1. Will we be able to make money? We’re a business. We have mortgages and tuitions to pay. Plus, if we don’t make some cash once in a while, how will we feed our habit of continually screwing around?

2. When we’re done, will we be proud of the work we’ve done? Slaving for months on a project only to not want to show it to anyone when you’re finished just plain sucks. No amount of money can make that feel better.

3. Can we learn a little something new along the way? Executing the project has to make us smarter and help satisfy our curiosity, which we think is our greatest asset.

The information you’ve so generously shared with A List Apart will help us form a picture of the ways web design is practiced around the globe. We hope that making this data available will have a positive effect on best practices and employment, and will enhance public understanding of, and respect for, our profession.

Take the survey or see last year’s results.

HRT robbed BBC.

This is the embarrassment of the decade for the Croatian web community.

Follow the original thread at mi3dot.org. It is a Google’s translation from Croatian to English, but you’ll get the picture.

If you care, please let us know.

More voices:

• zytzagoo: HRT vs BBC
• Marketing Servis: HRT.hr i BBC.co.uk ko brata dva!
• T-portal: HRT ‘posudio’ dizajn od BBC-ja?
• Davor Peić Gavran: Croatian HRT vs BBC.co.uk, totally rip off
• Index: Iz koda HRT-ove stranice najednom nestalo ime tvrtke koja ju je radila
• Index: HRT-ova nova web stranica besramni plagijat bbc.co.uk
• Index: Hašim Bahtijari: Pitat ću na Vijeću koliko je novaca utrošeno na izradu novih stranica HRT-a
• Index: Dizajneri složni: HRT je pokrao BBC, i to loše
• Marko Mihelčić: Croatian national television website (HRT) fancy’s BBC website.
• Nivas Blog: How HRT failed in their intention to become Croatian BBC
• Wolfwood’s Crowd: Ripanje i ripersko prigovaranje

Downsides

Too many sponsor slots, sponsor slots too long and timetable was re-arranged on-the-fly a couple of times during the day. But that will be taken care of next time. They promised. And I believe in that, because the team behind the event is getting better and better each time.

On the tech day

All the non-sponsored slots were quite engaging. I only regret that there was no more designers and developers in the crowd, who could make a good use of those. I love how most of the speakers were authentic and shared their tips without a blink.

On the biz day

We found out about all about funding — how much money one can raise for a start-up, what kind of profit angels and VCs are expecting and how the things are going to change in terms of decision making once you’ve been funded. I was surprised about such both-directional and transparent dialogue. Kudos to that.

People as always made my conference

Getting together with some old buddies and seeing online acquaintances becoming friends, T-shirt exchange, iPhone battles, geek porn stories, practical jokes… if only we could arrange such meetings more often.

Next time? Sure.

See some pictures @ Marinshe

Addenum

Superawesome Dragan Babić also wrote an article and reminded me I haven’t linked my presentation :)

You probably wonder about how do you clean your Inbox? Since you are asking, we intensively worked on the relaunch of Croportal last week, and as a reward, the team had a couple of days off.

At this very moment I’m writing the post in one of the 40+ tabs in Safari. And I still haven’t option-spaced NetNewsWire. There’s recent unpacked shipment from Amazon on a shelf across the table. If only days would last longer.

There was a time when web standards pioneers had all the important stuff only in the Bookmarks, because there was simply just a few resources. It was quite handy and convenient having them all in the Bookmarks bar. I sometimes miss that comfort.

Where there was just a dozen of on-topic resources to follow, now is the hundreds. Where there was 2 or three events a year, now is the ten or 20 at least.

I was introduced by 80/20 rule back in 2004. Fast-forward four years later and I wonder which ones are considered today’s 20% must-read authors? Even if I knew, one would still need considerable amount of time for all the latest stuff.

The above question applies to events, too — are there 20% events that cover 80% of the current topics?

The schedule can be occasionally a serious threat, time and budget-wise. Especially if you have to travel across the continent and have tons of work that just don’t allow frequent travel breaks.

We’ve been practicing various media diet programs. Should we also consider event diet?

How to judge which one to choose and which one to discard from the list? With media, you test it for some period and then decide is it good enough to enter reader’s A-list, but for obvious reasons, you can’t apply the same method with events.

AMZ is a joint venture of Sanoma Magazines International B.V. and Gruner + Jahr AG & Co. AMZ is also partially owned by Styria Medien AG. Those three companies are already having a few significant web projects in the local markets around Europe. As such, AMZ is very ambitious about being a top player in the Croatian internet space, so they were determined to secure the productive environment for a team of in-house experts.

Kristijan Soldo, the Manager of the Internet Department, approached Tomaš, Marko and me and since we set conditions and met each other’s expectations surprisingly early, we all accepted the offer very quickly.

Working on one project at the time without insane deadlines and demanding clients on a budget made a switch for me, as well as the opportunity to fully focus on a limited number of specialized internet destinations from the grounds up. To prune such a project, twist it and help it grow without lengthy presentations, argumentations or technical debates was another plus. Kristijan is a long-time internet professional with clear goals, fully confident in his team members capabilities.

