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•  ALA 313: CS, CMS, H&J, OK! 07 Sep 2010, 14:16

  
  
  

  

  In Issue No. 313 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Better content management systems start with content strategy; typographically beauteous web pages may benefit from hyphenation and justification.

  Strategic Content Management

  by JONATHAN KAHN

  Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?

  Published in: Content Strategy

  The Look That Says Book

  by RICHARD FINK

  Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.

  Published in: Layout, Typography

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  Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart

  
  
  

  
  
  

  

•  My other iPad is a Kindle 02 Sep 2010, 17:29

  
  
  

  

  The new Kindle has a lot going for it. It’s inexpensive compared to a full-featured tablet computer like the iPad; you can slip it in your back pocket, where it’s more comfortable than an old-style paperback; and it includes a Webkit browser. This last point is where folks like us start to give a hoot, whether we’re fans of epub reading or not.

  The flavor of Kindle’s browser concerns us because it affords us the ability to optimize the mobile viewing experience with a single line of markup. You can see this in action in the photo at the head of this article (published and discussed on Flickr).

  I made no tweaks for Kindle per se; the Kindle is simply responding to a line of markup I’ve been putting into my web pages since 2007—namely, the viewport meta element, which controls the width of the viewport, thus enabling mobile devices with a limited number of pixels to focus all available pixels on your site’s core content (instead of, for instance, wasting part of the small screen on a background color, image, or gradient). The technique is as simple as web design gets:

  meta name="viewport" content="width=770"

  (Obviously, the value of “width” should be adjusted to match your site’s layout.)

  I learned this little trick from Craig Hockenberry’s Put Your Content in My Pocket (A List Apart, August 28, 2007), which I naturally recommend to any designer who hasn’t seen it.

  
  
  

  
  
  

  

•  Episode 18: Roger Black on web type and templates 01 Sep 2010, 21:18

  
  
  

  

  Legendary art director Roger Black guests on tomorrow’s episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped in front of a live internet audience.

  Roger co-founded the following new companies: Webtype, creators of high-end fonts for online typography; Treesaver, a platform that uses CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the principles of responsive design to publish beautifully formatted content on any device with a web browser; Ready-Media, which designs templates for newspaper and magazine publishers (and attracts controversy); and Nomad Editions, a series of digital weeklies designed directly for mobile devices.

  Roger is also a founding partner in Danilo Black, an international design agency he co-founded with Eduardo Danilo, and The Font Bureau, a leading type foundry he co-founded with David Berlow.

  “He pioneered the use of computers in design, cut the best deals, and made himself synonymous with the modern magazine,” wrote Michael Wolff in a New York Magazine profile of Roger back in the 1990s, when Roger was the best-known magazine art director in the world. (Among many others, he designed Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The New Republic, Fast Company, Advertising Age, and Esquire.)

  He also co-founded Interactive Bureau, one of the biggest and most successful web design agencies of the dot-com era.

  In his free time, Roger putters around in his award-winning West Texas vacation home made of recycled shipping containers.

  Roger Black is an astoundingly prolific creative force; we hope you can join us for this Episode of the show.

  The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of taping, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

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  Photo of Roger Black at Happy Cog by Jeffrey Zeldman.

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•  HTML5 For Web Designers: The eBook 31 Aug 2010, 18:37

  
  
  

  

  Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers is now available as an epub at books.alistapart.com.

  If you bought the paperback, watch your inbox for a special discount on the ebook. (To take advantage of this offer, enter the discount code in page 2 of the shopping cart’s checkout process, after you put in your billing information.)

  Also, be on the lookout for our second book, CSS3 For Web Designers by Dan Cederholm, forthcoming this Fall. Upcoming A Book Apart topics include progressive enhancement, content strategy, responsive web design, and emotional design by industry-leading authors Aaron Gustafson, Erin Kissane, Ethan Marcotte, and Aarron Walter.

  
  
  

  
  
  

  

•  Announcing Lanyrd 31 Aug 2010, 14:14

  
  
  

  

  No, it isn’t a Happy Cog project (it’s by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe) but we couldn’t love Lanyrd, the social conference directory any more if we’d created it ourselves.

  Lanyrd uses Twitter to tell you which conferences, workshops and such your friends are attending or speaking at. You can add and track events, and soon you’ll be able to export your events as iCal or into your Google calendar (the site is powered by microformats). Soon, too, you’ll be able to add sessions, slides, and videos.

  The site’s not for everyone. It’s for people who attend web/UX conferences, and as it was created by inhabitants of the UK, it presently focuses mainly on Western European and North American events, but that will change as more people use it.

  Congratulations and thank you, Natalie and Simon.