August 23rd
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
