Guernica imitation grafitti

On this day (April 27) in 1937,  the German air force bombed the Basque city of Guernica, an event memorialized in Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica.

Update: As of  Jan. 26, 2009 – there are over 4,800 members.

Designing With Web Standards - Facebook Group

Quoting from the DWWS Facebook group page:

Designing With Web Standards is “the foundational web standards text”. “A core text cited by many as the beginning of the true revolution.”

“Web standards” didn’t really exist until Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman, and his colleagues, coined the term, applied it to a set of ill-enforced W3C and ECMA recommendations, and persuaded browser makers to support these core technologies accurately and completely. That was “The Web Standards Project.”

Designers still weren’t using these hard-won standards, so Mr. Zeldman pushed A List Apart in the direction of web standards evangelism, and this had a great effect. An underground of smart, forward-thinking designers and developers embraced web standards.

Still, most people didn’t get the concepts of web standards, and the industry was oblivious to the benefits or even the existence of web standards.

So the book was written, and published, revised and re-published and the story of web standards continues. It’s the book that launched a thousand other books, from Web Standards Solutions on. It changed some people’s careers, launched others, shook up the industry. However imperfectly applied, web standards are behind most “Web 2.0″ apps.

And yet web standards are still a semi-underground movement, and standardistas are still a rare breed.

Back on November 2nd, 2007 – Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about the group in his blog.

In July of 2008, we wrote an update about DWWS group activities, and related events.

In the past year, 4,171 members have to joined the DWWS Facebook group – to ask questions about the Designing With Web Standards book, and dialogue about Web Standards.

The DWWS Facebook group is already very global. Members are from the following countries, or regions: Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Belgium, Belize, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, Fiji, France, Ghana, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya,
Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, USA, Venezuela, Vietnam, etc.

Join the DWWS FB group and let’s learn about web standards together.

Just getting started with web design or web standards? Check out Jeffrey Zeldman’s DWWS page, or our recent book review of Jeffrey’s book – Designing With Web Standards.

Pablo Picasso 1907 Self Portrait

Here is a section from Pablo Picasso’s 1907 self portrait. Picasso was  born on October 25, 1881. Picasso grew up in a middle class family in Malaga, Spain. His father was an art instructer and curator of an art museum. According to Picasso’s mother, his first words were “piz, piz” – short for lápiz, the Spanish word for “pencil”.  Picasso is one of the most famous 20th century artists and is best known for Cubist style paintings.

While we’re on the topic of Zeldman (and DWWS) you should participate in (yes, if you are a web designer, you should take the survey too!) the 2008 Survey of People Who Make Websites.

I browned the sausage on Saturday afternoon. Sunday morning I got up early; whipped the eggs, and grated the extra-sharp cheddar cheese. While it baked in the oven, I wrote a short article about Bono.

Priscilla made some fruit salad. We had breakfast a little after 8:00AM. Jane and the girls enjoyed the breakfast.

We got to church early, and the girls practiced Let All Things Now Living on the violin, viola, and cello. (It’s sung to the old Welsh tune of Ash Grove.) Ralph talked about letting the little children come to Jesus, and the blessings of God’s covenant faithfulness.

We had chicken, potatoes and vegies for lunch. Then we watched City of Joy. It’s a great movie about a shanty town in Calcutta — filled with gangsters, slum dwellers, and people with leprosy. (People I could relate to.) Do you know the happiest part of the movie? The wedding celebration.

That was yesterday. It’s only a memory now. Yesterday was also a Beatles’ song. But that was yesterday, and I want to talk about Tomorrow. Smashing Pumpkins wrote a song called Today (which I don’t recommend), so let’s talk about Tomorrow.

My mother grew up in Ogilvie, Minnesota — which is a really small town along highway 23, north of the Twin Cities. Seems like a lot of kids growing up in Ogilvie felt trapped in that tiny town, and could not wait to grow up and get out of that “2 traffic-light town”. There were only a couple stores in Ogilvie, so lot’s of folks went to other towns nearby to do their shopping. To the north-east was a town called Mora, and to the south was a little town called Day. Seems like the town called Day was even smaller than Ogilvie, so maybe they went there just to get away from Ogilvie.

