emotionalmarkup

Going through my RSS feeds this morning I was once again beset by reams of article titles with claims of 10 items you should take on a holiday, 20 CSS tricks everyone should know, 11 iPhone apps that will make your grandmother orgasm and so on and so forth.

Can we stop this pathetic enumeration of self-help blogshit please? To post n ways of doing something in the hope that a catchy title may ensnare a few self-absorbed or paranoid web surfers may have been novel advice for bloggers once upon a time, but it has become cliché and the numbers and topics are getting more ridiculous. I mean, who needs to read a post about 7 ways Forrest Gump can improve your self confidence?

So, anyway as a retort I thought I’d share 5 pitiful pieces of advice to help all those template-worshipping, google-hungry tip-bandits out there to move on:

1. Don’t make the number more important than the message

   To limit, or stretch, yourself to provide 6 or 7 or 25 tips on making a hat out of salmon or whatever means that you’re spending more time on conforming to a structure than on what you’re writing. A good argument, or a list of lucid tips, doesn’t need to be fenced in and will flow naturally anyway if the content is well-written.

2. If you write good content they’ll come anyway

   Oh my God! 40 Photoshop tutorials you must read! Digg this and I’ll be famous even though I’m just linking to the top 40 Google results and haven’t contributed anything to the broader sphere of knowledge nor do I know anything about Photoshop!
   Loser.

3. Lists can be great. Big lists are not.

   Sure, people who use RSS to aggregate their news are really going to spend more than 15 seconds reading your 20-page article on 100 movie bloopers you must see before you go to the toilet.

4. Don’t make the web boring

   People are copycats. It’s natural. If I see someone wearing a particularly dashing pair of jeans on Oxford Street, I’ll scour the opportunity shops until I find something similar. But if you’re smart enough to be able to create your own blog, you probably also possess sufficient imagination to do something new on the web or, at least, not to follow what a quadrillion people have done before.
   The web is exciting. It’s malleable and there are (mostly) no rules. Don’t turn it into a newspaper.

5. There is no five

   When you realise the truth, that there are more than 12 methods of pruning nasal hair or 8 foods you should eat to become Pavarotti, you might just be on the way to achieving the authoritative voice you thought you’d receive from your sad numbered list.

So I finally redesigned and relaunched tommyemmanuel.com. The design was four years old and needed more than just a slap of paint and a slap around the face.

While it’s a total mission doing everything yourself - I mean from conceptual design to frontend/backend development - it’s also liberating since you have total control over execution and you know where and what everything is.

Nevertheless, you never get time to do everything perfectly (I was constrained to using ASP/SQL Server for a start!) and it is easier to make mistakes due to the wide scope. My advice is to ditch the pride and get someone to at least do an independent spell/browser check and code validation!! It will save you mucho tiempo.

Now I’m too tired to play guitar.

After walking out of a particularly insipid meeting the other day I looked down at my notepad to see what I’d jotted down. You know the sorts of things: action list, contacts, deadlines and so on.

But all I’d taken away, like many meetings before, was a doodle. So I’ve decided to hang on to them.

My response to the zealous meeting overlords when they make their disapproval known, is that I learn best through disassociation and, if I’m feeling particularly chirpy, that perhaps they should set up another meeting to discuss why they’re so uptight.

This one is from a spanish class where we were going over the possessive pronouns. Yawn!

It’s intriguing how, when you spend a considerable amount of time away from your culture (towards which you many have even harboured secret feelings of shame or disgust) that you begin to yearn for it, deify it and gravitate towards those who understand your perverse fascination.

This has happened to me recently in relation to Aussie rock.

I’ve rediscovered artists that I thought had simply dissolved like giant beroccas; bands I should have known better; bands I’ve liked but never paid enough attention to, dudes that rocked, and groups that I’d always categorised (mistakenly) as bogan head bangers with hangovers.

I can’t get enough of it. My only fear is that within a few weeks of re-entering my homeland, this nouveau infatuation will subside like the dregs at the bottom of a schooner glass.

The sun has come out in London and beach lovers like me are all wondering when their next ‘real summer’ will be. Now, when the television turns to Home and Away, we don’t cringe with disgust and hurl a frozen side of lamb through the screen, but scan every frame for evidence of that yellow sand and those rolling waves we miss so much. Which brings me to clearing using CSS.

Let’s take a look at the following snippet:

<ul id="mylist">
<li>I float left!</li>
<li>I float right!</li>
</ul>

We’ve all seen this before. The UL has a background colour or is supposed to clear an adjacent sibling however without a clearing fix, it doesn’t wrap around it’s children or just floats in space like your demented cousin Jonah.

So we implement a clearing fix. Remember this little beauty?

.clearfix:after {
content: ".";
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}

* html .clearfix {height: 1%;}

What a great deal of time it saved us. It bludgeoned those divs down past their floating children like a hunter taming a pack of wild kittens, all while keeping your markup clean and your smugness intact. However if you look at it, it’s a little bloated and, unless you add specific id and classes to the rule, you have to slip in the classname clearfix to all the offending elements in the markup. Boring!

Well forget that. Now you can clear with gay abandon using just two lines of CSS.

#mylist {
overflow:hidden;
}

/* ie6 */
* html #mylist {
height:1%;
}

With any luck you won’t even have to implement the IE6 fix for very long. I usually keep all my IE hacks in a separate style sheet, ready for obliteration when people finally realise that using Internet Explorer 6 is worse than putting a fire out with your armpits.

Good day!