Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 3

My Glamorous Life: The Unexpected Samples

A whinnying horse. A blaxploitation sample. A female instructor saying Chinese is the easiest language to learn. These three brief audio samples regularly interrupt my late-night headphone music listening.

I’m not tripping or having a medical episode. My bedroom faces the rear of the Chinese Mission to the UN. I can’t be certain that these unwelcome late-night audio interruptions come from there, but it’s a theory. If you’ve never fallen gently asleep to a bespoke playlist of jazz ballads, only to sit bolt upright in terror an hour later because a horse is shrilly whinnying in your ears, you should try it some time.

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

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A Jewish Joke

Two Jews are standing in an open cattle car en route to Auschwitz. The train pauses on a bridge overlooking a river. Directly below them is a transport ship.

“Look!” the first Jew excitedly tells his friend. “Now’s our chance! That ship down there is delivering war supplies to the port city of Kaiserberg. If we jump down to the deck now and hide in one of those tanks, maybe we can avoid Auschwitz and ride things out in Kaiserberg!”

The second Jew thinks a moment.

“What if Kaiserberg’s worse?” he asks.

Disclaimer (only read if offended):

I don’t like to explain jokes, but if this one offends you, consider that I’m Jewish myself. The joke came to me fully formed while I was chatting with a friend about something unrelated. It felt like a perfect distillation of Jewish pessimism. Not that Judaism as a religion is pessimistic, but after two thousand years of, you know, we can be a bit touchy. I’m sorry if this disclaimer ruined the joke for you. I did say not to read it unless you were offended.

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Far from the bullying crowd

The bullies who beat and mocked me in eighth grade were cruel and stupid. They despised intelligence and worshipped violence, although they would settle for athletic ability. The school blessed their thuggery by scheduling dodgeball. It was good preparation for Viet Nam, the country where I expected to be blown apart if I managed to survive to eighteen. 

If you were smart in eighth grade, you were also a fag. I don’t even think they meant you were actually queer. I think it was just one of the worst things a bully could call you before pounding on you. Indeed, it lent an aura of righteousness and inevitability to the beatings that got doled out to you. Surely all red-blooded American boys would want to beat up fags! And who could blame them? Not the schools. Not the churches. And certainly not the cops. Why, it was practically a young man’s duty to rid the world of insufficiently macho peers. A kind of post-birth eugenics, if you will.

The other word the bullies used for me was pussy, because they could imagine nothing lower than a woman, I suppose. They even called me Zeldwoman. 

I’d been picked on in the seventh grade, in Connecticut, too, but that was mostly by my pals, who were possibly just busting balls, something they’d have learned to do (and I had not) over the previous year’s summer break. My friends’ taunts once made me cry in school, which was unforgivable in a boy, so I would have been destroyed had we stayed in Connecticut, anyway. But we moved.

And the Pittsburgh of those years was worse for me. In the end, I survived eighth grade in Pittsburgh because I could crack jokes and write and draw what were called underground or head comics at the time, and one of the toughest kids in the school thought I was funny and let me hang out with his gang. They were called the Garage Gang, and they probably had roots in preadolescent group onanism, but by the time I joined as a sort of amusing mascot, they were mostly about smoking, shoplifting, stealing beer, making out with girls, and buying and selling pot and psychedelics. Eventually I would become a dealer myself, and hang with the freaks instead—smart kids who made art and got high a lot. This enabled me to survive until I was old enough to go college and reinvent myself.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about these things again lately. It’s not like America’s most vulnerable citizens are being targeted by a hostile, mentally retrograde government. Not like bullies, racists, and homophobes everywhere have been set free to revert to their ugliest selves by a mentally deficient ringleader who knows how to whip up a crowd and feed their hunger for violence as a screen behind which he robs us all. Of our money, of course. But more importantly of our rights, our dignity, our ability to accept one another and celebrate our differences instead of masking them. Most of all, the bullying crowd is robbing us of the more perfect union many of us hoped America was beginning to achieve. But, hey. How ’bout that Gulf of America. Winning.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov.

See also “How my grandfather came to America.”

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My weekend project

It’s Sunday; I’m playing with my music collection, content as a fed-and-burped babe. Let me explain.

I realized last night that, in tracking my shifting musical tastes via my Last.fm Pro account, I’m basically remaking “Pardon My Icons,” the creative project I launched on this very website in 1995, back when it was still at a tilde address (it did not become zeldman.com until ’96), and which first brought my work to the attention of other creatives who were also discovering the early web and making it their own.

Me, collage, and music

Although I was not serious about it, I started making collage art when I lived in Washington DC in my 20s.

