Today’s comic features a rather large cast of web designers (Eric Meyer, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Cederholm, Elliot Jay Stocks and Jeremy Keith) doing nothing involving the web. Rather, each of them has traveled to the Pilcrow Public House for a tall drink and a leisurely respite.

Although I’m deeply in love with the Internet and its delicious offerings, I find that the 21st century is running at a pace that is accelerating and doesn’t allow for much leisure, even during your leisure time. My own plate is rather full, even outside my work hours, with various online and offline activities that result in my bitter laughter when someone asks what I’m doing with my spare time this week.

If, as a web developer, I were to fashion a pub, I’d probably call it the Pilcrow. I’m blaming all the typography nuts that are in my feed reader. Hence it plays stage for a look at what I imagine leisure would be like in the middle of nowhere, preferably without any wifi or 3G signals, leaving you with no choice but to put down the phone and look at who’s next to you.

True to the premise of slowing down, this comic was inspired by some older posts on the blogs of the notables above. When Dan Cederholm updated the design of SimpleBits, he spoke briefly in his post Woodpress about his desire to start writing posts more often, and not for search engines or tutorials, but for conversation.

Ethan Marcotte picked up the thread in an entry by the same name, complimenting Dan’s redesign and realizing that his “quasi-tumblog” wasn’t entirely cracked up as he wanted it to be.  He then quoted a sentence from this post by Merlin Mann that really hit me where it counts: Jesus, I miss paragraphs.

Amen to that. I love Twitter. It’s a great way to get an idea out quickly, to share links and views among peers when time is short or when dealing with a keyboard the size of my thumb. But sometimes I feel like I’ve lost the ability to take my time and write at length because of that need to get the ideas out quickly.

The clincher for me was Elliot Jay Stocks’ contribution to 24ways.org (the web designer’s advent calender) entitled A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just For Christmas. It’s a great read, discussing the need for our own pet projects as a form of relieving work pressure, collaborating with friends, and improving our quality of life. I couldn’t agree more. CSSquirrel is in essence a pet project, but lacks that collaborative nature that can be so addicting. I need to find some quality geeks and a wacky idea and get rolling. To me, these sort of projects are an equivalent the fixer-uppers in the garages of our fathers. They’re there for some peace and the opportunity to play with your toolset.

So I don’t know about you, but one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to find a way to slow down where it counts, and tinker more where it doesn’t. Or the reverse of that. I’m not sure which.

(Regarding Meyer and Keith’s presence in the comic: Eric Meyer wrote on Twitter about applying to truck-driver’s school on a day off. Fictitious or real, I found it hilarious. I also recently re-discovered the Salter Cane website, featuring a band including one Jeremy Keith on bouzouki. I’ve found the music rather enjoyable, and may have to purchase one of their albums.)

Today’s comic, which features a massive ensemble cast of Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer, Ethan Marcotte, Tantek Çelik, Nicole Sullivan and Wendy Chisholm (guest starring Chris Wilson astride a unicorn), is something like gloss and candy. It’s not tackling a serious issue. Rather, it’s tackling a humorous name created by a group of great people who are themselves tackling a serious issue.

As this photo conclusively proves, the people above (minus Chris Wilson and the unicorn) gathered in the recent past to discuss something very vital. Contrary to popular rumor, it was not the secret location of the Holy Grail or harnessing the power of cold fusion. Nay, they were instead talking about HTML5. More importantly, they were talking about HTML5 as “authors”. For pretty much anyone who reads this blog and doesn’t work for a browser manufacturer, that means you, or your son (if your my parents. Hi mom! Hi dad!)

Like the Hardy Boys, these people were industriously searching for clues, especially clues along the line of “what the hell is HTML5 anyway, and how does it apply to a web designer?” After spelunking the depths of the spec, they surfaced with two things: Firstly, they declared that it was good. Secondly, (and for my purposes, more importantly) they chose  an identity to bind them: The HTML5  Super Friends.

Today’s comic is comedic salute to their bravery and choice of identity. They’ve already done us a great deal of good by recommending alterations to the footer element (which was already a source of annoyance to yours truly) which has now come to pass.

Keep up the noble work, dear heroes.

(And in case you wanted to know, Chris Wilson’s appearance was due to his tweet here regarding the presence of the unicorn on the HTML5 Super Friends page.)

Last week I had the extreme pleasure of being the subject of an interview given by the esteemed Eric Meyer and presented by An Event Apart.

