This time last year, I was lucky enough to be at Summercamp down at the Carsonified offices in Bath and thought I’d write an update of the things that have happened in the last year and how the event has helped me in the last 12 months. Summercamp was billed as an event aimed at full-time students and founders of startup web apps who were just starting out. Places were limited to 8 only and as there was only three weeks between the event being announced and the event itself, I applied immediately and to be honest, kind of forgot about it as I didn’t really believe that I would be accepted. I was delighted however when Trista got in touch to say that I had been awarded a place.

As well as myself, the other attendees were:

• James Proud (founder of Gig Locator)
• Jonathan Dalrymple
• Rob Day
• Matt Dempsey
• Felix Rennicks
• Amaury Moulron
• Ross Bearman

Across the 8 of us were a wide range of skills and talents, with Gig Locator being in beta at the time and has since launched and doing well, and Rob was organising a one-day conference called Tomorrow’s Web which took place just a few weeks after Summercamp. There was a mix of designers and developers across the attendees and the sessions were also evenly spread between design, development and business/career issues, all of which were interesting in their own. Full write ups on the event are available her with part 1 and part 2.

In the 12 months since, things have changed a lot for me as I am no longer at university and am now in full-time employment and have also improved both my design and development skills over the last year. My own website has been re-designed several times since and have also learned more coding skills, focussing on HTML5 and CSS 3 and even dabbling in php!

As more of a designer than developer I was more interested with the design focussed talks and I thoroughly enjoyed Mike‘s talk through on what was then the recent Carsonified re-design and how he approached it. I also enjoyed the talks on development techniques and how to approach the task of building and testing sites, with Ryan‘s introduction to A/B testing being an interesting session.

The whole experience was brilliant and if Carsonified were to ever run it again, I would recommend to anyone to apply for a place. I’ve benefitted greatly from the experience (even playing Wiffle Ball!) and I’m sure all the other guys have gained a lot from it also.

There are a few ways to add in CSS support for unsupported browsers using JavaScript but nothing that really offers a one stop simple solution for achieving decent CSS 3 support cross browser, and one service which was recently announced was eCSStender, which promised that by downloading and including a couple of JavaScript files that a wide range of CSS 3 techniques could be implemented cross-browser, crucially without any vendor prefixes required.

Recently, I was working on a project which would have benefited from this library as development time would have been drastically reduced with the benefit of cross browser compatibility for techniques such as border-radius, box-shadow etc and I began coding with this in mind.

There was initial success with Firefox recognising the standard border-radius without the need for the -moz- prefix, and this appeared to work cross-browser. Except for Internet Explorer, any version. After many attempts at trying to get this to work, I gave up.I recently heard that border-radius was not supported in IE with eCSStender, and I’m wondering what all the hype was in the A List Apart article. It was billed as a simple solution to easily achieve CSS 3 compatibility, but if something as simple as border-radius doesn’t work in IE then what’s the point? There are other ways of achieving compatibility and eCSStender was not all it was made out to be in the article.

It was billed as the saviour to vendor prefixes and greater flexibility, whereas in reality it is none of these.

I’m currently in the process of re-designing this site and part of this process means updating it to utilise the latest HTML5 and CSS 3 elements where possible, and as a result of this I’ve used the time element in all dates such as post date and also other dates.

The format of the time element for dates is as follows:

<time datetime="2009-11-13">13 November 2009</time>

The datetime attribute has to contain an ISO 8601 date although the value can contain any date format you wish. When using this with the dynamic nature of wordpress, the following format produces a valid output for post dates:

<time datetime="<?php the_time('c'); ?>"><?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?></time>

This will currently produce valid HTML5 and can be used in addition to “pubdate” to indicate that this was the date the article was published.

<time datetime="<?php the_time('c'); ?>" pubdate><?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?></time>

Of course, time can be used elsewhere on the site where suitable, and in any string format you wish.

Having posted my thoughts on university before, both the good and bad points I was in two minds with what to do over the summer as the end of the educational year and holidays approached and I wasn’t sure whether it was worth carrying on or trying to seek employment within the industry.

