OK, so I have to disclose that this post is a thinly veiled attempt to get one last blog entry before the curtain falls on 2007. One more post actually makes my pitiful stats look a little better this year! If I believed in New Year’s resolutions, you can probably guess that blogging more would be on my list. I’m more into weekly resolutions to be honest - 12 month plans are destined to fail…
I did want to share one last nugget of InnerWorkings activity with you before wrapping up for the year. Those of you who believe in Santa Claus will be glad to hear that he delivered 3 hours of new learning challenges on Cascading Style Sheets last week! If I had a penny for every time I saw CSS floating around the middle of our roadmap, I’d be sitting on a beach in Costa Rica as I write this blog!
The long wait is over, however - InnerWorkings has listened to your pleas and demands for some top quality CSS learning for web developers. Separating presentation and structure with CSS is certainly a terrific skill for all serious web developers to master. You’ll find a shiny new Drill on Styling Websites with Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) in our web catalog. The learning challenges are pitched at level 3 developers and topics covered include CSS techniques to add fonts, colors, spacing, and other style elements to web documents.
It’s our small contribution to making the web a more structured and beautiful place. Happy New Year to one and all!
All of us at InnerWorkings are big fans of Safari Books Online. So I am delighted to let you know that we have extended our partnership with them in ways that will brings real beneifts to you, our users. For one thing, all of our drills now have selected Safari titles embedded in them at no additional cost to you! You can check this out here.
For those of you who don’t know Safari, let me give you a little background. Safari Books Online was created in July 2001 as a joint venture between the publishers O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education. The Safari libraries now contain more than 4,875 titles for programming and IT professionals. As well as the very popular O’Reilly titles, the Safari libraries include titles from Addison Wesley, Sams, Peachpit Press, Microsoft Press, Que, Prentice Hall and many other publisher partners. Most recently, Wiley has been added into the mix.
The content teams here at InnerWorkings take the best and most relevant of these titles and embed them into our drills in a context-sensitive way. This provides you with richer, more extensive reference and support. And,as usual, our thinking is that all of this material is available to you not just while you ‘learn’ but also as you work day-to-day on real projects. Combining the strengths of InnerWorkngs and Safari Books Online continues our committment to bulding the most powerful learning tool for developers everywhere in the world. In the months ahead, you will see further developments between our companies. For now, just enjoy!
I was reading B.L. Ochman’s blog today when I saw this YouTube clip, which had me sniggering and chuckling along. The video content is quite dense and WAY too fast in some cases, but the overall effect is just hilarious. It’s a clever parody on the glut of web 2.0 business plans and often excessive valuations floating around Silicon Valley these days. That’s enough preamble - check the clip out for yourself:
Look out for smashing lines like “find yourself an engineer, feed him pizza, buy him beer” and “make your elevator pitch, code it up, and flip the switch”. Followed by an instant Internal Server Error, of course. All to the pumping soundtrack of a homemade version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. Fair use indeed.
Who exactly is behind this farcical look at Silicon Valley, you ask? Credit goes to Matt Hempey from a group called The Richter Scales for publishing this video - it’s really clever stuff. According to their website, it’s “a bevy of gentlemen songsters, all residents of the San Francisco Bay Area”. Local talent no less…
So I was trying to figure out what I liked about this video aside from the catchy tune and funny gags. It certainly does a great job of exposing the opportunists with half-baked ideas jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon. What better showcase for this behavior than the sardonic example of a company founded to sell friendship bracelets online? It also harkens back to some classic Dotcom busts like Webvan - hey, I remember them and I was a loyal customer for about 3 months…until I got tired of getting pigmy vegetables that looked great on the website, were perfectly formed, but wouldn’t feed baby hamster.
Excessive valuations on companies like Facebook, Skype, and aQuantive are all skewered in the clip, although Ford Motor Company probably isn’t the best counter example these days! The venture capitalists get a good roast for throwing their weight behind the transformative potential of friendship bracelets - the “next wave” of the web and good potential for affiliate programs, I suppose. Towards the end, the clip focuses on exuberant greed, the skyward property ladder, corporate jets, rocket ships, ego trips - it’s all on the money. But the best bit for me, hands-down, is the following line printed on a t-shirt towards the end of the clip: “You looked better on MySpace”. We’re still a bit wary of the web, no matter how much time we spend on it.
I like these attempts to poke fun at the Silicon Valley business culture, which takes itself very seriously most of the time. There’s no doubt that the Valley is a place where many ideas (good, bad, and ugly) get the chance to see the light of day. Maybe it is better to be lucky than good in this world, but for all the griping, you don’t build a great business on bad ideas. Lucky they may be, but there’s one thing that Google, Facebook, Feedburner, Skype, and others have in common. They all started with great ideas that lived to see the light of day. It is hard to resist poking fun at the culture that spawned them every now and again, all the same. I’m going to watch this clip one last time…then it’s back to riding the next wave I suppose.
