Back in January, I got to spend some quality time talking shop over coffee with my good friend Dan Cederholm. He mentioned to me he was writing a new book. No more than a handshake and a latte later I had the honor of being on board as technical editor for the book. It is called Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design and comes out next month. No comment on the rumors that Dan’s latte might have been spiked.

I’ve been reading Dan’s books for years. I bought both Web Standards Solutions & Bulletproof Web Design right when each came out, and each has been extremely influential in my work. Dan doesn’t just tell you how to implement a solution, but also why we might consider doing it that particular way, and what are the pitfalls of some of the other methods. That kind of stuff is hard to do, but Dan does it so extremely well.

This new book is a little different in that it jumps right into details of how we can make websites better through craftsmanship. It takes a forward-looking view of some of the fancy new methods and tools we can be using and how to use those tools in such a way that degrades nicely for browsers that, shall we say, aren’t quite as forward-looking.

It gets better. Ethan Marcotte, the Unstoppable Robot Ninja from Cambridge, wrote a delightfully magical chapter about fluid grids. It will melt your brain in all the right ways.

One exciting part that I had zero hand in is an accompanying DVD, called Handcrafted CSS: Bulletproof Essentials. They come bundled or separately, your call.

It was truly an honor to edit this book. While I was working on it, I kept thinking, “I cannot wait for people to get their hands on this.” It was a great experience for me and I believe the final result is worth a few of your hard-earned dollars.

More information can be found at the companion site and Twitter feed. Also, check out Dan’s announcement, on his blog, and Ethan’s, on his.

Last note: I don’t get any royalties from the publisher or anything, but the links to Amazon in here are referral links. So if you order via these links, I’ll get a few dimes or so. Many thanks if you do!

If we, the people who make websites, want the world to know who we are and what we do, it’s up to each of us to stand up and represent.

They improved the survey this year with better questions, making the findings clearer and more relevant for full-time independent web professionals. I’m glad to see the A List Apart crew is making this a regular thing. This data will only become more important as add on the years of results.

Last year the findings were presented in PDF form, but this year we get a special treat. It’s all on the web and Eric Meyer did some serious elite ninja work taking regular table data and turning it into beautiful graphs. If you want to dive deep into the technical details, check out his post about his process. Well done sir!

I implore you, go check out the results. Even if all you read is the first page, I guarantee you will get something good out of it.

I sweated a bit while I reworked our presentation into notes on my moleskine, since I also found out, just then, that we might not have a projector.

Thankfully there was a fantastic turnout and you guys were extremely gracious, chiming in with lots of questions and comments. We got into a nice lively discussion, and it seemed like most everybody enjoyed themselves. I mentioned a few of the thoughts and points that Josh wanted to bring up, so he was there in spirit too (by the way, it’s a girl). So thank’s again, I had a great time!

We don’t want to sound like we know all there is to know about this, so if you’re a seasoned indie, then by all means come and chime in with your expertise.

Either way, if you’re in the area, I hope you can make it. It should be a fun time.

Refresh Denver is at Forest Room 5 @ 6pm this Wednesday, 25 March 2009.

Busy is good. We like busy. But at some point I realized that something needed to give if I was going to stay moderately this side of sane, as well as get to spend time working on the business and other internal and side projects.

Enter Derek Balmer. It’s no secret we like collaborating with other freelancers. For as long as Be Good Not Bad has been around, we’ve been doing just that. With Derek we hit a sweet spot. We work great together and his skills blend nicely.

So we made it official and the big news for us is that we’ve brought on Mr. Balmer to work with us on a part-time basis. Derek recently left his day job to go indie, so we have no illusions about luring him into anything full-time. In the meantime, though, we are thrilled to have him on board. Derek has some amazing visual design prowess, and the front-end coding chops to back it up. We just wrapped up a project that turned out downright awesome thanks to Derek.

I’m sure 2009 has more surprises up its sleeve and we’re looking forward to it.

I’m super-excited to be a part of it and it should be a really great time! I’ll be sharing the stage with Kevin Menzie, Jeremy Harrington and the very same aforementioned Devin Reams for the Design Panel. Our topics won’t be super Wordpress-heavy, more about design issues in general, client relationships, and designing outside the box with publishing systems.

I’m told there are only a small handful of registration slots left, so if you’re interested in coming, make sure to sign up now. Check out the schedule, speaker line up and how to register at the WordCamp Denver site.