I’d become disillusioned with university over the last few months as I felt the course had stalled slightly and I wasn’t picking up as much as I wanted to and felt that a lot of the content we were being taught had little relevance to the industry. (We were still told that table based layouts were acceptable on occasion). As the year finished I was still swithering as to what to do and decided that I’d decide over the summer as there was no immediate rush to make my mind up as the course doesn’t re-start until September but circumstances speeded that process up.

After a hectic couple of weeks, between completing the university year and everything that’s associated with that, I was offered employment with MTC Media here in Dundee and I was delighted to accept. My role is the front end development of websites and implementing the HTML/CSS/JavaScript, as well as designing and after four weeks of employment I’m really enjoying it so far. I’ve learnt a lot in the short space of time in my employment, from the mechanics of how a design agency operates to more technical aspects of coding and designing solutions for clients. Whilst I’ve designed and implemented several websites in the past, it’s much different now that it is my main job role and in a design agency, and I’m really enjoying it so far.

My knowledge is increasing all the time and at a much faster rate than it would had I stayed in education and for that reason I feel I’ve made the right decision.

Last week we had a visit from Rachel Andrew to university where she was to give a talk about The Web and The Future, and it was a good talk. She concentrated on the basics that are required to succeed in the industry, and made the point that we were ideally placed to experiment with the emerging specs of HTML5 and CSS 3 by using them on uni projects which provide a lot more freedom than client work. She explained the current state of the web industry and some of the exciting things which are in the near future such as improvements in typography, and advancements in other areas.

The talk was slightly delayed as over 100 folk turned up to hear her speak in a room with around 30 seats, so there was a slight delay as we moved into the main lecture theatre and Rachel did well to deal with the upheaval and still deliver a great talk. Speaking to a full lecture hall would scare the living daylights out of me!

It was good to see a leading name in the web industry up in Dundee and hopefully more will follow in time.

Recently I’ve been working on restoring a WordPress blog back to health after it was compromised, and after performing an upgrade to both WordPress itself and all contributed modules, I used the excellent WordPress Exploit Scanner to identify errors and inserted code within files, and it was able to identify that a malicious php script was inserted into the first line of almost every plugin file.


< php
eval(base64_decode("dfslgdgdfgdg...................")
?>

In order to restore the blog back to full working order it was necessary to remove this line from each file, and with there being over 20 plugins this was going to be a lengthy process. Fortunately by deleting the plugin and uploading a newly downloaded version this saved trawling through each file to remove the malicious code.

This was the first time that I’d used the WordPress Exploit Scanner but I will definitely keep it in mind for the future, both when there is a specific problem and also to check the health on any WordPress site.

As some of you may know, I’m now in second year at university, and that was after spending some time at college prior to this. When I left school I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career, and due to circumstances at the time I went to work full-time in an office for 3 years, although that quickly got boring. Having had an interest in computers and web design since I was at school, I decided to leave full-time employment in order to pursue a career in this field, and I can honestly say I have no regrets about this decision at all.

I returned to education and learned a lot in that time, both from a technical viewpoint and those all important “life-skills”, as well as meeting some great people who I still keep in touch with. I was also lucky enough to gain some work experience abroad which confirmed that it was something I’d like to again in the future, and after college I moved on to university, to a web-design course. I’ve enjoyed the course  so far but recently I’ve been giving it some serious consideration as to whether it is worth continuing much longer with it for a number of reasons, and I hate quitting anything.

Whilst I enjoyed the first year, some of the modules were a bit out-dated (our entire HTML module was either entirely wrong or out-dated), and other modules sole purpose was for us to talk to each other and work in groups. I finished first year happy and having enjoyed it, however part of me thought it was a waste as I felt that I picked up very little.

I returned to second year thinking that things would improve, and overall they are much better and relevant this year but it’s still not as good as it could be and my enthusiasm for the course is decreasing as time goes on. I’m not saying that there is nothing else to learn as that is clearly not the case and in this industry learning is something that has to be ongoing as technologies and techniques change, I’m just not sure staying at university is the best environment to progress. There will be many things that I’d learn if I completed my time here and I’m certainly not that big headed to think that I’ve learned all there is to know at this point, but another couple of years learning Flash just does not appeal and is something I don’t think I’d use that often to justify spending hours learning it from a lecturer who doesn’t know it herself and copies and pastes materials from the Adobe website!