Back then I was serious about composing and producing. I used an Akai 12-track recorder, a rack of synth modules commanded by my Yamaha DX7 with a custom E! card, and a PC running Personal Composer MIDI, arranging, and composition software. I also had an old Selmer Bundy flute, an African reed instrument whose name I forget (and whose “reed” turned out to be a dried locust carcass, as I would discover, to my horror, when the instrument broke), Fender amps, mics, and a variety of percussion instruments with which I made music in my Washington, DC-based recording studio. But that’s a whole ’nother story.

I did not expect to earn a living as a composer, and in that negative expectation I was more than amply fulfilled.

So I scrounged up a day job at a local advertising agency as a naively optimistic copywriter.

And a night job as a stringer for The Washington Post’s Arts section.

Music journalist by night

The paper’s arts section editor in those days was named Richard. I’d gotten his attention without soliciting it after creating “Khz” for City Paper. Khz was my weekly music column. I covered the emerging go-go and hardcore scenes, as they were what was happening in DC, and the whole country would soon be listening. Naturally, the Post made me stop writing about that interesting and relevant stuff, and instead paid me $40 per to crank out anodyne concert reviews of mainstream artists like Kenny Rogers when their tours came through DC. (I was comped to the ticket but paid my own travel and gas out of the 40 bucks.)

I typically had 30 minutes from the time the headliner started to call in my review, which meant I had to write it in my head while watching the beginning of the performance, then run to a pay phone booth (kids, ask your parents) and dictate it aloud to someone on the copy desk, before the concert had even begun to build up a head of steam. This wasn’t fair to the artists. I did the best job I could under the circumstances, taking pride in how quickly I could structure and ship a news story. Richard fired me before I could quit, but that, too, is another story.

Most importantly at that time, I lived with a girlfriend. She was an artist and architect who had left that career to study computer programming. We were social (many friends, drinking was often involved), and serious about our art—which, in my case, was music, even if I earned my living writing concert reviews and crafting passable but hardly brilliant ads.

Through all of those ups and downs, and to the side of those major efforts, I kept at the collage for years, putting in several hours a night making the things. When each was finished—and deciding that any art product was finished was damned tough for my restless young mind—I would carefully frame it behind glass, and mount it on the walls of our apartment.

Was it art? Just a hobby? Who knows? It made me happy.

And then gradually, as I put more effort into my music and ad careers, I set the collage-making aside, for a time.

New career in a new town[image error]

Ten years later, I was a New York art director and copywriter, two years sober, and no longer in that same romantic relationship. That’s okay, I was in a new one.

I’d packed my music studio equipment—now obsolete because Akai stopped making the proprietary multitrack tape format that their 12-track unit ran on—in a storage unit. Eventually I’d give away all that music and recording equipment (keeping only the multitrack masters), but that, too, is another story.

Cutting-edge for a day

Then in 1995, one of our ad clients asked the agency if we could make them a website. Like many of you, we lied and said, sure. And then we figured out how to actually do it.

The client was Warner Bros., the project was “Batman Forever,” our visionary client was Donald Buckley, my partners were Steve McCarron, Alec Pollak, and Doug Rice, and the website was a huge hit, attracting half the people who visited the early web. (Alec’s “Flashback 1995: batmanforever” shares screenshots, which are great, although they cannot convey what a breakthrough the site was in March, 1995.)

With 3 million people using the web in 1995, the site got 1.5 million visits a day for over a year. Not bad.

Pardon my icons (1995)[image error]

I immediately set to work creating a personal site (this one), and Pardon My Icons was one of its first “entertainments.”

As is often the case with my creative efforts, I made these tiny, Warhol-inflected bits of art as a protest against what I saw as the mediocrity of the icons in general use on that early, early web.

(Similarly, my friends and I would later start The Web Standards Project in protest against the dumb ways most folks were being told to create websites, e.g. using proprietary tags instead of W3C and ECMA standards, because browsers didn’t properly support those. Having lost access to my musical master tapes because I’d invested in Akai’s non-standard and eventually discontinued tape format, I was kind of keen on not letting the internet fall victim to the same kind of nonstandard f*ckery. But that, too, is another story. We are gathered here to talk about icons and collage. So let’s do that:)

A mental break

I track my music on Last.fm Pro. Here’s my account. (But don’t look unless you, too, have a Pro account. I’ll explain why in a moment.)

[image error]Some of the artists I listen to, as shown on last.fm Pro.

Last.fm lists the artists you play, arranging them by the number of plays. Thus, if you were to play two tracks by Freddie Gibbs and three by Bill Evans, you’d have a collage featuring those two artists, with Bill preceding Freddie because he has one more play than Freddie.

In regular, free old last.fm, you can see other people’s artists as a list, arranged by number of plays, interrupted by an ugly barrage of ads.

Collage for days

In Pro, you can see their artists and yours as an ad-free collage that goes on for pages and pages. Plus, as a Pro user, you can choose which photo represents which artist—and even upload your own. When viewing your collection, you and your visitors will see a collage of your favorite artists, in descending order of plays, using artwork you not only select, but you can also create.

