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CSS3 Hitting The Big Time In A Slightly Unconventional Way

The iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0 are causing quite a resurgence towards the iPhone platform — new users and previous iPhone users alike are both feeling like they have a brand new device in front of them. The App Store allows people to download desktop-class applications directly to their phone and it’s amazing.

However what gets me more excited is the splattering of advanced web technologies that are now in millions of people’s hands courtesy of the Apple and the iPhone. Technologies like CSS3 and sqlite that have only been implemented in the tiniest slice of browsers are now able to be taken advantage of on the iPhone.

Safari performance in iPhone OS 2.0 has been dramatically improved, and this is important because it will continue to allow developers to create great web applications instead of simply going the native Cocoa route. One of the beautiful things about creating applications for the iPhone is that you get to pick which technologies you want to use and implement them where they make the most sense. With the advanced layout rendering capabilities present in Safari, you can create some seriously powerful design logic just by using CSS3 selectors to manipulate your content.

Safari and Firefox have implemented many parts of the CSS3 specification, but the problem is if you’re releasing an application to the masses, you have to support the big ugly dog in the corner, Internet Explorer. All the cool things you can do with CSS3 don’t matter if you’re still supporting older browsers, but on the iPhone you’re only supporting one browser and it happens to have fantastic standards support.

So go ahead and bust out your shadows, rounded corners, and background images, Safari on the iPhone can take it.

Getting Smart About Taking Blogging Advice

There are hundreds of blogs out there that are writing entries solely on how to be a better blogger. Many of these authors aspire to become rich and successful simply because they are writing about how to become rich and successful, which has always been a cart-and-horse problem to me. When your blog is just starting and you barely have triple-digit RSS subscribers, who are you to tell anyone else how to blog and how to market a blog?

This is the problem I’ve always had with articles about “how to blog”, “how to get more traffic”, and “how to boost your RSS subscribers” — so many of these articles are written by blogs that have no business writing about these topics. Heck, even when I’ve had a blog with thousands of RSS subscribers I didn’t quite feel qualified to write on these topics because I knew I was still low on the totem pole. Of course you don’t have to be qualified to talk about a specific topic on your blog — you can talk about whatever you want — but I never wanted to do a potential disservice to my readers.

Opinions are like a**holes, everyone’s got one. Some people like to spam forums with links to their blog to gain traffic, and others like to write cohesive and witty comments. Obviously in that scenario you can figure out which is the better method, so why is the spammy tactic the one that so many people write about as an effective method for promoting your blog? One reason is that bombing forums with links is a common talking point on lists that give you “Top 100 Ways To Promote Your Blog” which are taken to heart by newer bloggers. Just because people include it in an article doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, so don’t take these lists at face value since many of them are created just to get traffic to their blog.

Blogs about blogging, articles about writing articles on your blog, when does the meta craziness end? Well just because information on blogging is abundant doesn’t mean that you should read one blog, one article, one author, and then call it the gospel. You need to fact-check your information, read a dozen lists and articles, create your own best practices, and then create strategies that work best for who you are, what your blog is about, and who you’re trying to reach. The same moral rules that apply in the real world also apply online, so whenever you come across a “tip” that seems a little shady, just ask yourself, “would doing this technique/method make me annoying to someone else?” and you’ll figure out what’s a bad idea and what’s not. It’s actually pretty simple, but sometimes the goal of having a check get mailed to you once a month is more alluring.

Don’t take tips from just anybody, in fact, don’t take tips from me at face value either. Read many things, decide for yourself, and then create strategies that still uphold your moral values. Doing everything that someone puts on a Top 100 list is a fast-track to nowhere. Doing a few things really well (like leaving smart comments, emailing authors that you appreciate, writing accurate & interesting entries) will get you well on your way and you didn’t even have to sacrifice your morals during the process.

My 5 CSS Tips

After reading “5 Steps To CSS Heaven” over at pingmag.jp, and disagreeing with some of what was said I thought that writing this would be appropriate. I’ve been writing CSS professionally now for about 2.5 years so here are 5 quick tips that help me out in my day to day work. I wouldn’t call them best practices because everybody has a style that works for them, but these are what work best for me.

