ALA 4.0: A Few Thoughts

Alistapart, the venerable (hey, Mike Davidson used venerable, too) web design magazine started by Jeffrey Zeldman, has been updated to version 4.0.

A few thoughts as I peruse their design and new articles:

• It’s beautiful. Just Pretty. This is a design that I would be really proud of. Jason Santa Maria takes a color pallete I love and adds little details like the black seal for a wonderful affect (update: JSM points out the old articles are grey. So now I *really* love the color pallete, as it gives a sense of home)
• I wonder if changing the domain name will hurt traffic like it did for Keith Robinson (update: that was just temporary until the DNS propagated – great, if not intentional, advertising!)
• Ruby on Rails, the platform underlying it all, is the cat’s meow
• Comment feeds are now standard in WordPress installations. I’m in the process of adding them (along with other things) to my own hacked templates
• We need more voices like those at Alistapart and Digital Web. Nothing is quite like sitting down to a new edition of those two publications
• I really hope they start publishing on a regular schedule again
• It looks like nobody’s figured out categories/tags yet. Here’s another shot at it
• Jeffrey should write more. Just the tone he writes in is wonderful to read
• Why is the layout left-aligned, and the comments paged?
• Joe Clark is curmudgeon-like, and I mean that in a good way
• Interesting use of “user science” as a top-level category
• In Safari, when you roll over an article title that wraps, there is an interesting affect
• What is the meaning of Semantician?
• The bar is now higher