After that first-time setup, my Flickr account was left unused for several months. I didn’t own a decent digital camera at the time, and had no contacts with whom to share pictures anyway. I mostly ignored Flickr, though it stayed at the back of my mind in a “one of these days I’ll have to do something with that” kind of way.

Then, in March of 2005, I went to my first SXSW Interactive conference. This became my excuse to finally buy a camera and start photographically documenting some more of my life. My very first upload was a picture of my luggage tossed casually in a chair in my hotel room on the night I arrived in Austin. I added a tag and some notes and created a photoset for my one photo. But I hadn’t gotten around to changing my avatar, and still couldn’t think of anything original. So the fish stayed.

That first SXSW was — to abuse a cliché — a life-changing experience. I met a slew of my personal heroes whom I soon came to regard as friends and colleagues. Suddenly I had contacts attached my Flickr account, and the network started to grow. I was tagging and faving and commenting on people’s photos just as they commented on mine. And all with a little picture of a three-eyed fish next to my name, because I still hadn’t gotten around to changing it.

Over the next few years I joined up with more social networking sites. I still had no personal brand to speak of, so each new profile defaulted to using Blinky as an avatar. In time, that little mutant became familiar and even recognized to the point that more than one person has failed to remember my name or my website, but remembered that “oh, you’re the guy with the fish.” And so, as they say, it stuck.

Now the Blinky avatar is permanently attached to whatever semblance of an online identity I have. I use it on Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, Dopplr, Ma.gnolia, Pownce, Upcoming, and even Facebook (though I abhor Facebook and don’t really use it). But Blinky really came into his own when I started customizing him with different looks and outfits for various occasions, beginning a new tradition that I’m now obliged to continue until it stops being funny. On a lark, I ordered a small batch of 1 inch Blinky badges for SXSW08. They proved quite popular, much to my surprise.

So the story behind the Blinky avatar is… there is no story. It was a completely random and meaningless image that, through consistency and repetition, has gradually taken on meaning. Blinky has become part of my residual self image. So if, when next you jack into the Matrix, you happen across a goofy, three-eyed cartoon fish swimming about making dweeby sci-fi references and griping about sloppy markup, it’s probably me. Feel free to say hi.

This is probably a good time to pimp the companion site, BeginningHTMLbook.com. All the hip authors do promotional companion sites these days, so who am I to go against the grain? The site features all the usual bits: an introduction, table of contents, and code downloads, as well as some other recommended books and the complete case study website from Chapter 11, Spaghetti & Cruft. But I also thought it would be good to add some “extended and deleted scenes,” which are additional articles and tutorials that don’t appear in the book. The goal is to supplement the book and fill in any knowledge gaps: stuff that really should be covered somewhere, but didn’t make it into the print edition. So far I’ve only written up a bit on specifying colors in CSS, but more is forthcoming soon.

The design is based on the one I did for the case study, which was deliberately engineered to be uncomplicated (it’s a book for beginners, after all, and is more about code than about design, so I went for simplicity). The companion site is a tad more complex than the case study, but follows the same general template. I changed the masthead background from red to blue because, well, the Apress standard black-and-gold cover looked positively putrid on a red background. I first darkened it to a rich burgundy, which looked good, but was much too similar to Andy’s recent reboot. So, since Spaghetti & Cruft was red with green accents (complementary colors, as well as invoking the Italian flag), I simply rotated the color wheel and switched to blue with orange accents.

The site naturally includes the requisite multinational Amazon links, with affiliate IDs attached to those for the US, UK, Canada, and Germany (I couldn’t muddle through the French signup process, and Japanese was right out). If anyone wishes to purchase a copy, doing so via these links will earn me a slightly higher commission, which I would certainly appreciate. As of this posting it’s still on pre-order on Amazons outside the US, though Canada shows it as “out of stock” and unavailable. Come on, Amazon.ca, get with the program.

Working on this book has been a more grueling and time-consuming process than I ever could have imagined. I’ve always said that writing is the easy part. Deciding what to write, what to keep, and what to cut out… well, that’s downright excruciating, and demands a great deal more skill and competence. I did my best, and in the end I’m rather proud of the portions I wrote. I learned a lot in the course of writing my chapters (and correcting my mistakes), and I sincerely hope the book can be of some use to people who want to learn how to build a better web.