This turn of events was so abnormal to my existence that I repeatedly pinched myself to ascertain that I was in fact, still alive. It was, in a word, freaking amazing, and I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity. For a guy that I’ve compared to a Romulan, planned to abduct, and confused with Rupert Gint, Eric Meyer seemed to be all too friendly to yours truly. Suspiciously so. You might find the fact that he’d choose to interview me at all quite an odd choice.

I’d agree, but then, maybe it wasn’t so innocent as that. Maybe, as today’s comic implies, it was a kung fu death trap.

Ok, ok. It wasn’t. There were no wuxia battles or bicycle kicks. It was simply awesome.

I’m sure if you visit my website you’re in one of three camps: Either you thought you were learning about squirrels (sorry), you’re my parents (hi!) or you’re already into web design. If you’re in the latter group, you probably have already heard of An Event Apart. If you haven’t, go check it out. Not only is it an awesome two-day conference about standards-based design (which is so important in our ever-growing modern web), it’s a social network of good men and women who are obsessed with the same geeky stuff you are.

Which, I think you’ll agree, is pretty dang cool.

Over the weekend I moved to a new apartment. After this, it was Memorial Day on Monday. As a result, this week’s comic is a day late, and accompanied by only a brief post.

It wasn’t my intent to discuss Twitter back to back. After all, there’s all sorts of important web development topics just ripe for plunder. But I couldn’t pass this one up.

Twitter is working on a TV show. No, really. Or working with people working on a show. Whatever. I can’t imagine how I’d react to hearing this in person from one of Twitter’s higher-ups if I worked with them, although today’s comic attempts to recreate such a scenario. However, both Eric Meyer and Jeff Croft managed to craft suitable tweets that sum things up fairly well, here and here (respectively).

I appreciate the tool that is Twitter. I’ve kept in contact with people met elsewhere thanks to it, met new people with similar interests over it, and made good use of it in keeping up to date on interesting information in my industry. I’m not really sure, though, that a 140-character micro-blog requires a televised show.

About the only way you could jump the shark more is, well, to be Fonzi.

Seriously, why is he water-skiing in a leather jacket AND the shortest shorts ever? If this was cool in the 70’s, I’m glad I was only 3 when they ended.

If you’re one of the few people who read my blog but haven’t heard of Twitter, you may be unaware of the firestorm that started last week when the company decided to alter a feature of their service last week.

Today’s comic (featuring Biz Stone, Doug Bowman, and Eric Meyer with a Star Trek flair) pokes fun at the brouhaha that resulted. It also highlights the dangers of running any sort of social networking site and trying to make feature changes.

As the creators of Facebook have learned in the past, people have opinions. Build a site based on people sharing with one another, then make a change, any change, and you’re going to find that people are going to use your site to share negative opinions about those changes. If they’re loud enough, or numerous enough, you’ll find yourself suddenly struggling with an unanticipated PR disaster over what seems to be the most minuscule issues.

In this case, the big issue was Twitter deciding to remove the optional setting that allowed you to see a reply from one user to another, even if you weren’t following that other user (tweets known as conversational fragments). For quite some time Twitter has had the option of letting you hide those from yourself, so that your chattier friends’ conversations with strangers doesn’t drive you bananas.

However, removing this option angered the people who liked that feature, allowing for what they call “serendipitous discovery”. What better way, for example, to expand your list of industry colleagues that you get useful tips from then to watch who professionals in your field are talking to? (More than a few people now on my follow list I learned about from stalking the tweets of people like  Meyer and Andy Clarke).

To sidestep the limitation, in protest Eric Meyer (and many others) started adding > prior to every reply. The catch, of course, was that you couldn’t filter those out, so then suddenly everyone on Twitter was seeing a lot more replies than they actually used to when they had an option.

Thankfully, less than twenty-four hours later this was changed. Unfortunately, you now need a flow chart to determine how your tweets are being seen (here’s one by ReadWriteWeb.) I’m not even going to try to explain it, other than to say some of your replies are visible to others who choose to see them, and some aren’t.

I don’t understand why it was so important for them to make this change, nor am I sure that I understand their new compromise position. (Biz explains the issue more clearly here) What I do know is that any web service (especially a social networking one) should think twice (or heck, three times) before removing a feature from their service that users are actually using, and incapable of reproducing on their own through workarounds.