So I spent 30 minutes talking to them about the basics of user centred design and how the internet works. Then I helped them trouble shoot their table based layouts and font tags.

“From your 77 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 809 items…”

No wonder I don’t read any books any more.

And then today I had an “ah-ha’ moment – this this is why I hate coding flexible horizontal navigation menus.

A few weeks months ago Jeffrey Zeldman posted a summary of the results of an An Event Apart fact finding mission on women in IT (web design was deemed too liquid a field to study). Jeffrey’s blog post sure sparked a discussion and a few basic ideas came up:

• is there is something about IT that doesn’t attract women?
• do men and women contribute different things?
• do women self promote? do men do it more? how is it perceived?
• how much of the above is cultural or learned behaviour?

In response to all of that I can say: I think men and women are fundamentally the same and any differences in our behaviour is cultural or taught. This is based on any number of my own personal observations the most relevant of which are: no matter what the stereotype, there is always an exception to what is considered typical or biological behaviour and that around the world the typical traits of each gender are different things in different cultures.

If there is a difference in the number of women doing something (a career in this case), it follows that there is some learned behaviour responsible for that disparity.

I’ve been talking these ideas over with my friends and I think the most interesting new piece of information to come out of this discussion, for me anyway, is the idea that men and women communicate in different ways and communicate with each other in different ways. So while a man might demand a raise and be respected a woman might not even phrase a request for a raise as a demand. The idea that the lingering pay disparity might be because women just haven’t asked for a raise is kind of a new thought for me.

I spent a few weeks thinking women needed to learn to be more aggressive and then at one of the panels at the CADE-AMTEC conference on gender in online discussion one of the other audience members (the only male in the room) suggested that maybe men needed be socialized to be less aggressive. The idea that maybe women have it right was a new idea for me too. I suspect the ideal path lies some where in the middle and is, at any rate, not the decision for one person to make anyway since a society changes only when the majority of the people who comprise it change.

I wrote most of this within two weeks of Jeffrey’s blog post and I was going to delete it rather than posting it but, well, some new information came up so I thought I’d post the two together.

Also mentioned in the discussion in response to the blog post was the idea that many of the women doing web design don’t think of themselves as web designers and aren’t in IT, they’re women in pink collar jobs who are doing design as part of a slew of other duties they have.

Last week we had a meeting with the leaders of our distributed web publishing community. These are the people who are in charge of ensuring their entire department or school is following our guidelines before a change goes public. They evaluate pages for good IA, UX, adherence to coding standards and writing style guidelines, and nitpicky details too. It was a room full of very talented women, all women, who contribute to the web site as a small part of their other job duties.

This whole gender thing really makes me think.

At some point in 2004 he finally won the argument and I promised my next computer would be a Mac. But then I got cold feet and I signed up for a course that required I have a Windows machine and I bought a some assembly required Windows box from one of those cheep no name computer stores that come and go over night. This particular store had been recommended to me a couple times and had stuck around for 5 or 6 years so I figured it was fairly reputable.

A year later the Windows box self destructed. First I bought a new power supply, then a new fan, then new memory, then a new mother board and finally I stopped short of replacing the hard drive and just pronounced the damn thing dead.

Out of excuses to not buy a Mac and very mad at my last Windows machine. I rented a Mac one for a week to see if I could live with it and decided, at the very lest, the whole command vs control thing would not drive me crazy. Once I discovered I got educational pricing (the job would suck if it wasn’t for the benefits!) I couldn’t even argue with the price. At the very worst I could wipe the hard drive, install Windows, and pretend I never bought a Mac.  Apple also has a very articulate environmental policy which doesn’t hurt at all.

I bought a 15″ Mac Book Pro.

The first week I had it there were a couple times I desperately wanted my money back but after two and a half weeks these are my thoughts:

Text smoothing

As screen technology evolves I’m sure it won’t matter but right now with this screen on this computer I miss the way Windows renders text.

Work flow

Work flow is the thing that has bothered me the most about switching. I find I lose windows other other windows and occasionally have to minimize things to the dock one at a time to find them again. Then I have to un-minimize them because you can’t alt-tab to things minimized to the dock.

I really can’t make effective use of dual monitors any more because the menu bar stays on the main screen no matter what and tool bars and pallets have to be moved individually.

I also dislike the way applications just pile up. Every now and then I go to click on a pallet or a scroll bar and suddenly I’m an another application.

Learning an new operating system

Switching from Windows XP to OS X was as easy as switching from Windows 98 to Windows XP. And, lets face it, even Windows users are going have to learn a new operating system when they buy their next computer and just cuz it’s pretty doesn’t mean Vista is going to be easy to use.

Running Windows

Running windows hasn’t been a problem. I’m playing with Parallels and I’m going to give VM Ware a go before I decide on which to use but I’ll be happy with Parallels.

