ACSSO is a long term client and one that I value because the subject matter matters.

Having not so long converted the site to WordPress (admittedly in a clumsy albeit functional manner), it was good to be able to expand what should be an important interface between the peak national body for public school parent organisations and anyone with an interest in public education in Australia.

In the past few years, ACSSO has consolidated its role as a provider of information-as-advocacy to public education stakeholders. Much of this has been focused on web technology and information aggregation, and has developed some very solid information products.

These products – by which I mean mainly websites and email newsletters (produced by me) – have in turn created a direct dialogue with stakeholders that we’re seeking to expand through the website.

So far, it seems to be working well.

Sci-Tek Systems sells, installs, tests and services medical refrigerators.

These are the kind of fridges and freezers used by hospitals, pharmacies and pathology centres to store blood, vaccines and the like. They’re based in Wollongong and service pretty much all of NSW and ACT.

As always, I spent a bit of time understanding the business, scoping my client’s competitors, Googling for likely search terms and generally surveying the medical and pharmaceutical refrigeration market. As you do.

Even though it’s usually my client’s responsibility to provide the content, as it was in this case, I do the research because I’m the one who’s going to be presenting it, so I’d better understand it.

I’m also scared to hell that I’ll get stuff wrong. But then I’m also always pleasantly surprised by how interesting any line of business is. It all works out OK.

In this case, my client had some specific aims based on his own market research and that very much informed the basic structure.

I should say re-structure, as there was already a website in operation.

Apart from being a bit dated in its looks, and failing to cope with modern wide screens, the main issue with the old site was that it buried the items the client wanted to emphasise: the products themselves.

I was a little surprised, then, that my client opted to remove the prominent photo of a big three door blood fridge I had set on the home page and replace it with his phone number. He has a logic to it, which he explained, and he’s the boss.

As my client’s web hosting account didn’t include MySQL, among other things, this would be a static site. So I decided to make my first HTML5 site.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it play nice on Internet Explorer 8 – which is, of course, the browser used by my client. It’s possible – likely, even – that there are solutions to the problems I had with HTML5, but I didn’t have quite enough time to follow through.

But I will say that it felt very close. I think my first HTML5 site is not far away.

The web industry, in turn, is fortunate to have people like Andy Clarke, Mark Boulton and Elliot Jay Stocks to inspire us to seek and achieve beauty in our designs.

All three are highly creative visual designers as well as engaging and articulate conference speakers and workshop leaders. They are also the authors of books that highlight not just their own work and philosophies but those of their peers.

I was quick to pre-order a copy of 8 faces, a new magazine project of Elliot’s, and it was just as well I did, as it soon sold out.

No wonder, with people like Jason Santamaria, Jos Buivenga and Erik Spiekermann on board in the first issue to talk about typography: fonts, lettering, type, foundries, faces, treatments, rendering … everything to do with the presentation of words on the web.

Elliot’s idea was to plumb the thoughts of eight key people who work with type on the web, along the way asking each to list the typefaces they would use if they could have only eight.

If you are at all interested in how text is, and can be, presented on web pages and rendered by various browsers on a range of screens – and if you’re a web designer, you should be – this is fascinating and inspiring stuff.

One of the things I like about what Elliot describes as a “niche subject”, is that people who are into typography on the web see themselves as part of a historical chain, the latest practitioners of a craft that goes back beyond books and magazines in print all the way to cuneiform and hieroglyphics, as well as sideways into posters, tickets, timetables and advertising hoardings, and now onward into the digital age.

From choosing and implementing fonts for style and purpose, understanding how different fonts work together, creating illustrative lettering and designing new typefaces, right through to exploring business models for making a living out of all this, 8 Faces is both a wonderful showcase and an instructional guide.

It’s an ambitious project. $22.50 (which is what £8 worked out to) is not cheap for a magazine, but this is not your supermarket checkout kind of magazine. Producing a 210mm square 76pp paperback spinebound magazine in full cover on quality paper stock will set you back a few quid.

