Web.start is a local web conference with strong focus on Web application development and Web startups. The conference takes place on May 8-9, 2008, at Hypo EXPO XXI Centre in Zagreb, Croatia.

This year the schedule is really, really promising. If you are around and you understand Croatian, you shouldn’t miss the opportunity to hear what’s going on at the local startup scene.

On the other hand, if you have an interesting project yourself, then there is a chance to meet some quality VCs to help you out.

I’ll be there both days, so drop by and say “Hi!”. If I look confused, don’t worry — that’s just me being full of excitement about my presentation ”What the users want?”. The presentation will give a short insight in user’s needs, based on our work with users and focus groups at Croportal.

5 FONTS I WISH WOULD DIE.
Reading that blog post was extremely sad to me.

There are times when those so-called “ugly fonts” work extremely well.

And if the target group loves Comic Sans, they are going to get the Comic Sans. Using particular font or avoiding it — based on a personal preference is utterly ridiculous. That is not designing, that is creating an artwork.

Use what your users love. Use what communicates best.
Even if that’s Comic Sans. And try to live with it.

Watch out for the falling mortar!

TODO (me):

• contact page
• about page
• favicon done.

TODO (you)

• enjoy!

http://naked.dustindiaz.com/

What? Where did you get that?

The Accessibility Superhero Detective Joe Clark was hired to discover the truth about the subject. We all hoped the situation is not so dramatic, but boy — were we wrong!?

Yea, but why exactly captioning sucks?

• Not enough of it
• They don’t listen
• It’s hard to read
• Deaf people settle for crumbs
• The wrong kind
• The fox is watching the henhouse
• There are no standards

So I’m catching up with what’s happening in the industry. You know, one of these days when you zeroed-out your mailbox and entered the “save for later” folder in your favorite e-mail app.

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.

Occasionally, people ask me to create XHTML/CSS template based on provided .PSDs. Most of the time, such projects are pretty straight-forward — I tell the hourly rate and the estimated hours. The prospective client then accepts the offer or not.

It could be zillion reasons why clients reject offers and I’m used to some neutral (read: polite) arguments, like “It exceeds our budget” or something like that. However, today I received an interesting response:

“You are a little-bit too expensive, XXX is an hourly rate for a programmer.”

Funny, huh? Or sad?

Why on Earth would anyone compare client-side coding with programming. What is it that people (or just this particular client) think some cog of the same engine should be valued more than others?

Is it because the work of accessibility consultant, CSS coder, SEO engineer or usability expert is not something you can point your finger at? Or is it ‘cause people tend to care for web standards in a way of questionably increased initial exposure on endless, but completely irrelevant CSS showcase lists?…

The first post in this year (better late, than never) and I present you 2 (that’s right: two) brand new web logs by my two fellow colleagues — Marko Kršul (the creative) and Tomaš Trkulja (the methodic).

I was more than happy to contribute in the development of these two beautiful WordPress themes, spiritually named Balance White and Balance Black. The White was deployed first on our company’s flagship project’s development blog in it’s original setup and Dudikoff and Roseanne (link removed for offending content :p) have been customized later on. (Ed’s note: Dudikoff and Roseanne is not a WordPress theme, it’s customized version of Balance White.)

Anyway, download Balance White 0r Balance Black and if you care, let us know what do you think.

Sample sites:

• Croportal Dev Blog
• Zytzagoo’s Den

Barcamp Zagreb session slots are almost all filled. I reserved mines in the very last moment (thanks Mislav) risking the clash with other presenters which sessions I planned to attend. Everything went well at the end, and BTW I finished up with the two topics:

• Superfast web sites in 20 minutes beginning at 19:20 and ending at 19:40 in Gray room and
• Typography for web, 10 dirty tricks from 20:00 to 20:20 in White ‘the Geekier’ room

Just a few more seats are available, so hurry up and grab yours for an intensive Wednesday afternoon.