For the moment, I intend to rest on my laurels for a bit and enjoy the relief and sense of accomplishment for as long as it lasts, at least until the inevitable nasty reviews start to appear. Until then… wow, I wrote half a book. How freaking cool is that?

I feared Suckswuh was jumping the shark this year, and would be so overextended and overwhelming as to become unfun. But, strangely, the size had just the opposite effect, for me anyway. With so many people there and so much going on, I felt less pressure to meet and see everyone and everything, and instead just enjoyed who I was with wherever I was. I attended the talks I was most interested in and went to just a few parties, usually turning in early. I had more real quality conversations this year than at the previous two, and I’ve heard similar accounts from others. Deeper, lengthier conversations with fewer people is far more rewarding than brief, sound-bite chats with hundreds.

It seems the very immensity of the thing forced people to narrow their focus to just the things they really wanted to attend and the people they wanted to speak to. And yet, it didn’t seem to splinter into closed cliques as much as in the past. Obviously there were groups that tended to cluster together, as always happens, but this time around they seemed more fluid and relaxed, the cliques mingling and cross-pollinating freely. This social free-formedness is one of the things that makes SXSW so much fun.

On a sadder note, there were several absent friends, people I’ve met at Suckswuhs past that couldn’t make it this year. Meri, Elly, Simon, John, Jon, Kelly, Stephanie, Jessica, et. al.: You were missed. On an especially sadder note, Lauren had to leave early because her mother was in a nasty accident. By last reports she’s in stable condition and will make a full recovery in due time. Best wishes to Lauren and mom. Hopefully your second anniversary will be better than the first.

When it came to daytime programming this year, there seemed to be far less about “how to do ___ with CSS” and more discussion about design and media in general. Web standards aren’t just Kool-Aid any more, they’re the main water supply.

I neglected the mobile/social/gaming/business tracks wholesale, but tried to hit most of the design-related sessions. Highlights were “Bluff Your Way in Web 2.0″ by Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith, “Why Grids are Good,” by Mark Boulton and Khoi Vinh, “Bullet Tooth Web Design,” by Andy Clarke and Jason Santa Maria, and “Web Typography Sucks,” by Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter (that’s two for two for Mark Boulton; the man knows design and speaks about it with elegance and clarity).

The 25-minute “Power Sessions” were an interesting experiment, and worked well for the most part. The main fault was that all of those sessions were originally proposed as hour-long talks, so cutting them in half forced the speakers to leave out a lot of good info. Even so, most of the shorter talks I saw were well done. If the Power Sessions return next year I hope presenters are allowed to pitch their ideas with a shorter length in mind from the start, to allow sessions tailored for short-form that won’t feel so incomplete and rushed.

There were a lot of sessions I missed out on, but I resolved not to get too upset about it. As with people, when there are just too many presentations happening at once you’re always missing something good, so why worry about it? I chose to skip a few entire blocks of time so I could get a bit of work done, and while there are things I’m sorry to have missed, I’m choosing not to dwell on those regrets.

A major sour note was struck at the climactic closing party, where a special VIP section had been closed off in one corner of the venue. That section didn’t seem very special, and the people within it didn’t seem any more important than anyone else. We’re all equals at SXSW, siblings in industry, geeks who share the common bond of passion for our work. And here’s this pointless pocket of exclusivity, needlessly drawing an invisible barrier between The Accepted and The Rejected. Utterly weak. I’ll be ranting at length on this shortly.

While the VIP thing was stupid and annoying and left a bad taste in the mouths of most, it wasn’t enough to completely ruin the Suckswuh experience, just to tarnish it slightly. It sucks that our lasting memories of Geekstock ’07 will be marked by snobbery and snubbery instead of the uninterrupted camaraderie the rest of the week offered.

The final morning was a bit sad, as it has been before. Saying farewells with full knowledge that most of these people won’t be seen for a year at least, and quite likely never again, is enough to make anyone choke up a bit. Yet this was also a little different this year, a little more relaxed and joyous. For one thing, Twitter absolutely came into its own at SXSWi07. With mass-IM updates from all the folks in my list, I can maintain some contact with this entire circle of friends I’ve made. In fact, even arriving at SXSW was smoother this year. Twitter made it seem as if I’d spoken to everyone just yesterday, with less need for “so what have you been up to this year?” small-talk catchup and instead diving right into real conversation about topics other than ourselves. And so the goodbyes were less teary because I’ll be twittering with everyone tomorrow anyway.

