Meet me in Austin

I am leaving bright and early tomorrow morning (like at 4am, sheesh) to attend my 4th SXSW. I’m really looking forward to getting out of Dodge for a while, and I really need the shot in the arm that I always get from hanging out with all the geeks, seeing old friends, and meeting new ones. If you will be there, look me up and say hi. I will have some kick-ass Interllectual Moo cards — get ’em while they last! If you really want to track me down, you can see my schedule on sched.org, the schedule service the SXSW should have created, but didn’t. I am also going to be speaking on an Unpanel, the creation of Matthew Oliphant. This will be my first foray into SXSW speaking— I will probably talk about our epic accessibility pursuits at Humboldt State, but may speak about some other topic related to Higher Ed web design/development. I am excited and slightly terrified, but I decided that I need to start kicking my fear of public speaking somehow. Details on the where and when of the Unpanel will be coming soon.

Please caption your videos about web accessibility

Seriously. This should be obvious. Why would you make inaccessible videos about accessibility? Yet, I have found this happening more and more lately. I has become very frustrating for me, because some of the videos are great, and I would love to use them in the accessibility training materials I am assembling. However, for reasons that should be obvious, I cannot use inaccessible training materials in a course about accessibility. Some recent examples that come to mind are: Victor Tsaran: “An Introduction to Screen Readers” on YUI Theater, the AssistiveWare videos on computer accessibility, and Using ALT attributes smartly on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Come on guys. Practice what you preach.

The great CSS framework debate

I’m a little late to this conversation, since I am on vacation for Thanksgiving, but I thought I’d weigh in on the CSS framework discussion started by Jeff Croft. I’m pretty sure the only reason why this is getting so much attention right now is because of the final few paragraphs of Jeff’s original article, which suggest that the only reason folks are against frameworks is that they are afraid frameworks will make their jobs obsolete:

My gut feeling is that many folks who make their living off writing semantic (X)HTML and CSS are getting scared. They’re realizing that CSS and HTML are actually pretty darn easy, especially with the aide of tools like frameworks. They’re realizing that the only hard thing about writing CSS is troubleshooting lousy browsers — and they’re realizing that lousy browsers are fewer and farther between than ever, and getting fewer every year. They’re realizing, quite frankly, that their skill set may be less valuable in the future than it has been for the past couple of years. I’d love to be proven wrong, but until someone speaks up with some good reason why CSS frameworks shouldn’t be used, instead of simply asserting that they shouldn’t, I’m convinced these folks are just trying to drum up some false job security.

Version 4: Codename Finnegan

In the last couple of days I have soft-launched version 4 of Interllectual.com. Any craziness you have been seeing with the RSS feeds should be resolved now. My goal with this version was to bring all the different aspects of my life together in one place, and to have the site feel like it represents where I am in my life at this point. Colors are brighter that they were before, and animals play a huge part in the site as they do in my life. There is a new logo-mascot, and my mammal and bird life-lists are a major feature. I have a backlog of data to fill in to the animal section, which is my favorite part of the new site. Brian and I spend a lot of time bird and mammal watching, and now we have a place to record what we’ve seen and to feature photos and videos we’ve taken of the critters. I have a bunch of videos from Australia that will be going up soon. I also have a lifestream (the Diversions section) that pulls in my data from my other online forays— my tweets, links, books I’m currently reading, etc. And of course there are also the articles which I plan to devote a bit more time to in the near future. The site is now running on ExpressionEngine, and I will write more about that soon. I still have a bit of work to do with some of the finer details and the IE6 compatibility, but I wanted to get the site out there and let everyone start enjoying it. I call this version “Finnegan”, which is the name of the owl. I’ve always wanted to name one of my pets Finnegan, and now I have. Finny is wise and shares his wisdom with us all in his “Thought of the Day” in the footer of the main page. Enjoy.

Testing HSU’s Emergency Alert System, Part 2

As promised, here is a follow-up to my previous post about our test of the emergency alert system last week. We advertised the test on the HSU home page during business hours with a red box in the “promo” area: Then, at the appointed time, I switched the HSU home page into emergency mode for 15 minutes. A notice was displayed that explained the test, and what HSU constituents should do during an actual emergency: (These screenshots were taken by Karine Joly of collegewebeditor.com, who has many great articles about higher ed emergency communications. I forgot to take screenshots during the drill :/ )

What we learned

We interrupt this broadcast to bring you the following

Hot Fudge! Right On! Comin’ Atcha Now!

I can’t express how stoked I am to finally have found a clip of this show to prove to my California friends that it did exist and I am not crazy. Pay special attention to the music and the typography— there is no better way than this to express childhood in Detroit in the 70’s.