People in Ogilvie had a saying that was kind of funny and really makes you think about yesterday, today, and tomorrow. They would say:

“Today I’m going to Mora, and tomorrow I’m going to Day.”

Bono wrote a song about his mother’s funeral, called Tomorrow. His mom died when he was only 14, and I think that was one of the big events that set a trajectory for his life, and shaped several of his songs.

Tomorrow also talks about Jesus coming back. [ Tomorrow Lyrics - song by Bono/U2]

“Open up to the Lamb of God… To the love of He who made the blind to see … He’s coming back, I believe it, Jesus coming… I’m gonna be there.”

I know the Great Wedding Feast is coming Tomorrow, and I’m gonna be there too. Just wanted to encourage you to think about yesterday, today, and tomorrow, while it’s still today.

It’s always daytime where I’m going. It’s called it the marriage supper of the Lamb. I’m not sure if we’ll eat breakfast since there won’t be any night, but I’m sure there will be joy and feasting. No darkness. No night. Only light. Only day.

Today I’m only talking about Tomorrow, but Tomorrow I’m going to Day.

In several recent articles, we talked about the impact of the new documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. (See also: Can I Ask You a Question?) The movie was released about 2 weeks ago. The article I wrote last Saturday, Questions That Aren’t Properly Answered … received a number of interesting comments. It’s obviously too early to tell what the long term impact of the movie will be, and like many movies, it makes a big splash for about 2 weeks, and then disappears off the radar… only showing up in DVD rentals and video sales many months later.

When you look at the chart above (thanks to Google Trends), you can see where interest (“search volume”) in the Expelled movie (green line) and Ben Stein (red line) peaked around April 18th, 2008. It’s a 30 day view of the data. The bottom part of the chart above (labeled “News reference volume”) indicates a ripple effect in news articles with reference to “Intelligent Design” (blue line) slightly after the movie release.

The chart below takes a longer view of the data (showing 2004 – 2008), and indicates that most of the debate, public interest in Intelligent Design, and news articles about Intelligent Design took place in 2005. I was surprised by this — and had forgotten about the 2005 broohaahaa over ID.

The blue line indicates interest in Intelligent Design, both in search volume, and news articles. The red line shows a peak in queries about Ben Stein occurring at the time of his movie release. On the original Google Trend chart that I reviewed, item C (above) indicates a news item: “Schools Should Teach ‘Intelligent Design,’ Bush Says”. Item D was a news item: “Intelligent Design Debate to Take Center Stage”. Item E was most interesting – a news item: “Pennsylvania voters oust school board that backed intelligent design”. So there was a whole PA school board that was expelled. Finally, the big blue spike flagged as item F was tagged with news item “Judge rules in intelligent design lawsuit”.

Here’s a photo of PJ going to work with me.

Monday, November 26, 2007 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic web content.

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Don a Blue Beanie and snap a photo. Then on November 26, switch your profile picture in Facebook and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day photo pool on Flickr.

Next Steps:

1. Make a personal commitment to fight Web Standards Apathy. Show solidarity with the Standardistas on November 26th, 2007.
2. Buy, beg, or borrow a Blue Beanie (blue hat or cap, even a black or grey one will do in a pinch.)
3. Take a photo of yourself wearing the Blue Beanie. Or take a cool group photo of you and your friends wearing Blue Beanies.
4. Post your photo, or photos to Facebook, Flickr, and other social networks on November 26th, 2007. Remember to switch your Facebook profile photo that day. While you’re at it, switch all your social network profile photos. Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, iLike, Pownce, you name it.
5. Promote Blue Beanie Day in your blog or wiki starting today, and tell all your friends to get ready for Blue Beanie Day. Start by inviting all your Facebook friends to this event.

Check the Blue Beanie Day event notification on Facebook to see more Blue Beanie heads and to make a comment or ask questions.

For the first time ever, there is a complete, fully-functional Ruby 1.8 compiler.