Welcome to CSS Wizardry—Web standards design and development

Welcome to the all new CSS Wizardry. I am Harry Roberts—a 19 year old web developer living and working in Leeds. ‘Work’ is the exciting new startup Venturelab where I work on a range of projects, dealing with design and development with particular focus on accessibility, semantics, usability, clean xHTML, sensible CSS, grids and typography.


Thoughts on Dribbble 11

For a while I was really gutted I didn’t have a Dribbble invite, I posted a tweet requesting one, and Drew McLellan gave me one. From the off I was kind of disappointed with it. It’s just Twitter with screenshots. Anyway, I wrote these thoughts down the other day elsewhere, and I thought I’d do a mini-post to share them more publicly. They are totally unrehearsed, unedited and completely off the cuff:

“I think it’s just another place where the more famous designers just pat each other on the back, regardless of what they actually produce.
It’s too elitist and the more known designers only follow each other, leaving less known people following them but their own work barely been seen. This in turn fuels the cycle—the famous get more so, while the more humble designers go unnoticed. I am seriously unimpressed with Dribbble”

So, if you’re really really wanting a Dribbble invite, don’t worry; you’re not missing much.


On a more personal note… 2

Lately, I’ll admit, I’ve not been too hot on replying to emails and suchlike. If you have emailed me recently I do apologise, however I’ve not turned my home PC on in almost two weeks now, and it feels great. I spend eight hours a day in front of my computer at work, and usually the first thing I do when I get home is turn the computer on there. I could sometimes spend over half of my day sat at a PC.

While I have written several resources in my spare time, and thoroughly enjoyed each, they are very time consuming. The exposure and nice comments they bring are great, but sometimes it’s hard to keep on putting in hours and hours of work in exchange for a pat on the back—that’s why so few people actually take the time to do it.

A photo of me riding trials, taken by Suzanna Haworth

Photo by @suzehaworth

So, having gotten back into trials lately, combined with improving weather, I’m devoting more spare time to that at the moment. Evenings not spent with Suze will most likely be spent riding. Not at my PC.

This is not to say I won’t be writing articles any more, far from it. I love writing articles, and as CSS Wizardry’s exposure has rocketed recently (thanks to people like yourself) writing articles is even more rewarding than ever, and the quality of the comments and feedback is increasing too. I have article ideas all the time, and will post whenever I have the chance. All that’s happening at the moment is I’m stepping back from the PC for a bit, for my health and sanity more than anything. Too much time at the PC can’t be doing me much good. A result of which is that I haven’t been on email for a couple of weeks now…

If you have emailed and it is urgent, I apologise. Please tweet at me as I’m always on Twitter. I’ve also had emails regarding permission to translate Web Design+—if you’d like to translate it that’d be great, you have my permission to do so (provided you don’t pass it off as your own, of course).

Also, regarding freelance work; I shan’t be undertaking any form of freelance for the foreseeable future, sorry…

Keep following me on Twitter though, as I’ll still be posting links and things as ever, and add the CSS Wizardry RSS feed so any articles I do write, you’ll hear about first.

I’m not going, just relaxing. And I think you should too. Move away from your computer, get outside and have fun!

Cheers,
Harry


Building sites without using IDs or classes 33

This morning, for one reason or another, I decided to have a go at coding up a page without using any IDs or classes in my markup, and therefore none in my CSS. I’m not sure why I tried it, I guess I just did… In order to make it a fairly painless job I dove straight into the browser and coded up a simple header, footer, two column layout. View the demo and be sure to view the source.

Continue reading this post →


I rode through Leeds on a bike with no seat 4

As well as being a web developer and type geek, I like to bounce around on a bike with no seat… Trials is something I’ve been doing for a couple of years now, but I always did it on a smaller mod trials bike, with 20″ wheels. This was okay for a period, but after a while it became painfully clear that a 6′4″ guy on a bike with small wheels looked remarkably like a clown. So, after six months out of the sport, this week I went to town and forked out £1200+ on a stock, a type of trials bike with 26″ wheels.

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30 days without an iPhone 1

As of 6 February, 2010, I have been without my iPhone. It’s been
unbelievably difficult for me, as a web developer and geek, to
properly function without it. You do not realise how reliant
everyone is upon technology until you lose it. Unsurprisingly it is
really quite hard going from having the whole internet at your
call and fingertips, to going to a big, archaic pre-iPhone piece
of rubbish. If this experience taught me one thing though, I am
very dependent on technology, simply just to wile away the time;
even sat in bed, my iPhone was a major part of me seeing what
revelations the web had in store.

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