Tomorrow is Edge of the Web conference day. There’s so much to choose from, but at the moment my day looks like this:

1. Opening Keynote by Derek Featherstone


2. Hacking humans: Advocating for a better web by Ben Buchanan


3. Designing with Creative Code by Cameron Adams


4. Adobe AIR by Kai Koenig, or Involving users by Donna Spencer


5. Pushing the Boundaries on Content-Rich Websites by Russ Weakley


6. Either Developing for the iPhone or SaaS as an Ecosystem.


7. Usability for Designers, Developers, and Decision Makers by Lisa Herrod


8. Closing Keynote by Chris Messina

Friday is workshop day. For me the first half will be theoretic with Donna Spencer talking about Information Architecture, after lunch it’ll be hands on javascripting with Cameron Adams.

After all that I might just take the weekend off.

Client:

Creuna

Work:

CSS, WordPress

Link:

http://brandserver.creuna.com/ (Password protected)

Client:

EDB Business Partner ASA

Work:

XHTML, CSS, templates for .net

Link:

http://www.edb.com/

EDB is one of the largest IT groups in the Nordic countries. In 2007 they did a total makeover of both their domestic and international websites, in which I developed XHTML-templates and CSS, and helped implementing it towards their .net backend.

Client:

Advokatfirmaet Schjødt DA

Work:

XHTML, CSS, jQuery

Link:

http://www.schjodt.no/en/

The design is part of a new branding of the company. The site is built with Drupal.

Just got a tweet saying I won SitePoint’s new book Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong. That is the one CSS book that’s come out recently that I feel any need of reading. As it is, I’ve done my fair share of CSS, not that I mind, not at all. I’ve long reached the point where I know which browsers has which bugs and how to combat them without my brain exploding. Most of the time anyway.

So I’ve finally taken the plunge into JavaScript. I know, it’s like starting a blog in 2008, but better late than never, right? And literally as I’m going through the last pages of Jeremy Keith’s DOM scripting (friendly lent from Man With No Blog) Twitter tells me they’ve picked a winner, not mentioning who the winner is. Easily distracted as I am I follow the link, read the whole post, and don’t realize I’m the lucky one until I read my own name towards the end. Never mind that they’ve screenshotted my twitterbadge all over the top. I just thought that was some new integrated twitter API thing displaying that I’m logged in. So in one word – yay!

Looks like I’m getting some visitors via the SitePoint blog and my twitter profile. Hi guys and girls!

The site is live at schjodt.no

Ladies and Gentlemen: I hereby present my Technorati Profile.

From Administration secretary:

The new venetian blinds for the meetingrooms have arrived. The remotes are lying in the windowsill.

Reply from boss who spends 99% of his time in clientmeetings:

... and I promise you that it’s really fun – have been running the blinds up and down for 30 minutes. This is cool

¹ Translated from Norwegian.

Enough ranting, I gotta get back to googling now.

Why use subversion?

At my workplace we have a bunch of graphic designers and a bunch of developers. I’m somewhere in between. And there’s always the problem when the designer, or client, or manager, wants some graphical changes done. The designer makes the change, uploads to server or emails it, front-end guy (me) adds it to the stylesheet, emails new CSS and image to the back-end developer who then tests it on his (sorry, no female developers her) local test-server, and then finally uploads it to the live page.

You don’t have to be a rocket-scientist to see that this isn’t a streamlined process. With a subversion client that takes out the ‘hacking’ bits, the graphic designers will be willing to use it. I, and everyone else, will immediately see the change and voila! No more going through emails to see who did what when.

You see, I’m a front-end kinda guy. I like things with a nice GUI, and I believe that anything that can be done in the terminal will eventually get an upgrade to something more user-friendly. But not so with subversion. There were never any native Mac-clients. I used some cross-OS java application for a while, but it never stuck. About a year ago I came across the splash-page for Versions, and I tell you – the logo alone left me longing for this new app, so I signed up for the private beta and completely forgot about it.

Cornerstone vs. Versions

Until a couple of weeks ago. One newsletter later I had installed Versions and was using it for what (I think) it’s worth, and was happy as a clam. A couple of days later I was in for another surprise. Cornerstone popped up on the interwebs. From having nothing, zero, nill, subversion apps, there was now two. That’s like getting two different iPhones at once. So I had to try them both offcourse.

Now keep in mind that my way of testing this does not go very deep, since I have close to zero previous experience with subversion. I’ve simply used them both, and based which one I like the most more or less by my gut feeling.

And the winner is Cornerstone

I don’t have a great understanding of trunks, repositories and working copies. But they are vital for using subversion. With Versions I needed some help getting these things working, whereas with Cornerstone I managed to set it up myself by trial and error. Versions told me to install Xcode when I wanted to run a diff. Xcode is about a 1GB install, so I didn’t feel like doing that. Cornerstone has a fantastic diff timeline, where you can select any two points and immediately view it within the same window. As a great bonus it doesn’t only do code, but also graphics. Perhaps Versions do this as well, but in Cornerstone I easily just stumbled across it.

_{What’s a diff then? It’s checking a file for differences between two points in time. So you don’t need backups for every little change you make. (But hey, backups are still a good thing!)}

Others have discovered these two new clients, so check out Jade Ohlhauser’s post for a more technical review of the two. I also realize that some will say that svn is the old way of doing it, and that something called Git is the new and improved way, however that means back to the command-line, and my point here is that with a nice drag-n-drop friendly interface anyone can use revision control.