It must indeed have been tempting to extend the initial print run of 1,000 when it became clear the demand was there, but Elliot has said that he will keep his word to print no more, although pdf versions are available. And he’ll make sure to print more for #2, before Christmas.

I’m looking forward to it.

WIPA is the Web Industry Professional Association, “an organisation that brings Australian Web professionals together to exchange ideas, participate in debate, advance education and promote ethical practice”.

More information will be made available shortly (ie as soon as I write the next newsletter) about WIPA’s upcoming national workshop tour, but I can tell you now that we have secured the services of Bruce Lawson and Steve Faulkner to hold masterclasses in HTML5 and WAI-ARIA with Australian developers and designers according to the following schedule:

• November 23: Sydney
• November 24: Canberra
• November 26: Melbourne
• November 29: Perth (co-hosted by AWIA)
• December 1: Brisbane

Venues and ticket prices are yet to be finalised. Each workshop will take about three and half hours long, divided into digestible sessions.

Bruce and Steve have also asked for opportunities to chat with the locals in less formal settings, perhaps not totally dissimilar to say, a pub. This will be a unique chance to chew the web fat with two global champions of standards, inclusion and the open web.

WIPA is currently working out how to merge with the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) to create a single industry body. I’ve been a Vice President of WIPA for the past year, and was recently elected President.

Steven Bradbury is an Australian ice skater who won an Olympic speed skating gold medal by being the only one in the race not to fall over. My ascension to the WIPA Presidency could also be seen as a case of “last man standing”.

It’s quite a different kettle of code to Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers. That book explained how I could confidently starting using HTML5 with my existing and planned web projects.

This book, Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp, goes into much greater detail about how much more I can do with HTML5.

Bruce Lawson is a UK web developer who works for Opera, with an impressive understanding of, and commitment to, the open web, standards and accessibility. Bruce is coming to Australia in November to hold a series of workshops on ARIA-HTML5 for WIPA, of which I am the newly elected President (did someone say ‘Steven Bradbury’?).

Remy Sharp is also a UK web developer with similar passions plus a particular facility with jQuery and JavaScript.

I haven’t even finished this book, but already I find myself extending my expectations of what I can do now and in the future with markup on a web page. That’s pretty exciting.

Significantly, Lawson & Sharp do not believe HTML5 is perfect. They simply focus on what HTML5 can do while noting its limitations, inconsistencies and logical discrepancies.

The examples they provide are clear, useful and relevant, and their language is positive. They inject enough humour and self-awareness to lighten the learning load.

I’m no dab hand with JavaScript but they make me feel I can handle this.

The book isn’t meant to be comprehensive, either in saying what HTML5 is and isn’t, or in defining what can be done with it. But the authors do walk through some of the more interesting APIs that become available.  OK, in the case of ‘canvas’ it’s more like ‘wade through’, but still.

I think what I like most about HTML5, at least as I’ve come to understand it so far via Keith, Lawson, Sharp and others, is that – particularly when used with CSS3 – it seems to greatly empower people like me who genuinely see themselves as designer, developer, information architect and all round web creator.

If there is a future edition of Introducing HTML5, I expect that some sections will be extended as the use of  HTML5 is refined.

In the meantime, this book will do nicely as a guide to practical application of the new markup.

Until a month ago, when @vanderwal mentioned it in a tweet. I follow Thomas Vander Wal on Twitter because he knows more about how information of all kinds is exchanged between people using internet technologies than just about anyone I know. That he’s from a Dutch background is a bonus.

The name of the book rang a bell, I looked it up and ordered a copy from Amazon the same day, 10 days into the World Cup.

It arrived just after the Netherlands beat Slovakia 2-1 to set up a quarter final against Brazil.

Brilliant Orange is subtitled “The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer“. This tells you that the author acknowledges the superior quality of football produced by players from a small European country, and wants to explore both how this unusually high skill level came about, and then why it hasn’t translated into continuing high level international success.

The context for David Winner is how the presence of Johan Cruijff transformed Dutch football in the 1970s, propelling the national team to consecutive World Cup finals – both of which they lost.

