mindgarden

Call me a genius, I managed to delete all the comments from the blog (yes, all of them) when getting rid of spam comments. Another proof of how spam ruins everything. Or not thinking about what you’re doing.

I’m currently trying to get my hands on a proper backup of the database, but it doesn’t look good (you know how it is with backups). If worst comes to worst, all the comments since mindgarden moved to the new server might be gone forever. So if you left a comment on mindgarden and it isn’t there anymore, it’s not because I don’t like you and deleted it.

In the meantime, far more serious things are going on in the world. So please go ahead and donate some money for Haiti if you haven’t done so yet

So it’s 2010 and the first week has almost passed already. During the Christmas break I signed up to Project 52 which is a fantastic idea. There was very little content going into mindgarden in recent weeks and by signing up with p52 you basically promise yourself and the world that you’ll post something at least once a week.

And I’m already about to miss the target in the first week. I have a more or less good reason though as I started my new job this week working as a google webmaster. It has been a fantastic week with loads of new stuff to get my head around (and a lot of great food too!). I don’t think I’m judging too early when I say this is a great place to work for.

So this is my first post of hopefully 52, I know I’m kind of cheating my way out of this one. The next one will be filled with fantasticly awesome world-changing content. Promised.

This year’s fourth issue of the german Webstandards Magazin should hit the stores today. And I feel very honoured to be one of the authors contributing to this issue. My article is about the HTML5 and CSS3 that I used to relaunch mindgarden.de and is called “HTML5 und CSS3 - Mal was Neues wagen: HTML- und CSS-Features von Browsern im Praxiseinsatz.”

Unfortunately I haven’t received my copy yet and it’s not being sold here in England, but if you happen to be in Germany go pick up your copy today and let me know what you think!

Yesterday I’ve updated the magnum website starter kit on github to version 1.1

Included in the kit now are the modernizr library (hop over to Yaili’s article on the Web Designer Notebook for more on modernizr) and a sample implementation of font embedding.

The font embedding uses the very nice Sorts Mill Goudy from the League of Movable Type

Go to the github page to download magnum

(image by khem93)

Newspaper companies are having a hard time adjusting to a world in which people use the internet. And especially since Rupert Murdoch accused Search Engines of stealing their content and announced that he would make people pay to read News Corp. content there is a lot of discussion about how the future of the news industry will look like.

Yesterday Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google posted his view on things in an article on Wall Street Journal , envisioning the future to look like this:

It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.

Apparently newspaper companies are indeed working on that future right now. Time Inc. have just released a demo of a tablet-targeted version of Sports Illustrated which gives a good impression of how they want to justify taking money for content in the digital age:

Also, the New York Times have recently released their Times Skimmer which is an alternative Interface for their headlines. What they’ve come up with is really nice I think. It is especially nice to see that they did not implement it in a proprietary format like Flash or Silverlight but instead used open standards like HTML and CSS (with some nice HTML5 and CSS3 highlights sprinkled on top). And they’re using @font-face through Typekit as well.