I spent December of 2008 in mixed states of both reflection and eager anticipation. I realize our economy is in shambles, and optimistic may not be the most popular word these days, but it’s hard for me not to be excited about things to come.

2008 Was Pretty Awesome

Just days before sticking a fork in 2007, my daughter was born, and a month previous, my wife quit her day job for good. What was to follow was both the most awesome year of my life both personally and professionally.

I was a little nervous with Mrs. Warren quitting her job. The main question on our minds was: How were we going to replace her income? We just bought a new house that year, and one income disappearing did make things feel a little more tenuous. Amazingly enough, just a couple weeks before she stopped working, some really good opportunities came in the door. I started working with Happy Cog on some projects followed by a fantastic project with the fine chaps at Airbag Industries. The Mrs. and I never hit a wall, never got scared, and just made sure to stay super thankful that it was working out this way.

And boy did we have a lot to be thankful for. Little Bridget has grown up exceptionally well, and our far flung family is very much enjoying my geeking out with making a website for her, while filling up my Flickr and Momentile streams with lots of photos and videos.

2009 Is Looking Good

So you can see why 2009 is looking good for us. Work with Be Good Not Bad has been going well, and the projects we’re working on right now are very fun. One minor side-note: I’ve decided that for the foreseeable future I’m going to refer to Be Good Not Bad in the “we”. I haven’t hired anybody full-time or anything (yet), but it’s extremely rare that I work on a project by myself; in nearly every project I’ll bring in one of my ninja cohorts to work with me. This gives me a wonderful opportunity to work with extremely talented people with everybody learning from each other. The client benefits too, in that they get lots of talented people working together on their project. It’s one of my our favorite things in this work.

Seriously? Like, Seriously?

Practically daily people ask me how work is going. What they really mean is: “Are you running for the hills and/or filling out Starbucks applications?”. The economy is about all people can talk about, especially if they know you own your own business. I confess, I slipped into that mode too, becoming a hypochondriac for a few weeks this fall. If we didn’t get a project that we estimated, or a client was late on a payment, I thought “Oh man, this is it. We’re going down, folks”. But once I took a step back and stopped hyperventilating, I realized that we weren’t, in fact, going down.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m under no illusions about the state of the world economy. But it’s times like these I’m very glad I’m not working at a big company.

Consistently I am finding that the smaller the company, the more stable and optimistic people seem. The solo freelancers are the most positive and excited people I know. The way I see it, 2009 is the year of the indie. The smallest groups and independent people can work harder, faster, and, most importantly, they can work smarter than the big guys. We can partner with others like us, doing excellent work while keeping exceptionally low overhead.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about it in his 24ways Article: Recession Tips for Web Designers

Bad times are hard on overweight companies and over-leveraged start-ups, but can be kind to freelancers and small agencies. Clients who once had money to burn and big agencies to help them burn it suddenly consider the quality of work more important than the marquee value of the business card. Fancy offices and ten people at every meeting are out. A close relationship with an individual or small team that listens is in.

Greg Storey, founder of Airbag Industries has some fantastic advice to business owners in an amazing post about our current situation:

Don’t turn away any work that comes through your door. Get it. Grab it. Take it—as much as you can— and network with the people who are ready and willing and have the skills you need. Team up, and conquer.

Go read the rest of his article. It’s marvelous.

To You

It’s in that spirit I say thanks to you, friends, clients, and readers. I hope you have an awesome year. I can’t wait to see what it brings for all of us. If you happen to be looking for an agile team of ninjas for your next project, well, do get in touch!

In November, Leslie Camacho interviewed yours truly about a site we did this spring called Animal Internet. It was fun and I was honored to be interviewed. We chatted about what the site was all about and some of the specific challenges we faced when building the website. Be Good Not Bad partnered with Mark Bixby for the design and Corey Snipes at Twomile, Inc. for custom module development. Corey had never used ExpressionEngine before but by the end he was a pro.

From the interview:

It turned out ExpressionEngine was up to the task after all. It’s really a testament to not only the extensive built-in functionality, but the extensibility of the application. By the end of it, Corey was sold, wanting to use it on future projects of his own.

Corey and I are working on a new ExpressionEngine project this winter for some scientists at Harvard.

Read the entire interview on the ExpressionEngine site. While you’re there, check out the Showcase Gallery. It’s pretty wild how many sites are being developed with ExpressionEngine these days.

