Chicago Librarian

Okay, here are the slides from my presentation, 'Drupal: Past, Present & Future' which I gave at the Chicagoland Drupal Library Group on May 23, 2012. Thanks to Mick (Skokie) for setting this up and Ann (OPPL) for hosting it.

Went to sleep looking at new web template; Woke up noticing that one of the div's (i.e. sections) wasn't aligning properly; Reached over to laptop near bed and right-clicked for 'inspect element with Firebug', got information about the styling markup.

And then I thought: Is this what one million years of evolution has brought us to?

Saw the demo for 'Adobe Creative Suite 6' -- Adobe's software lineup which is about to receive an upgrade. Interesting how the topics tended to reflect developments in the online world: tablet computers, 'cloud' computing and (for Dreamweaver at least) 'responsive' design. Some things were better thought out than others. $300/yr for cloud-based software and document storage seems a bit high. Also, I'm not sure why Photoshop has to do video.

Anyway, interesting presentation nonetheless.

In the middle of 'project hell' as a colleague put it, but why let that stop me from giving a talk on Google Analytics at the UIC Webmasters Brownbag next week? (Actually it was the talk I was supposed to give last February when I blew it away in favor of talking about Responsive Design).

The next chapter of responsive web design
By John Yuda on April 27, 2012
For designs to be truly responsive, we need to move beyond flexible grids and media queries. John Yuda outlines five building blocks for the future of RWD

I notice that this is .net magazine's third article/post on responsive web design in as many days. I think an interesting follow-up would be something along the lines of 'the next chapter of responsive web design' -- from the perspective of visual design -- an aspect that's oftentimes forgotten in the rush to praise, for example, the Boston Globe site which if you ask me is visually rather bland and unexceptional.

We already know there are other sites that are 'responsive' and still appealing -- so one doesn't rule out the other (unless we want it to).

At the UIC Digital Accessibility Expo. http://dae.uic.edu/

Hard to find room at the bar!

I got a stern warning from Facebook telling me that I might be "blocked from commenting on public posts" if I went through with posting the following strong words on a post originally by Tony ('Maakies') Millionaire about chickens being found with caffeine in their feathers:

As someone who in a former life actually was a chicken, I'd like to strongly object to the arrogant assumption by pampered human beings with double vowels in their names that chickens don't appreciate coffee. We do! In fact, it's common knowledge that coffee beans were first plucked out of the soil by enterprising chickens -- long before humans even stopped swinging in trees.

Note to self: when uploading a file creating a whole bunch of new accounts for your content management system, remember to include passwords along with usernames, or frankly there might be one or two people who can't log in. Oops.

I heard about the 'new look' for YouTube so I naturally hurried over to have a look and immediately came upon a couple of things I've put up over the years. I guess my most popular item were the clips I made in New York right after 9-11, "Lower Manhattan Two Weeks After the Attack" (23,069 views). In a totally different vein are the interviews I did for OneWebDay at UIC in 2007 -- the people were pretty funny and I didn't do too badly on the edits.