Likewise the scripting module that we are currently undertaking, the lecturer doesn’t appear to have  a clue and his main resource was an ancient JavaScript site which no longer existed, and I’ve learnt more from Jeremy Keith‘s DOM Scripting than he could ever teach me, and I’m paying for this privilege!

I’m beginning to feel that by working in the industry full-time and I’d pick up more and at a quicker rate, and it would be a more enjoyable experience to do this. I’m lucky enough to be able to work part-time whilst at university which is invaluable that I can pick up “real-world” experience as well as continuing with my studies, but I’m beginning to give serious thought to making it full-time work and no longer continuing with university. Web design is something I enjoy greatly and would continue to work on personal projects and attend industry events such as FOWD and the DIBI Conference to enhance my learning as well as working full-time.

I’m not going to make any rash decisions and I’ve certainly not made my mind up either on this one and will wait till the summer before weighing up my options fully before coming to a decision, I’m just a bit disillusioned with it at the moment.

Over the last few months I’ve noticed a trend for websites to feature an embossed style, with large text and other UI elements given an embossed look to add some depth to the design. I admit to being a fan of this style, and have begun incorporating it into recent designs. With the emergence of CSS 3 techniques such as box-shadow and text-shadow have made it easier to empty this technique without the use of images and below are some of the best examples at the moment.

Jack Osborne:

App Zapper:

Lee Munroe:

Atebits:

Inspireling:

Arbent:

This is just a small collection of examples and there are a lot more out there, and I can see this trend continuing for a while yet.

There’s always been a debate within the web industry about whether it’s better to gain a university education or to gain a job within the industry in order to build up a portfolio of work and experience. Having been at university for just over a year and gaining work experience at the same time, I can see both sides of the argument. Whilst I’m enjoying my time here, there are areas where the course could be significantly improved, with the latest set of modules described below:

Web Standards:

This module was essentially all about valid code and practices for accessibility and usability, all basic and essential things to know for any web designer/developer. I had a slight advantage for this module having known a lot of the areas discussed previously and knew all about the table layouts v CSS layouts and validators etc. However, it baffles me why this module wasn’t delivered in first year instead of the HTML module we had to endure with the tutor telling us that inline styles and table layouts were still ok to be used if we wanted.

MultMedia:

This module was all about Flash and ActionScript 2.0, which although useful and good to know it is not something that interests me at all and do not enjoy Flash work at all. The module is called Web MultiMedia but rarely ventures out of Flash and there is a lot more to multimedia on the web than that.

With the emergence of HTML 5 and the video and audio tags coming into effect within browsers, this could be a new era of multimedia embedded into sites but this has not been mentioned at all. The emergence of web apps such as Spotify etc have changed the way music is consumed on the web, and the Kindle has changed the book industry and popularised e-books.

Designing Interfaces:

This module was interesting and probably the highlight of the semester, with a lecturer who knew his subject and was passionate about it certainly helped. A lot of theory was introduced to the way that interfaces are designed and considerations were analysed in order to produce the most effective and attractive interface.

The highlight of the semester for me.

Law:

We had to endure a law module which was interesting, but too generic to really get me interested. The area of contract law is obviously essential to the industry as a key area is the relationship between client and designer and a good solid contract is key to this relationship. However, there was no mention of intellectual property or other law specific to computing and the internet which was a disappointment as this would have been more relevant and interesting.

The current semester has just started this week and new modules include Web Scripting, Marketing and Information Design which has the potential to be an improvement on the previous one. This post has turned into a bit of a rant about the failings of the course, and although it’s not all bad, I can see why people skip the university route and head straight for industry.

Photo Credit: Yellow Arrow

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading more about HTML 5 and CSS 3 and how the respective specifications are progressing, and beginning to experiment with a lot of the new elements and selectors available. Although a lot of the new elements and ways to markup a site are not production ready, I’ve been working on a university project which allows a lot more freedom to experiment and as such I decided to mark up the entire site with HTML 5 and to also use a number of CSS 3 selectors where appropriate. Having read a lot about these new technologies, this represented the ideal opportunity to begin using the things which I had read about.