The first time I went to SXSW I was starstruck. The second time was like a reunion. This time it just felt like coming home. Overall, this was hands down my best Suckswuh to date and I will definitely be returning next year.

I discovered ALA around 2003 while reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s seminal masterpiece “Designing With Web Standards.” As has happened to so many others, it was DWWS that finally made me sit up and pay attention to web standards. Prior to that I was using tables to lay out my pages and CSS was only good for removing underlines from links. But Zeldman’s book is a wakeup call for presentational designers. It’s as much about the “why” as it is about the “how.” I took it upon myself to learn more about the mysteries of CSS, and it was zeldman.com and ALA that were my gateway.

I followed links and discovered Mezzoblue, Simplebits and StopDesign (I had seen and enjoyed the CSS Zen Garden, yet oddly had never visited Dave’s home site, Mezzoblue, until following a link from Zeldman). From there the linktrail led me through the broad network of standards-oriented blogs: Andy Budd, Shaun Inman, Jeremy Keith, Jeffrey Veen, Molly Holzschlag, Ethan Marcotte, Richard Rutter, Joe Clark, Dunstan Orchard, Andy Clarke, Eric Meyer, and many many more names that deserve dropping. Every new site I discovered brought new links of its own to expand the network of know-how, and it was through reading the writings of these people, these bright luminaries of semantics and style, that I found a new passion.

It began with technique. Faux columns, elastic layouts and horizontal navigation lists with sliding doors were handy reusable design patterns, tricks to employ to make my pages look good. But gradually came the realization that this whole “separation of content from presentation” hullabaloo was more important than mere technique; it’s the very cornerstone of the web medium.

I realized that the web isn’t really visual by nature, it’s merely a visual representation of the underlying ideas. The web is a conduit for the transmission of thoughts. Thoughts articulated in words, made portable by markup and given presence through style. If any one of those aspects of the medium takes precedence over the other two, it’s the thought behind it that suffers the damage. I developed a new appreciation of HTML as nothing more than markers to denote the meaning of text. It’s the text that really matters and the ideas behind it, the message driving your content, that thing that something about something is about. Presentational markup hurts content, and design that harms content is bad design.

Until a few years ago, browsers’ support of CSS wasn’t strong enough to make CSS design practical. We resorted to table hacks because there were no other options. But today’s generation of browsers, bugs aside, support CSS well enough that we needn’t keep designing pages the way we did in the olden days. We must unlearn what we have learned, readjust our attitudes and start doing it right. When I see the work of a designer who still uses tables and font tags, it just broadcasts loud and clear that they haven’t updated their skillset in half a decade. There is simply no acceptable excuse for designing web pages today the same way we did in 1999.

So why are there so many practicing designers — those who would call web design their profession — who still haven’t jumped ship? For some it’s just a symptom of ignorance, a lack of exposure to the books and blogs that have been preaching web standards methodologies. Those people need to be welcomed with open arms, offered understanding and guidance on their new journey. But others willfully resist, dismiss CSS as “too hard” and all this web standards mumbo jumbo as hype. They’re comfy with the sloppy, inaccessible presentational pasta that has cluttered the web for far too long. After all, it seems to get the job done. Everything looks just as it should, right?

I couldn’t comprehend that mindset, how anyone could learn about web standards and still reject them by choice. I finally figured out what the problem is; their brains just don’t work right.

A strictly visual thinker is not concerned with semantics and accessibility. They’ll treat a web page as a picture of a web page, and commit whatever HTML sins are required to bend pixels to their will. They don’t appreciate the significance of markup as a support system for content, don’t understand that every presentational tag and attribute is an obstacle hindering the movement of information. They’re thinking like an artist, obsessed with the experience while neglecting the message and the mechanics. Understanding web standards — not just how they work but what they mean — takes more than memorizing techniques for presentation. A web page serves a purpose above and beyond surface aesthetics.

Nearly two years ago I started drafting a post on this topic, exploring the mentality of standards-aware design and the thought process that goes into it. It’s difficult to articulate without a lot of hand-waving and abstraction, so the post lamented in draft stasis, occasionally being dusted off and reworked before going back into the locker unfinished. When Krista Stevens contacted me about writing something for ALA (on a reference from Aaron), I decided it was high time I brought that post out of storage and gave it to the world. I hope someone out there can glean some nuggets of truth and inspiration from How to Grok Web Standards and will use that to further the advancement of the web as a whole. I’m honored to contribute to a publication that has contributed so much to me.