Every now and then a project comes along that just makes me so glad to be doing the things I do. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my work. I even look forward to jumping out of bed and starting my day. But sometimes a project is just truly exceptional. Recently, I had the honor of working on just such a project with the brilliant folks at Happy Cog.

From Housing Works’ about page:

Housing Works is committed to ending the twin crises of AIDS and homelessness. We believe that all people have the right to a rich and empowering life. Since 1990, we have provided the highest quality services for homeless men, women, and children living with HIV and AIDS in New York City and beyond.

That’s a powerful cause, and it’s awesome to get to interact with and ultimately help those who are carrying it out. They are an awe-inspiring group of people.

With the excellent art direction of Daniel Mall, front-end development by yours truly, and Expression Engine development by the extremely talented Mark Huot we crafted the new Housing Works website that focused especially on the human side of their work.

For more about the project, check out the case study on Happy Cog’s website, and definitely make sure to visit Housing Works to see it for yourself.

Sure, it’s been awhile, but one might say I’ve had my hands full. I got the itch to put together another set for you guys, so I hope you enjoy this one.

I make no promises that I’ll do this with any regularity. That way, every time I make one you’ll just be so excited and thankful that it’s there. Something like that.

Brian’s Mix Tape #3 [34.8mb / aac]

I listed all the tracks below, along with links to where you can get them. Please buy the music, unless it’s already free. Except where indicated, I linked to the albums at the Amazon MP3 store.

1. MGMT - Time to Pretend
2. Magnetic Fields - I Need a New Heart
3. Sigur Rós - Inní mér syngur vitleysingur
4. Nico - These Days
5. Stereolab - Long Life Love (This one’s off a 3 disc set, if you’re looking for this one track, check #6 on disc 3)
6. The Submarines - Peace and Hate
7. The Books - take time
8. El Ten Eleven - I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool (Some of their stuff is on Amazon MP3 but this particular album I only found on their site.)
9. Bill Mallonee and Vigilantes of Love - Solar System

I enjoy making these, so I plan to keep it up. Let me know if you have any feedback, thoughts, or just if you enjoyed it. I’d appreciate it.

Related: My Summer Mix Tape; My October Mix Tape

This is an important time for this industry, as large companies are considering that maybe the website isn’t just an extension of the IT department, and maybe I can stop just checking “Other” for what industry I’m in when I’m filling out pretty much any form online. Data collected from The Survey goes a long way toward showing the world what’s going on behind the scenes of this internet people are so excited about.

I first wrote this plugin for Animal Internet, a website that we built earlier this year.

The Admin Comments plugin gives users the ability to delete their own comments on a site, super-users the ability to delete anybody’s comment, and also a super-user can choose to close comments instead of deleting them.

View the documentation and download the plugin on the Admin Comments Plugin Page.

It’s pretty handy. I’m using it on this site now. It even gets a cooler if you add in some javascript to make the experience a bit more fluid. I didn’t incorporate that into the released version of the plugin as the javascript is fairly specific to my needs and website, but I’ll include a little video here so you can see what the possibilities are.

Let me know what you think, and send me any ideas you have for improving it, via my Contact Page. Thanks!

I had no idea what I was in for when Anna sent me a link to the site for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. The name alone is fantastic, and then I’m greeted by a glorious graphic of Neil Patrick Harris donned in evil villain garb. Who could resist digging further?

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is the creation of Joss Whedon. It’s a 45-minute film he co-wrote and directed starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. Whedon basically got a bunch of his friends to pitch in, and, without the aid of studios or major (even minor) funding, made a movie and put it up on the internet. It was free for about five days, and now it’s available on iTunes for a mere $3.99.

It’s a fantastic, funny story, and also happens to be a musical (I kid you not). You can tell it’s not heavily-funded, but honestly, more money would have just added a bit of polish. The brilliance, talent and entertainment is all there. It’s a great example of how much can be done with very little.

I have no doubt they’ll make their money back and, given how little time they spent on it, I imagine they’ll see some good return on it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that professional writers and studios are worthless. But rather, this movie proves the notion that to be a success you don’t necessarily need to market to the masses. In fact, there is a lot of success to be had in the niche where you can be more original, more interesting, and get a more devoted set of fans than if you’re just making the next episode of a rapidly-forgotten reality television show.

Lastly, if you think that applies only to movies and television… well, then, think again.

Check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. There you can find a link to buy it on the iTunes Music store. You’ll be glad you did.