HTML 5:

Much has been written about HTML 5 and is now at a point where it is being used more and more in production sites, with browser support improving all the time (except IE of course!). I first heard of the new HTML 5 spec about a year ago when the first “2022 rumours” came out and I was a bit confused about the timeline and the development progress. However, over the past year it has come a lot more popular and the record was straight on the 2022 date. At FOWD Glasgow I was lucky enough to hear Bruce Lawson speak about HTML 5 and how it was being developed to be used now, and taking the things that we all do on a regular basis and streamlining these tasks. HTML 5 is designed to be used now, and as browser support increases it is becoming more widespread.

One of the first noticeable things about HTML5 is the Doctype, and how simple it is in comparison to the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1 doctypes, which simplifies things a lot and this sets the tone for the rest of the page as I feel in general that markup is a lot cleaner by making use of the new elements such as section, article, aside etc reducing the number of divs used within a page.  Although the canvas element has got a lot of attention for some of the exciting things now native to the browser, but I found the video element a real treat to use and certainly cuts down on the amount of markup needed to embed a video into the page, which is not as big a problem as it once was. The only code required with the new video tag is:

<video width=”280″ height=”160″ poster=”img/roll.jpg” controls autoplay>
<source src=”video/roll.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″ /> <!– MPEG4 for Safari –>
<source src=”video/roll.ogg” type=”video/ogg” /> <!– Ogg Theora for Firefox –>
<img src=”img/roll.jpg” alt=”Our Famous Ham &amp; Cheese” title=”Our Famous Ham &amp; Cheese” />
</video>

The reason there’s two sources is that Safari and the Webkit browsers support the mp4 codec whereas Firefox and the Gecko based browsers only support the ogg codec. There is a debate ongoing at the moment at getting an industry wide codec supported to make life easier but I think there’s a way to go yet on that issue. After declaring the sources, it’s important to add an image or other fallback content for browsers which currently don’t recognise the <video> tag – I’m looking at you again IE!

That’s just one of the new tags available and there are a wide range of HTML 5 resources available to keep up to date with the development specification and techniques including:

• HTML 5 Doctor
• Bruce Lawson
• HTML 5 Gallery
• W3C Differences document
• WHATWG Current Working Draft
• A List Apart Article

I’ll post up the results of my HTML 5 experiement once it’s completed, which is a university project based around a sandwich shop and Coldfusion.

CSS 3:

As well as using HTML 5 for the firs time in earnest, I also used the opportunity to make use of some CSS 3 techniques for the first time and there is some exciting developments in this area which cut down the amount of CSS and styling needed. With the new specification techniques such as rounded corners, gradients, drop shadows and font embedding become much easier. The @font-face attribute has been around for a while but has become a lot more popular recently, as has the issue of fonts on the web with the emergence of services like Typekit and Fontdeck.

Rounded corners, drop shadows and gradients have been a popular “Web 2.0″ look for a while now but with CSS 3 these techniques are made much easier. In order to achieve fully rounded corners, it hasbeen known for up to 9 different images being used to achieve, however with the border-radius attribute it’s possible to achieve this with pure css. Although not an official attribute at the moment, it almost certainly will be and can be achieved at the moment with browser specific attributes such as -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius. As ever, IE lags behind with no support for the border-radius element at all.

CSS backgrounds are set to change dramtically with support for multiple backgrounds and the use of rgba values offering new ways to set backgrounds via CSS. Currently, only Safari supports multiple backgrounds and if applied, all other browsers won’t see any background image so it’s not production ready at the moment but I don’t think it will be long before it becomes adopted in other browsers. The other change to the background element is the ability to set colours using rgba values to define the colour and opacity of a background. Drew McLellan kicked off this year’s 24Ways with an excellent article on the use of rgba values, and I’ve used rgba to create some semi transparent background in my university project, which negated the need to use transparent pngs andreduced page load for the user.

LIke HTML 5, we’re just at the beginning of  being able to use CSS 3 and whilst there’s not a huge amount of support available it won’t be too long before there is and will make coding beautiful sites that bit easier.

Once my university project is finished, I’ll post up a link and a description of the techniques used.