one replies.

One of my long-time favorite places to eat is Yours Truly, which is a local chain of sorts—well, to be honest, they’re more of a local institution in seven locations—and whose Web site lends serious support to my theory that site quality is inversely proportional to food quality.  They also have free WiFi at the location nearest us, not that I ever happen to have my laptop along when I’m there.  But there’s always the possibility of using it.

In a menu full of good things, one of my favorites is their Notso™ Fries (“They’re notso common!”).  To make a plate of Notso™ Fries, you first pile up some cottage fries, which are those little round crinkle-cut jobbies.  To the fry pile, you then add a whole bunch of cheese.  Then crumbled bacon, and I think more cheese.  The whole plate is then broiled until the cheese is golden, and just before serving you plop on a generous dollop o’ sour cream.

It’s like a heart attack on a plate.

I had long thought that this wonderful dish represented, in some sense, the apex of cholesterolicious cooking, but this morning I discovered that I was wrong, that the fine folks at Yours Truly had gone themselves one better and given us…

The Notso™ Omelet.

Substitute hashbrowns for the cottage fries but keep everything else the same, stuff the result into a three-egg omelet, and put the sour cream on top.

Oh yeah.

• Breakfast Bliss was published on Friday, February 4th, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Cleveland and Food categories.
• There have been twenty replies.

The Rogue Librarian is back!  And, as it happens, pointed to a New York Times article that just completely set me off.  (Yes, it requires registration to read the article, but then, said registration doesn’t necessarily have to be your own.)

I was experiencing a mixture of bemusement and wariness about the sites mentioned and what they chronicle, but then I hit the rationalizations in part 2, and that’s when my fuse got lit.  Here’s the first spark:

“A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering,” [Ayelet Waldman] said. “But it’s necessary. As a parent your days are consumed by other people’s needs. This is payback for driving back and forth to gymnastics all week long.”

You know what?  Boo [censored] hoo.  Being a parent means, to some extent, suppressing your personal needs, desires, and expression for the good of your children.  That’s pretty much A-number-one on the list of job requirements.  If you feel like you have to pay back your children for your having to drive them back and forth to gymnastics, then odds are you made a very poor choice in becoming a parent.  And your children are the ones who are most likely to end up paying for it.

Blogging about little Johnny’s poopy diapers, or Susie’s apparently sourceless temper tantrums, is in no sense of the word necessary.  It isn’t even needed, either by you or by the rest of us.  If you absolutely must write down your thoughts and feelings about how hard it is to be a parent, do so in a private journal.  Fifteen years from now, you can decide whether or not to give it to your child, and if you do, they can decide what to do with it.  But don’t throw it out into the world as if it were a list of your favorite movies.  That’s unnecessarily cruel.

As the article’s author observes:

How will the bloggee feel, say, 16 years from now, when her prom date Googles her entire existence?

That’s definitely a point of concern, and one I’ve been conscious of from the beginning.  More to the point: how will the bloggee feel to discover that he or she was, without any consent or consultation, made an object of scrutiny, laughter, scorn, wonder, and general comment to anyone who might drop by?  How many of us would like to have our lives chronicled and published without our consent, let alone our input?

Which leads us to the next bit that drove me up a wall:

At some point, however, parents may find themselves at a crossroads. Molly Jong-Fast, who has been a frequent subject for her mother, Erica Jong, said, “There comes that inevitable moment when parents who write about their children need to choose between their writing and their children’s privacy and honor.” Ms. Jong based a children’s book on her daughter as well as a pilot for a Fox sitcom. “There’s no compassionate way to do both, so either the parent or the child will end up feeling resentful.”

I can barely believe this was even raised as a potential issue.  You choose in the child’s favor. End of story.  If you can’t do that, and especially if you can’t do it without feeling resentful about it, then it’s long past time for you to suck it up, get over yourself, and seriously consider therapy.

Your child is not perfect.  Parenthood is not a sun-filled meadow of joy.  Raising children is not easy, and it isn’t a smooth ride, and you aren’t going to make the best decision every time.  There are diapers to change, mouths to feed, tantrums to weather, and sleepless nights to endure.  You don’t get to be yourself any more, not completely.  Not the way you used to before the baby.  That isn’t how it works.  Furthermore, you are not uniquely suffering, because this is how it’s been since humanity became sentient, and definitely how it’s been since civilization emerged.  So deal with it.

It’s true that many parents have, for all that time, talked with their family and friends about the challenges of being parents.  The difference is that those conversations were conducted within a social network of people who could help the parents out, and knew when to be discreet.  To blog the every detail of your baby’s life, though, is making a spectacle of your child for your own benefit.

For that stunning degree of selfishness, and for the damage I fear it will cause the children thus forced on display, I weep.

You may wonder where I get off being so hypocritical, since I write about Carolyn here from time to time.  Feel free to read what I’ve written, and see if you think I’m putting my writing above her privacy and honor.  If indeed I am, then some of my anger needs to be directed inward, and I need to change my behavior.  I can accept that, and should I need to, I will do so without resentment.

Because that’s what a parent does.

• Be A Parent was published on Monday, January 31st, 2005.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been seven replies.