Cruijff, and the coaches who successfully figured out how to play him and build a team around him, revolutionised Dutch soccer at Ajax and with the national team and then later did the same at Barcelona.

Dutch football waned when he left, but his legacy did much to inform a revival of sorts in the late ’80s to early ’90s. And yet, the Netherlands could not grasp the ultimate crown.

The context that I bring to the book is that while I have been removed from the day-to-day soap opera of Dutch football since the 1970s, this year’s World Cup brought everything back into focus.

You may recall I picked the Netherlands to win WC2010, based largely on my belief that they could beat Brazil, and if you can beat Brazil you can beat anyone.

What Winner does in this book is to look in every cultural and historical nook and cranny to find out how the Dutch became so good, and why they’re never quite good enough.

It would be an interesting journey through any nation’s development of prowess in a particular sport, or other area of endeavour, but this particular trip is a fascinating one.

You couldn’t make up the Dutch obsession with beating Germany, nor Cruijff’s gifts, nor how Netherlanders will dress up like clowns to cheer their team on. Winner pulls in the physical constraints of a small, flat country, European wars, the physical characteristics of the Dutch, colonial influences, social changes, art, architecture, politics, prejudices, fears – anything that might explain why Dutch football is the way it is.

There is, of course, no ultimate explanation. The best you can say is that the Dutch are the way they are because they’re Dutch.

Winner does identify certain specific events and occurrences that played a part – for example, the legacy of  the Netherlands’s colonial past in delivering a generation of superbly skilled players of Surinamese descent in the 1980s.

And he’s gathered a great collection of quotes from people in and around the great Dutch and Ajax football teams.

I laughed, I cried, I gasped as I read. And I watched the Netherlands beat Brazil, and then Uruguay to set up another World Cup final, this time against Spain. And I watched them lose.

This is not the generation of Dutch football that invented Total Football, and it is not the generation that faced the trauma of reconciling black football and white football. And yet, like those two, this generation managed to get tantalisingly close to being called champions of the world.

As @vanderwal later commented, World Cup 2010 provided a fitting epilogue to Brilliant Orange, one that absolutely no-one would have predicted – and one that surprised absolutely no-one.

I should add that this book is ideal for people who like to see the connections between things. If you like Mark Kurlansky’s take on Cod or Salt, for instance, you’ll probably like this book, even if you’re not especially interested in football or the Netherlands.

Not only does he know more about personal communication skills than anyone else I know, he has a singluar ability to draw the best out of people.

He brings to his consultancy AB Communicates a rare combination of a highly technical understanding of how people communicate and a gift for analysing and improving corporate management.

I don’t know whether he had those characteristics before he started a 25 year climb from regional on-air broadcaster to General Manager Local Radio for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, running a national network of 58 radio stations, or whether he has built up that skill set over time.

It makes perfect sense to put communication skills and corporate management skills together like that – I just don’t see many other people who have so successfully mastered both. And manage to remain a fundamentally good bloke.

Having managed Andrew’s consultancy website for a few years, I’ve now been allowed to give it a complete overhaul.

That gave me the chance to again review just what Andrew does, how he does it and how people can use his talents. Remarkable.

We used WordPress 3.0 as the content management system, adapting the Thesis theme.

FYI, I am very aware of the current argument between Thesis developer Chris Pearson and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg about whether the fact that Pearson charges for use of the theme contravenes the GPL conditions applied to use of the content management system.

Personally, I am sympathetic to both points of view, and I can only hope the resolution of this situation leads to greater clarity in the relationship between free and paid web applications.

We installed the following plug-ins:

Akismet
Fast and Secure Contact Form
Random Text
WordPress Automatic Upgrade
WordPress Firewall

We also installed Google Analytics to track site traffic.

Anyway, Lachlan made perfect sense of it all by explaining it logically and with the passion of someone who doesn’t just understand something but really gets it, and from a perspective close to my own and in a voice that resonated strongly with me.

That’s what this book is like. HTML5 for Web Designers is pitch perfect.

In providing a practical overview of what HTML5 is and how it will affect what web designers do, Jeremy Keith has delivered something that is part conference presentation, part interview and part geeks moving coasters around a pub table.