Buying new everything

When I bought the Adobe creative suite for Windows apparently it came with licenses for Mac versions as well. Suite. Unfortunately I can’t seem to locate CS2 versions of any of the Adobe stuff but I’m happily running all the Macromedia stuff in OS X and the Adobe stuff in Windows for now.

As for other software, hurray for educational pricing.

iPhoto Booth

Damn this is sheer dumb fun.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver looks like it could be the coolest thing ever, but it needs to be customized to be used to it’s full potential and I’ve found the basic documentation to be kind of sparse. The basic idea of being able to do any task ever with a keyboard short cut is very appealing. I am all about not having to use the mouse.

Verdict

When I told my Mum that I was buying a Mac the first thing she did was seek assurances that I wouldn’t become an Mac evangelist like our family friend. I don’t want my money back but I don’t think Mum has anything to worry about just yet.

FireFox, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.

Well, I get my wish. We’re going to take some baby steps towards semantic HTML and CSS (POSH if you like) and despite my aversion to being in charge, I’m leading the project.

As a first step I’m trying to write a CSS coding style guide. I can’t necessarily clean up the current mess but I can try to stop any new ones from being made ;)

What I want to do is develop guidelines for:

• if and how style definitions should be divided between multiple style sheets
• what order style definitions should be listed in (I currently put all my tag definitions at the top of documents and then place my id and class definitions beneath them in the order they’re anticipated to appear on the page)
• naming conventions for ids and classes
• commenting conventions
• what order properties should be arranged within definitions
• if and when we should use shorthand properties
• formatting guidelines

So far my research has turned up very few examples to help me with the development. This somewhat out dated post is the best I’ve found so far. Part of my problem is that searching for a style guide for CSS is just coming up with guides to styling with CSS.

Do you work with a CSS coding style guide or know any good resources for developing one?

Web Directions North is an international conference for people who work with the web, from project managers to web programmers to web designers. This year it was hosted in Vancouver and a few of us jumped at the opportunity to go and were grateful to have the department’s support.

The conference covered a good balance of theoretical big thinking ideas and practical hands on code ideas and we were fortunate to come home with both things to work towards in the long run and ideas that could be implemented immediately.

These are a few of the “big picture” ideas that stood out to us:

• User Experience – It’s the difference between making a website as popular as the SunDisk Sansa MP3 player and making a website as popular as the iPod. Many of the speakers talked about the ways they integrate user experience design and testing into their work early in the project process and what a huge positive impact it has had on their websites.
• Web Standards – All the presenters were strong advocates of web standards. They also argued against the idea that all a website needs to meet standards is to be well coded. In their eyes a website with standards has high standards – it should also be accessible, backwards compatible, built using the principles of progressive enhancement, semantic, and have good user experience.
• Ajax – There was a lot of discussion about Ajax, what it is, why it has become popular, and where and how to best use it. It was advocated that sites should be built to function perfectly without Ajax and Ajax can be added after to enhance user experience. There were also some user experience issues identified with using Ajax and some solutions proposed.

These ideas touch on difference skill sets and the presenters who talked about project management felt that the ideal web team would consist of a mix of individuals with skills that cross the disciplines of development, design, usability, and content. This structure keeps the team nimble, and promotes rapid prototyping for continuous improvement.

It’s rare that a conference provides information you can act on the next day when you sit back down at you desk but these are ideas we found immediately useful:

• Microformats – Microformats are a standardized way to add CSS to XHTML to code standardized information such as addresses and events so that programs such as address books and calendars can import them with a single click if you have a newer browser or the right plugins. The contacts application (bcit.ca/contacts) has been rewritten to use microformats and the new version launched March 6^th!
• Mashups – A mashup is when part of a website is integrated into another website. You might have seen a Google Maps mashup like this one: http://blogs.bcit.ca/catttrax2/journey/route. One of the sessions covered what’s involved in beginning a mashup and now a campus map mashup is on the way!
• Progressive Enhancement – This is a “big idea” about how to code and a shift from the old concept of “graceful degradation”. The suggestion is that content should be written first and then semantic code, presentation, and behavior should be added on top of it in layers so that the core content is still accessible and intelligible if it is accessed without the presentation and behavior layers. The contacts application was rewritten using the principles of progressive enhancement; check it out with JavaScript or CSS turned off!

If you’re interested in learning more about any of these ideas the presentation summaries and notes are available on the Web Directions North website or you can talk to Brandon, Alan or me :)

<a href="http://stephaniehobson.ca/file.php »
?fire=hot&amp;beer=foamy">link</a>

I just came out of a performance review where Vivian simultaneously told me what a great job I’m doing and laid out the changes I need to make to my life to have the world laid out at my feet by the time I’m fourty.

She said to me that in IT there are kind of two main career paths; one which is super specialized with one specific area of technology and one that sees the big picture and manages.

She thinks I should, and told me I have the right skills and thought processes to, be a manager.

I’m not sure I agree with where she wants me to go but she sure made me feel like I could get there if that’s where I wanted to go :)

Which begs the question, where do I want to go?