My Journey in UX, Design Systems, & Life

Since Google recently added +1 Metrics to Webmaster Tools and Social Engagement to Google Analytics, I decided to add the Google +1 button to my website. All went well until I ran my site through the W3C’s HTML validator. The new button caused my previously valid site not to validate.

I know some folks say RSS is dying. Apparently, those folks haven’t seen the number of feeds I subscribe to. I have tried many feed readers over the years and I have to say Reeder is my new favorite!

Finally, I have finished updating this website’s design. It took much longer than expected, but overall I am pleased with the new look and feel. I also took the time to clean up some code that had been bothering me for a while. Please feel free to let me know what you think!

Just a quick note to ask everyone to please excuse my mess as I push out a new design here on pixelflips. Between a full-time job and two kiddos, it almost takes an act of Mother Nature to have a smooth release. So if things don’t look quite right don’t panic just yet.

As an end of the year gift to myself, I recently purchased a membership over at Think Vitamin Membership. I was mainly looking for some tips & tricks related to jQuery, but what I got was a whole lot more. The amount of training videos available is outstanding and covers everything from HTML and CSS to PHP, JavaScript, and more!

It’s been one crazy year for me and my family, but overall it’s also been a great one. I have moved around the globe (TXL to SFO for you frequent flyers) and my new job has been challenging, but a much-needed change. This time of year I like to reflect on everything that has happened this year and look forward to the year to come.

Today, Google released an interactive online book that explains things like HTML, browser extensions, and much more. While this is probably very helpful for less tech-savvy web surfers, I am more excited about the underlying technology, HTML5 & CSS3. The site is a great example of what is possible with the latest updates to HTML and CSS.

I’ve been passing around these videos at work, so I thought I would also share them here. Both are from the Fronteers front-end conference that was recently held in Amsterdam. There are a lot of videos available from the conference but these two really stood out.

Even though I am not writing that much these days, I am still reading like a madman to keep myself up to date on upcoming technologies. One thing, I was not looking forward to reading was the 900+ page spec on HTML5. Thankfully, a book I have just recently finished helped solve this problem, so I thought it deserves a few words.