Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Lea Verou @ Front-Trends 2010

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m speaking in this year’s Front-Trends conference, which will take place in Warsaw, Poland on October 21-22. Front-Trends is a new conference (starting this year) but the organizers have managed to put together an impressive line-up (Crockford, PPK, Paul Bakaus, Dmitry Baranovskiy, Tantek Çelik, Robert Nyman and more).

My talk will introduce many aspects of CSS3, some of them in good depth (eg. selectors). Here is the official abstract:

Pragmatic CSS3

With browsers constantly adding support for CSS3, especially now that even IE jumped in the game, it’s quickly becoming a necessary tool of the trade. CSS3 offers exciting possibilities and changes the way that we design and develop websites.

In this 2-hour practical session, full of real world use cases, you will learn:

  • Everything you ever wanted to know about CSS3 selectors
  • Transparency and new color formats, including RGBA
  • New ways to work with backgrounds, including CSS gradients, multiple background images and natively supported CSS sprites
  • Rounded corners and border images
  • Box and text shadows
  • Transforms, transitions and their potential downsides
  • New values, including calc(), attr() and new units
  • Browser support information and techniques to take advantage of the exciting new stuff with respect to browsers of the past, to create experiences that are enjoyable for everyone

Tickets are very cheap (Just €198) but they’re selling quite fast, so if you want to come, hurry up!

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Posted in News, Personal | 4 Comments »

Organizing a university course on modern Web development

Monday, July 26th, 2010

About a year ago, prof. Vasilis Vassalos of Athens University of Economics and Business approached me and asked for my help in a new course they were preparing for their Computer Science department, which would introduce 4th year undergrads to various web development aspects. Since I was always complaining about how outdated higher education is when it comes to web development, I saw it as my chance to help things change for the better, so I agreed without a second thought.

This is one of the main reasons I didn’t have time to write many blog posts for the past months: This activity took up all my spare time. However, it proved to be an interesting and enlightening experience, in more than one ways. In this blog post I’ll describe the dilemmas we faced, the decisions we made and the insights I gained throughout these 6 months, with the hope that they’ll prove to be useful for anyone involved in something similar.

Table of contents

  1. Content
  2. Homework
  3. Labs
  4. Personal aftermath

(more…)

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Posted in Articles, Original, Personal | 1 Comment »

Redesign

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Was about time, wasn’t it?

I wanted a simpler, more minimalistic (and wider!) theme for a while now. The other one was too restrictive. I had designed it when I had absolutely no content, and few changes were made to it afterwards.

So, today that I was too sad and furious to do anything productive, I spent a few hours redesigning the blog (creative venting…). Please note that it’s just a few hours’ work (with no mockup), so it’s bound to be a bit rough around the edges. I will refine it more as time goes by.

(and just like the previous one, it’s best viewed in more CSS3-supporting browsers, like Firefox, Chrome or Safari. If we can’t use the latest bells n’ whistles in our personal blogs, where can we? ;) )

Here’s a screenshot from the previous theme:

Screenshot of the old leaverou.me theme

R.I.P. my first wordpress theme.

PS: Yeah, I know I haven’t posted in a while. I have started lots of posts, but didn’t finish any. I hope I’ll have something complete to post soon.

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Posted in Personal | 5 Comments »

(byte)size matters

Friday, July 31st, 2009

Yesterday, I was editing a CSS file and I was wondering how many bytes/KB would a particular addition add to it, in order to decide if it was worth it. Since, I had found myself wondering about the exact same thing multiple times in the past, I decided to make a simple standalone HTML page that would compute the size of any entered text in bytes, KB, MB, etc (whatever was most appropriate). It should be simple and quick and it should account for line terminator differences across operating systems.

About half an hour later, I was done. And then it dawned on me: Someone else might need it too! Since .com domains are, so cheap, hey, let’s get a domain for it as well! There are several sites with a domain that are way simpler than that anyway. A friend that was sitting next to me suggested “sizematters.com” as a joke, but as it turned out, bytesizematters.com was free, so we registered it. And there it is, less than a day after, it’s aliiive. :P

Any feedback or suggestions are greatly welcome!

For instance, should I implement a very simple minification algorithm and display bytesize for that as well, or is it too much and ruins the simplicity of it without being worth it? [edit: I did it anyway]

Should I implement a way to compare two pieces of text and find out the difference in byte size (could be useful for JavaScript refactoring)? [edit: I did it anyway]

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Posted in Personal, Tips | 5 Comments »

Help me: take the color survey

Monday, April 6th, 2009

If you are a creative professional, or just passionate about colors, please take my survey:

http://bit.ly/colorsurvey

It will greatly help me to make a future project of our company more usable (some of its features at least) and it only takes a few minutes (it contains 10-19 questions, depending on your responses).

Any suggestions, corrections, questions etc are of course welcome.

Thanks a lot in advance to everyone that takes the survey! :D

Of course, when it ends and I find the time to analyze the results, I’ll post them here for anyone interested. (Hint: That means that if you are interested in the results, you can promote the survey yourself as well, since more responses = more accurate results)

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Posted in Personal | 3 Comments »

CSS3 colors, today (MediaCampAthens session)

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Yesterday, I had a session at MediaCampAthens (a BarCamp-style event), regarding CSS3 colors. If you’ve followed my earlier posts tagged with “colors”, my presentation was mostly a sum-up of these.

It was my first presentation ever, actually, the first time I talked to an audience for more than 1 minute :P . This caused some goofs:

  • When introducing myself, I said completely different things than I intended to and ended up sounding like an arrogant moron :P
  • I tried not to look at the audience too much, in order to avoid sounding nervous, and this caused me to completely ignore 2 questions (as I found out afterwards)! How embarrasing!
  • At a certain point, I said “URL” instead of “domain” :P

Also, I had prepared some screenshots (you’ll see them in the ppt) and the projector completely screwed them up, as it showed any dark color as black.

Apart from those, I think it went very well, I received lots of positive feedback about it and the audience was paying attention, so I guess they found it interesting (something that I didn’t expect :P ).

Here is the presentation:

Please note that Slideshare messed up slide #8 and the background seems semi-transparent grey instead of semi-transparent white.

By the way, I also thought afterwards that I had made a mistake: -ms-filter is not required if we combine the gradient filter with Data URIs, since IE8 supports Data URIs (for images at least). Oops, I hate making mistakes that I can’t correct.

Here are some photos from my session. If I did it correctly, every facebook user can see them. If I messed things up, tell me :P

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Posted in News, Personal | 12 Comments »