Common to all of those is the active voice, and this book is very much Jeremy talking to you. He knows the background, he knows the politics and he most especially knows that you, jobbing web designer, just want to know whether it means you have to go back and recode everything you’ve ever done. And then learn Javascript.

What’s also common to those is that they are of a moment: not necessarily perishable, but likely to be superceded sooner or later by the next model. In the meantime, this will be the practical handbook for working with HTML5 for some time to come.

Anyone who’s seen Jeremy presenting at a conference knows he’s funny. It’s a witty, informed and clever funny. And still grounded in practical application. That’s what this book is like.

Look, frankly, I love that this book assumes I already know what I’m doing. It’s for people who are working web designers. If that’s you, you should get it.

HTML5 for Web Designers is badged as No. 1 in the new imprint A Book Apart: “brief books for people who make websites”, and represents an extension of web magazine A List Apart – itself a re-incarnation of a late ’90s web design mailing list which has more recently also moved into the US conference circuit with An Event Apart.

All but the newest or most cloistered web designers will recognise the names of the people behind all this: Zeldman, Meyer, Santa Maria. We’re talking quality, here – standards-compliant, CSS-driven, beautiful, functional quality. Yes, Virginia, web design now has stars.

In his foreword to HTML5 for Web Designers, Zeldman says that the goal of this book – and others to follow in this catalogue – is to “shed clear light on a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work.”

That’s what this book is like.

I assume you know that the Australian Government plans legislation that will require Australian ISPs to block web pages that contain material that has been “refused classification” under our existing censorship system.

Senator Stephen Conroy seems convinced that this is something the Australian population wants, even though no-one has actually told him that. In getting this wrong, he also seems unaware of the political damage he is doing.

So far, Sen. Conroy has dismissed every cogent and sensible argument put to him that explains what a bad idea the internet filter is.

He has gone on the record conceding the following points:

• It won’t stop people obtaining RC other than via websites.
• It won’t stop children stumbling on x-rated porn or violence.
• It will be easy to avoid.
• It is censorship at a level that is contrary to Australian public standards.
• It presents security concerns.
• It relies on a blacklist principle that is easily corrupted and abused.

And yet, just the other day:

”This is a policy that will be going ahead,” Senator Conroy said. ”We are still consulting on the final details of the scheme. But this policy has been approved by 85 per cent of Australian internet service providers, who have said they would welcome the filter, including Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and iinet.”

Well, iinet has since removed itself from Conroy’s club – and since when does 85% approval by commercial internet service providers carry any weight on this issue?

The funny thing is that Sen. Conroy has fallen into one of the great traps that the web holds for those not used to its digital nature.

Any web designer will tell you that this is not like graphic design, where you create one pixel-perfect copy of your masterpiece and then make endless copies rendered in perfect imitation of the original.

A “web page” (it’s not a page at all, but whatever …) will not only appear different according to browser type and version, connection speed, video card, screen dimensions and a dozen other factors beyond the designer’s control, it is also subject to change. A snapshot assessment of whether a screenful of web content merits classification under Australia’s censorship system – a system designed for old media – is simply inadequate. Who’s up for constant re-assessment of a few billion web pages, then?

Throw in the issue of how to apply classification to material linked to and the whole thing quickly descends into farce.

An expensive, ineffective, unpopular and unrealistic farce that – if it goes ahead – will come to haunt this Government.

There was a time that I had some respect  for Sen. Conroy thinking he really was doing the right thing. I don’t believe that any more and I have lost that respect. The evidence is overwhelming that this is a bad idea. It  increasingly appears that Sen. Conroy is stupid and dangerous, just another inept politician with a use-by stamped on his forehead.

Australia will beat Ghana and Serbia to qualify 2nd in Group D behind Germany.

Australia will then play England, who will beat them.

Others to make it to the second round will be France, Mexico, Argentina, Nigeria, USA, The Netherlands, Cameroon, Italy, Paraguay, Brazil, Portugal, Spain and Chile.

The finalists will be England and The Netherlands.

The Netherlands will win the World Cup.