Web.burza was an extraordinary place to work in, participate in handful of diverse projects, learn about new technologies and experiment with various new media concepts. My work in web.burza resulted in tremendous hands-on experience with front-end development and resulted in a few popular client-side development methods. I had a chance to deploy web standards in a real-life scenarios and practice modern web design on a dozen of high-profile projects — once again proving that there is a place for accessible CSS-based layouts beyond blogs and personal web pages.

Even though the three of us are leaving to AMZ, web.burza still has a bags of young talents fully capable to keep its position as a most awarded and innovative web agency in Croatia. With the extensive portfolio of pieces released in the last two years being visually extraordinary, yet fully standards compliant web sites/applications, web.burza set the standards for all the other local and world-wide agencies to follow.

The most noticeable projects web.burza produced in the last couple of years include web.burza.hr, www.hellgatelondon.com, www.coolinarika.com, www.vegeta.com, www.nacional.hr, www.oktal-pharma.hr, www.rtl.hr, www.borja.org, www.groovecaffe.com… as well as a dozens of small and medium business web sites…

But, the true heartbreaker is leaving web.burza people… I will miss morning coffee in the office kitchen, Mac evangelism and random photo shootings. “What if… ?” meetings and deadline overnights in the office (well, at least the social aspect of these…).

I’m not only leaving a bunch of gifted colleagues, but also a group of great friends. This is by no means a “Good bye.”, more like “See you around!”.

Take a look at more beauties of Croatia…

Impressed? I have 4 cards for 4 recepients. Drop me a line with your postal address and I’ll send you one. Unfortunately, we are out of cards, but all your addresses are in queue for the next round!

My fellow colleague pho went with me and that was fatal… He made me do it… I bought Logitech G-15 gaming keyboard.

Damn! The keyboard is great! And apparently, my MX510 mice is in love with my new keyboard.

Why I’m telling you this? Because, unfortunately, I had to refuse a special invitation from the organizers (sorry, guys)… (Ed: First, I missed the @media, now it seems I’m going to miss this one, too.)

Nevertheless, if you’re going, don’t forget to pick up your Survival Kit (or better said a ‘Surprise’ Kit) and, of course, say ‘hello’ to NY in my behalf.

The show is held at the Birmingham NEC, so if you’ll be anywhere near, drop me a line and we can drink a beer in a local pub and chat about web development and/or life in general… (speaking of which, feel free to recommend some food & drink places in Birmingham).

On the side note, the British embassy is lifting of visa restrictions on nationals of Croatia after 22 March 2006. And yes, I had to go through all this visa procedure, including paying the application fee (argh!), ‘cause the agreement is still not active. And no, it’s not funny.

Anyway, this will be my first trip to the UK. Unfortunately there will be no time for museums and such, but hell, missus promised someday we are going to visit for the sole tourism purposes.

There’re a few options of connecting currently vailable here in Croatia, and here are my average monthly costs:

• Dial-up modem (56Kbps), which I used to pay circa $70/mth
• ISDN (128Kbps), which is double the speed of the modem connection, but the costs also duplicate, so I’d say circa $150/mth
• ADSL (512/128Kbps) with 2GB bandwidth limit, which I’m currently paying circa $22/mth.

So, how much do you pay for the internet connection?

The Return of the Dead

After that pretentious subtitle, there’s no a movie review.

Okay, up until now – every rat and his neighbor visited A List Apart. I’m so glad I missed all that mess around design decisions on it’s redesign. These debates are quite exhausting and often useless… Anyway, gg to the team.

What I’d like to see more than a sweet redesign – is the quality content we used to read more often at ALA (and not just there). Personally, I’d like to see a new ideas, edge pushing and such – more conceptual stuff. For me, the XHTML, CSS and DOM techniques became pretty secondary (no, I’m not saying boring). I see those in exact same way like my father, the tailer, sees the new cutting machine.

Oxton is back. That’s a good news. Hilhorst is creative (and conceptual from above paragraph). That’s even better.

Pre-election Promises or What’s Due

It’s code name is TypeTester. You should see it by the end of the week. That would be if you’re a beta tester. You’re not? Become one.

This blog will be reworked. It’s boring and limiting. Watch this space for… oh, crap – what a cliché! If it happens, you’ll know it.

Update

Just a small clarification: sIFR is by Mike Davidson (the s is for scalable). It is based upon IFR, which stands for Inman Flash Replacement. IFR was first mentioned in February 2004. and introduced and explained in April 2004.

Update 2

Actually, it was Duke himself who made the .swf file and also it was his idea, guys from UP just made it work.

Dropping support doesn’t mean that a web site will not function, it just means that we don’t care if some icon is not positioned exactly where it should be or if columns are not perfectly tight. Visitor who has a nerve to use such an old piece of software, probably don’t mind about a few glitches here and there. Now, anybody who would argue about how some people can’t install any better browser, I really don’t buy it, but that’s another story…

It isn’t that it’s time consuming in a way of extra hacking to achieve the same layout as in other browsers (we are still supporting IE5.5), but we found that we cannot gain a number of essential and common structural functionality and details in a reasonable time-frame and without compromising what interface designers came up with. We no longer want to restrict ourselves, just because visual composition will appear lousy in IE5.

So, I guess that means I will not think about workarounds for that browser like I used to, and this is also a kind of apology to all of you faithful readers who are seeking for help. If I know how to fix a problem, I would help you, but I no longer have time to be inventive on your particular layouts. Other problems are welcome, though.