Petra Gregorová

YES, I’ll be back for another year of An Event Apart, after attending two years in a row An Event Apart Seattle 2007 & An Event Apart New Orleans 2008, but missing out this year due to some economy crisis and my personal life events.

I’ve been wanting to go to Boston for the next one no matter what the line up of speakers would be, but when I found out that for the first time ever that there will be A Day Apart, I knew that I’ll have to be there. Whether my work will pay for it or not, I had to make sure to make this happen!!! I mean I would be dumb to miss out on a full day workshop about HTML5 and CSS3 with Dan Cederholm & Jeremy Keith. A full day workshop that I’ve been wanting and even brought it up to Jeffrey Zeldman himself during a lunch at AEA in New Orleans where he sat at my table. Consequently, the second I knew that my wishes came true, it was a no-brainer that I had to be part of this & I will be…

So, besides signing up for two days of geekiness presented by only the best and my mentors in the industry like already mentioned Jeffrey Zeldman, my CSS guru Eric Meyer, always funny but mostly very resourceful Andy Clarke, also known as “Malarkey“. I will be delighted to see Aarron Walter again, as well as Jared Spool, Jeff Veen. In addition, I will get to listen for the first time to Ethan Marcotte who also co-wrote Handcrafted CSS with Cederholm and Designing with Web Standards (3rd Edition) with Zeldman, which both I got obviously and read by now.

No need to add anymore as it should be obvious that not only I will get my money worth, I’ll have three days to spend among the best and learn from them as much as I’ll be able to absorb. So, I am happy to say that I’M BACK An Event Apart, so be ready for me!!!!!

For those who know what I am talking about, yes… it is that time of the year again when we, thousands of Standardistas, want to show support for accessible, semantic web content. After participating last year, I knew that when the time will come for 3rd Annual – Blue Beanie Day, I will be back again. This will be my second year joining, after the first one that was so successful. I mean, I even got the props from Jeffrey Zeldman himself for my efforts.

This year it will be on November 30. Everyone can attend, regardless where you live or what you do.

It’s easy to show your support for web design done right. Beg, borrow, or buy a Blue Beanie and snap a photo of your mug wearing the blue. (Or get creative with Photoshop). Then on November 30, switch your profile picture in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, (and any other social network) and post your photo to the Blue Beanie Day group … watch for more information coming soon.

You don’t have a blue beanie or your Photoshop skills aren’t the best? Don’t sweat it! You can download a blue beannie from Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog that was provided Kevin Cornell and create your own avatar.

So, what are you waiting for? If you didn’t know what to do on November 30, 2009…. well, now you do!!!! Join us for 3rd Annual – Blue Beanie Day on Facebook or Flickr.

Don’t you wish sometimes there weren’t all these browsers out there for you to worry about your site breaking when developing a site with a nicely structured, table-less, semantic and valid (X)HTML/CSS markup? Well, guess what? They are here and won’t be going away very soon either.

But that is what I love about what I do, is the challenge and finding better solutions to any issue that I might a come across when cross-browser testing any site that I work on. We all have done hacks in the past, including me, but it’s been said many times by many people that it is better stay away from them and rather use conditional statements where needed instead.

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Have you ever wondered how to post code snippets on your site to demonstrate an example? I have to admit myself that I’ve tried myself to use <pre> or <code> tags, hoping that it would solve my frustration. After few trial and errors, some research, I found out that that you need to encode the html entities, like the “<” by replacing them with their html code equivalents.

If you feel a little overwhelmed by trying type up all those characters when you find yourself in need of using it, you might enjoy a Encode/Decode HTML entities tool at centricle.com. You can paste in your code snippet and convert it into ACII characters just by one click. Enjoy!