Keeping Up

I was talking with someone the other day about how I had spent my afternoon, describing editing screen shots and writing copy and double-checking everything and they asked me something I hadn’t considered much, lately, “How do you keep up with everything?”

There is a lot. HTML hasn’t changed much, but that itself may be changing, soon. Cascading Style Sheets have not changed much recently, but that may be about to end, too. Dreamweaver changes at regular intervals, but after Dreamweaver MX2000 only incrementally, and I am still catching up there.

The Templates we use have changed quite a bit over the summer, with tiny little changes as recently as, well, yesterday. But I have been in most of those meetings, and even had a hand in a few of the changes, so that hasn’t been difficult, aside from the communications issues.

So there’s the situation with the tools and the languages. There are (or were) lots of conferences, seminars and books and magazines and newspapers available, too.

The Computer Press has been ravaged in the last four to six years. I used to be a part of it, having been a writer for Ziff-Davis’ Computer Shopper magazine, the MacHome Journal and others. There was a time not long ago when you would walk into a B.Dalton bookstore and see several bays of computer books. At one time there were thirty titles devoted to WordPerfect, alone.

In the Macintosh slice of the pie, we had four or five monthly magazines, Macworld, MacUser, MACazine and the programmy MacTech, along with a weekly newspaper/magazine, MacWEEK. We had two trade shows every year, plus the mighty Comdex show, and various Mac user groups all dishing out How-To-Mac details, news, tips and so on. The PC side of things was even worse, of course. Just PC World, from IDG, was like getting a Sears Christmas catalog every month.

As far as I know, there are only three Web magazines, and only two you should consider. Both are from England, which makes them a little expensive, but I recommend Web Designer and .Net, if you can get them. A caution: .Net used to be available here in the USA as Practical Web Design. Elsewhere in the world it was called .Net (Dot-Net). That never quite caught on here, because everyone with a PC hears that and thinks of the Microsoft development architecture of a few years ago. There are ads enticing you to subscribe to Practical Web Design, but when you do, .Net is what shows up in your mailbox.

Today, of course, we have the Web and you need a computer to even get there, so it stands that the Computer Press would suffer first and hardest. Reading paper products is down across the board. Newspapers have folded and are struggling to reinvent themselves, bookstores have closed leaving only Barnes and Noble and Borders in many towns and the local magazine rack is about a third the size it was just a few years ago. The acre of computer books has shrunk down to about the same size as the cookbook section in my favorite book store. So, apparently, nobody has time, any more, to just sit and read. So, that leaves us Web sites and podcasts. And I use… both.

I try to check in with A List Apart at least once every couple of weeks. They generally feature three big stories and cover a lot of real, nuts-and-bolts markup and styling. These are the guys who led the charge for standards adherence and better browsers, starting with Issue 99. They are Good People.

I also listen to podcasts. I work in one of those cubicle farms that are made fun of in Dilbert comics and cheap movies. I don’t enjoy hearing my neighbors arguing with their wives, spouting the latest political propaganda or catching Hell from the boss. So, I plug my headphones or earbuds in and listen and learn throughout the day.

Paul Boag (BOW·agg) has one of the best podcasts for anyone wanting to know more about their craft. Boagworld is a weekly podcast for those who “Design, Develop or Run Web sites”. As with print magazines, both Boag and my next podcast come from the UK. The Rissington Podcast answers the question “What would a Web podcast be like if it had been done by Monty Python, just following World War II?” If you have never asked that question, perhaps you should give a listen.

One of the best ways to keep up, of course, remains the monthly meeting of the Web Developers Network. Sitting in on one of those gets you rubbing shoulders with people who are using other tools to keep up, and some of that knowledge is bound to rub off on you. And it’s the best way to find out how all of this new technology, or all of these new techniques, might find use here.