brianirish.com

An interesting read I found a day ago in a poll that found a dead even tie between Texas Republicans on the question of whether Texas should secede from the Union. Yes, seceding from the United States of America. … Texas.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/poll-texas-republicans-approve-of-rick-perrys-secession-remarks.php

I saved the best poll result for you to find out at the end of that page. Trust me, it’s worth it for the shock factor really.

This is a great article on the different ways to approach Twitter: http://mashable.com/2009/04/20/twitter-strategy/

Personally, I’m against using it as a personal status updater. Why limit your personal status to 140 characters when you have a Facebook account? Or your own blog? There are so many more methods of getting out what you’re doing this very instant much more effectively, and Twitter will not survive as a fad for long if more and more people use it in this very way (and they are).

My unfortunate prediction for Twitter is the following: Although it will remain useful as a means for professionals in certain industries to communicate effectively, it will die as a fad within a year. Growth has been extremely high recently, given the popularity given to it by certain celebreties (Opera, Ashton Kutcher, etc.), however these new users are almost all using it as a limited Facebook status. They will use it for a month, and slowly move on to other things and forget about it entirely. It’s just the nature of things, but mainly the nature of fads. Harumph.

Too often are CSS coders developing down a narrow road, thinking only of what will get the job done. To them, cross-browser functionality comes as a chore after the intial coding is completed (and is rendering fine in Firefox 3/Safari). Clearly this should not be the case, defensive coding is a best practice not just in functional languages, but in CSS as well. This article, sent by a colleague of mine, is a great introduction to this practice in CSS to prevent the most common browser (and non-browser) related bugs. Check out the article here.

“Don’t fix, prevent.”

I’ve finally integrated the latest 4 “tweets” from my Twitter account into the far right sidebar here on this blog. Took a little JavaScript/PHP work but it’s working beautifully! For those that want to know what Twitter is, it’s a means of communication (somewhere in between Instant Messaging and Email) between friends and people you don’t know but share the same interests. It’s a great tool to make new connections in the industry you are interested in, for example I use it to “follow” people who are tweeting about web development. When I follow them, I receive any tweets they make on my home page on Twitter. They do not receive MY tweets until they decide to follow me. It works in reverse as well, if someone follows me because they like what I’m tweeting about, I will see if it’s worth my time to follow them in return. If I like what they write about, I’ll follow them. It’s a pretty simple idea that has gone viral in the past year or so, and the company has seen an incredible amount of growth. Pretty interesting stuff!

Anyway, you can now see my four latest tweets (why four? Because that’s what I decided, haha) on the far right sidebar of this page. You can also click the link “Follow me on Twitter” to see my Twitter homepage.

Cheers!