Naepalm

When I started working at Mindfly almost a year ago (only about 20 days to go until I hit that mark, yay!) we were just starting to implement moving into CSS3 styles on objects and really focusing on the differences between browser capabilities. We're all aware, whether it be through rants on this blog, on our personal blogs, or through very frustrated tweets, how much of a pain Internet Explorer 6 is when it comes to making websites functional in such an old browser. And, when I say functional, I mean just that. We don't even demand that our sites look the same (in fact, we often insist that they don't), but merely just work in that poor dying horse of a browser.

That said, this blog post isn't about ranting about IE6, no matter how easy it is to do.  What I really want to talk about is the fact that yesterday, Firefox 3.5 came out.  Here at Mindfly, we've been waiting with baited breath to see it (not only be a faster browser, which is their big selling point) implement some of the quirky things that other browsers have put into play or that they're taking onto themselves.

For some time now, we've been working with things like rounded corners that function in CSS3, but do not validate for CSS2, nor work in all browsers such as Internet Explorer.  However, with IE8 coming out a few months back, Safari 4 shortly before that, and now Firefox 3.5 yesterday, I really feel like browsers are moving forward into a new era of making my life easier.  Despite the fact that IE still doesn't support rounded corners.

I've been talking about typography for some time now and our options with it.  At first it was image replacement, @font-face, and sIFR.  More recently I discussed the awesome use of cufon.  Now I'm going to take a step back and say that thank heavens Firefox 3.5 has introduced support of @font-face.  Legality issues aside, as that's a can of worms on it's own, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer (amazingly) users will now be able to view sites that use @font-face with no extra work included through javascript or flash.  There are rumors that Opera 10 will also be supporting this.  If you want tips on how to put @font-face into your site, Kyle has written a great blog post about it.  I am reminded, unfortunately, that one of my favorite browsers - Chrome - is not supporting @font-face.  Yet.  We can only hope that Google will implement it in the future (it can't be that hard, can it?  Safari is a webkit browser as well!).

What are some of the other things that Firefox is implementing for us designers out there?  You can get the full list at developer.mozilla.org, but my three favorites are:

1. Text Shadow: No longer will we have to use image-replacement to get text shadows in Firefox!  Huzzah.
2. Box Shadow: Since Safari and Chrome both support box shadow, it's nice to see Firefox jumping on the bandwagon and making it easier for us to add nice little shadows to items on our sites that aren't text.
3. CSS Transforms: let me just say this (as it's only one of many) - :nth-child!  If all browsers supported this, my life would be complete.  I can't even count the times I have to select item 9 in a list of 13.

I'm looking forward to the chance to play around with all the new features and see how sites will render across browsers now and in the future.  I also have to give Mozilla a thumb's up for their continual work to allow us to easily make sites look gorgeous in their browser.  Between their support of plugins like firebug, the web developer toolbar, and colorzilla, I can't imagine trying to build a website without them.

It's no surprise that I deal with a lot of social media.  I mean, considering that I work in a place completely devoted to the web and all the uses of... social media is something that I'm bound to have fallen into at some point.  Just look at my footer.  As big as social media is, social marketing is just as big right now.  I have a fair few SEO people who follow me on twitter, I've signed up (a bit regretfully) for biznik, and even Facebook is engulfed in a social marketing phenomenon.  I get it, I really do, but that doesn't mean that I actually get into it, and I often really feel lost in the crowd.

On twitter, I follow a lot of local people.  I like to see what the locals are tweeting, get to know who they are, and even keep in touch with what some of the local businesses are doing or... local events like the Bellingham Farmers Market.  Lately, though, I've felt like the tweets I see are very bogged down by networking for the sake of marketing.  Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I can't say that it's really my thing.  I like to network not for the sake of networking, for the sake of marketing, or for anything like that - I like to network for the sake of knowing people, and for the sake of allowing people to know me.

I've been deep into the realm of the web since I was about 16.  If you count the amount of boyfriends I had before I met and married my wonderful husband, Nick, the majority of them were online relationships with boys that I had met who lived in other cities or who I had never met at all.  I played an online free-form roleplaying game and made many friends there - a few of whom I now retain 10 years later.  I play World of Warcraft with a wonderful group of people through yet another social media - Massive Multiplayer Online RPGs (Or MMOs) and I've known some of them for almost 5 years now and consider them to be very, very close friends.

I'm finding it very difficult to filter through all the twitter posts lately with links to business things or with things that are just for the sake of saying "Hey, I'm out here!  See me!  See my business!".  I want to be known, personally known, and I want to know other people, the people I follow personally.

I don't really want to go through my twitter follow list, but I have a feeling that the axe will be coming down soon.  I want to genuinely meet and discuss with people, not feel like I'm filtering through a bunch of unimportant shit to see who everyone is, and it's inevitable that people out there are not going to want the same things I do - being different is what makes us unique after all.  But I think I may need to start looking for the people who do want the same thing I do, good friends.