[Read more…] about My 5 CSS Tips

Powerset Launches With Technology No One Needs

Powerset has launched (Powerset.com) and it unveils natural language search capabilities to find answers on Wikipedia, the first dataset that they’ve indexed. Instead of typing things like “Google acquisitions” into, well, Google, you’d type in “who did Google acquire” into Powerset and get back your results.

Wait, what? How is that useful?

Before people get up in arms about my example, it’s on their homepage under the Unlock Meaning section for search queries to try on Powerset. Here’s a list of some other queries they’re hyping as good examples of the technology:

  • actors in Pulp Fiction
  • what causes diabetes
  • who signed the Kyoto Protocol

Perhaps it’s just me and my above-average keyword searching capabilities, but finding these facts on Google would be trivial. When on Google and searching for “pulp fiction actors” the very first result is the IMDB listing with full information and the full answer to my query. When looking on Powerset it gives me a scrollable view of the actors. When I click on an actor, it brings me to another page which is a copy-and-paste job from Wikipedia, but on a Powerset page. The future is here!

If the benefit touted by Powerset is that you don’t have to click to the first result in the list to find your answers — instead, presenting them on the page — and that’s all they’ve got, then they’ve got nothing. The iPhone is killing the cellphone industry not because it’s “everything else that’s out there plus some other features” but because it’s a quantum leap ahead of what’s out there. When Steve Jobs announced it he talked heavily about the “high technology” features and how the technology in the iPhone is at least 5 years ahead of anything else out there. And he was right. Powerset isn’t 5 years ahead of anything, it’s just giving you what Google might have given you if you slightly alter your query.

Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineLand.com had a fantastic quote in the NYTimes article linked previously from which I pulled the title of this blog entry:

“They have a new and interesting technology that most people don’t really need right now,” said Danny Sullivan, a search expert and editor of SearchEngineLand.com. Mr. Sullivan also said that analyzing the meaning of pages, as Powerset does, demands so much computing power that the company is unlikely to be able to index the entire Web any time soon.

Danny his the nail on the head and drives it right into the wood. People are used to keyword searching and they’ve been perfecting their searching skills for years. Powerset gives you the same results in a different format, but it requires a different search syntax. This is like giving professional baseball players a new and improved baseball, but you have to throw it with two hands on the ball at all times. If you throw it with two hands, and do it perfectly, it will go the same speed as you used to be able to throw a normal baseball. What a feature!

Microsoft is rumored to be looking at Powerset as an acquisition target and I truly hope they buy it. If Ballmer thinks that Powerset is the key to taking down Google, then I’d love to see them try and fail over the next 2 years while they ramp up and give it a shot.

The Stupidest Idea Ever Was Writing This Article

When articles like this creep up you know it’s a slow news day. Or maybe that’s just the type of crap the San Jose Mercury News likes to write when no Valley-area companies are getting bought for billions at the moment.

“As managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, Guy Kawasaki funded all the really smart ideas he could find. None hit it big. So earlier this year the guru of Silicon Valley start-ups decided to fund a really dumb idea that cost as little as possible.”

I’ve written about Kawasaki’s venture before it was launched. This post isn’t about my opinion of Truemors, but the damage that this type of article does for the integrity (*cough*) of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in the Valley.

It seems that the crux of this article is that if you continually think you’re doing the right thing but are wrong every time, you shouldn’t readjust your initial assumptions, you should simply throw all reason out the window and do whatever you feel like doing since that’s obviously the answer you’ve been looking for. Kawasaki remarked in the article that although he has considered many of his company’s investments to be sound, few (if any) have panned out in any sort of remarkable way. Unfortunately for venture capital firms and the people who provide them with capital to begin with, investments aren’t judged by the uniqueness of the idea, or the founding team, or the technology, they’re judged with how they perform and if an exit strategy occurs yielding profit. Venture capital firms are companies who need to make money to stay afloat, just like any other company. Now does this mean that Garage isn’t a good venture capital firm? No, it simply means that they’re hurting for an exit like starving lion. All their portfolio companies could be happy as pigs in shit, unfortunately that doesn’t make Garage a successful investment firm it just makes them friendly and helpful business partners.

Perhaps their investments are made in good concepts and not good companies, or perhaps they’re investing in the team instead of the execution, I’m not the person to say, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want my investment firm featured in a newspaper piece where the basis of the article is “we thought all our previous investments were smart but we were wrong, so the hell with smart” because that doesn’t do much to bolster the morale of Garage’s current portfolio companies.