• Meetup
• Delicious
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook

• The Dotomator
• crawled all over Urban Dictionary (I swear someone buys the domain name for every entry)
• Brand Bucket (too costly for freelance, but not bad for startups)
• I even went through a list of words ending with "us", to cleverly use the .us tld

I was disgusted to see the news of an employee being trampled at a Wal-Mart yesterday.  At first I thought "was there a fire, or someone with a gun?".  No, it was much worse than that.  The man, a temporary worker no less, died because he stood between a slobbering, fevered, insane crowd of hundreds and some moderately good prices on items for the holidays.

The lack of humanity shown by the shoppers stands in stark contrast to the day preceding Black Friday, where people give more to help than any other time of the year. 

We had some great stories in Colorado this year of generous people lending a hand.  But some of the population treats Thanksgiving as an "offset" day to allow for outrageous and disgusting behavior the day after. 

Most of us have experienced this in some form or another, but every year I'm reminded again how people check their good graces at the door of the nearest mall.  Yesterday, my wife was with her friend at a toy store.  Her friend was in the bathroom changing her son while another woman repeatedly banged on the door because she was taking too long.  Outside of a football stadium or a bar at 1am, when is this behavior acceptable? 

Sometimes I worry that we're becoming detached as a society, completely lacking in empathy or understanding.  But that is too broad a statement.  Maybe its the hunter-gatherer instinct taking over, with soccer moms treating sale items like a deer for food in the middle of winter.  Any way you look at it, Black Friday has come to be consumerism, and in some cases humanism, at its worst. 

One thing is for sure, I'll be buying as many gifts as I can online this year.

Frameworks and Libraries Get You There Sooner

I think its safe to say most web teams, like most corporate employees, are under pressure to do more with less. Less time and less people usually means less progress being made on the website, but that is no longer acceptable in today's workplace. Enter CSS frameworks and Javascript libraries.

CSS Frameworks

A CSS framework can remove most of the basic problems professionals come across in major browsers. A CSS framework sets all browsers to the same level of default styles, and provides a simple way to rapidly layout the elements of your page.

The most popular frameworks, Blueprint and 960 Grid System, work off of a grid format that simplifies sizing and flow of elements on a layout (find out more about grid systems). Floating elements, clearing hacks, and numerous other bugs are minimized. Both are setup up to be extended and customized as needed to meet your design or CMS needs.

I started with Blueprint on a couple of personal sites earlier this year and found that I could acheive a simple layout in a fraction of the time it would normally take to code by hand. In recent designs at work, we have started implementing 960.gs in all of our redesigns as its flexibility fits better in our corporate environment and makes it much easier to make incremental changes without creating a huge CSS file. Regardless of your preference, the time savings in prototyping and design, paired with the reduced time in changes and maintenance make CSS frameworks the way to go for any web designer practicing the "less is more" corporate ethos.

Javascript Libraries

Javascript libraries are a little different than frameworks. Using a similar philosophy, a javascript library is a set of functions that take create a basic level of tools to greatly simplify the code when adding interactivity to your website (aka Web 2.0). In short, what used to take 50 lines of code to create a simple AJAX call, can now be done in 5.

There are a slew of libraries out there (DOJO, YUI, Prototype, etc), but I've been focused on using jQuery. The reason for jQuery is mostly because a co-worker had decided sometime last year that jQuery had the best upside of all the libraries in speed and flexibility. It also seems to have the largest community adoption and plugin library. Personally, I've learned to love jQuery.

Not only has jQuery cleaned up my scripting code dramatically, like using CSS frameworks, I've been able to do more faster. To top it off, we've integrated some very cool plugins into our company's site to enable better interactivity for our customers. For the quality, speed to market, and performance, jQuery is hard to beat.

More Frameworks in the Future

As I continue to sharpen my CSS and jQuery skills, I've started turning my attention to application frameworks. Notably, Django. I'm more than intrigued by Jeff Croft's blog post that states:

I think Django is a great tool for those of us who really aren’t programmers

Django...takes care of a lot of the programming work that goes into building web applications and other database-driven websites so I don’t have to.

And that was in 2006. Two years later I see Django getting very popular. To me, an application framework/library to develop server-side, ala Rails? I'll be taking that test drive very soon.

It will be an enormous challenge just to get the nation back to where it was before Mr. Bush, to begin to mend its image in the world and to restore its self-confidence and its self-respect. Doing all of that, and leading America forward, will require strength of will, character and intellect, sober judgment and a cool, steady hand.

Mr. Obama has those qualities in abundance.

You can read the entire recommendation from the NY Times here

Check out one here. A good example about one man's mission to put consumer feedback and insight into corporate advertising:

Then check out more on iTunes, surf the website, or find it playing on cable. You won't regret it.

Coupled with the longest part of the work year (the space between New Years and Memorial day with no company holidays), my confidence and attitude began to wither away. By March I was starting to get snippy with co-workers and my wife. By April I had moved past anger into apathy about work (my personal life was making a large shift then, more on that on another blog post). When May and June rolled around, I was distracted and losing focus both at work and home. I was near complete burn-out.

In the middle of June, I finally took a vacation. I took ten days off of work and stacked a trip with my best friend with a getaway for my anniversary with my wife. Both vacations were very low-key and didn't require much planning or structure, just time spent relaxing. Never before in my life had I needed a vacation more, and I didn't even know it until two days after my trip started.