I like Pro. And even though the product isn’t exactly in what you’d call hyper active development—even though the server isn’t always fast, even though there are a few bugs that will probably never get fixed, even though new features are introduced rarely, and the company’s customer service department isn’t exactly the most active help desk in tech—despite those minor drawbacks, the site does things no other website can do. And at US $3, the Pro account isn’t exactly priced out of reach for most customers. (If you can afford a computer, internet access, a music collection and/or a music streaming service, you can probably scratch the 3 bucks together as well.)

How to collage on last.fm[image error]

By controlling what I listen to, and the order in which I listen, I’m slowly building an infinite collage of my evolving musical tastes.

By choosing or finding the artist photos (often post-producing them in Photoshop), I create my mood, my rhythm, and my shifting color palettes.

There are design rules governing where portraits should be placed. For instance, people whose face or gaze points rightward get placed on the left of the grid, so they lead the viewer’s eye from left to right, into the composition, whereas those who gaze to my left belong on the right side, leading the viewer’s eye back in.

To reposition someone, I may listen to a few extra plays of them. Or use last.fm’s Pro Admin to subtract a few plays.

As you may have inferred, an accurate count of everything I’ve listened to over the past years is no longer my goal in using last.fm; the goal is the endless collage.

It’s kinda spiritual.

(Reminder: the only way to see it is to be a Pro member of last.fm, which turns off ads and enables you to view your own and other people’s collections in a grid format instead of a list. If you’re a non-member, you see a list jammed with ads. Of no interest to anyone.)

If a tree falls, is it art?

Unlike the real-world collages I made in my 20s (which could be mounted on a wall), and unlike 1995’s “Pardon My Icons” (which could be viewed in any browser connected to the web), my current art-making/hobby activity is not publicly viewable except by last.fm Pro users. And that’s okay. ’Cause I’m not designing this for anyone besides myself to enjoy. I mean, if you see it, cool. But if nobody ever sees it, engaging with it will still make me happy.

Which makes this collage business—what? Therapy? Gaming? (Just of a different sort than anybody else?) A form of stimming? It definitely helps lower my general anxiety, providing a space where I can make pretty pictures while listening to my favorite music, which, driven in part by the desire to expand the collage, is widely inclusive and always expanding.

The hunt for fresh collage material also helps keep me interested in new music. (Readers who feel stuck, take note.)

I do this activity every weekend when my more normal friends are biking or baking or dancing.

Is this activity, into which I’ve now poured many hours of my life, artistry or autism? Who cares? The point is that it’s escapist and harmless and we all need some of that in our lives, however we can grab it.

However you grab your moments of calm, meditation, and happiness, never be ashamed of taking care of yourself.

See also…

Rediscovering music: If Spotify exposes you to new music other people are listening to, Last.fm helps remind you of great music in your existing collection that may have slipped your mind.

For love of pixels: Stroll with us down memory lane as we celebrate the pearl anniversary of pixel art creation’s primary progenitor, and some of the many artists and design languages it inspired.

The post My weekend project appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

Valediction.

I started using Twitter before the dawn of the iPhone. Back then, in 2006, it was a fun, funky, fully functional (if barebones) beta messaging service used mainly by The People of the Web—the kind of folks who attended the SXSW Interactive conference and probably spoke on the panels. 

You know. You were there. You were one of us: Designers. Developers. Pioneers. Writers of blog posts, trade books, and all the little guide texts that websites depended on to attract and serve their users. People who, in casual conversation, might use words like “digerati” unironically and without intending to be pretentious. 

We believed in the power of the web to highlight unheard voices and evolve a more just society. If we were naive, and we surely were, at least we were on the side of the angels. Turns out, not everybody was.

A new skill

Years before Slack, the early 140-character Twitter served as a kind of private pre-Slack for the digitally awake and aware.

Back in those days, if you’d asked me or my conference-going fellow bloggers and designers who that first, rudimentary Twitter was for, we’d have said it was for us. For people like us, who’d spent years mastering all manner of skills and technologies simply to communicate online. Who saw value in the act of putting words together, so long as there were people to read and react to those words.

(After expressing our feelings of pride and ownership in the Twitter community, of course, the more Ted-talk-y among us early users would have waxed rhapsodic about microblogging and its potential to improve the world. More about that in a moment.)

With the birth of Twitter, when we wanted to pin down something that was twitching about in our heads and transmit it to other heads, the skill we needed wasn’t CSS or HTML or art direction or back-end wrangling. It was the ability to edit our thoughts down to a glittering trophy built with 140 characters or less. A new skill to master!

How much do people like us love showing the world what we’ve learned! This much: Even after Twitter no longer relied on wireless carriers’ text messaging services, so that the permitted character count was consequently doubled, many of us would-be Oscar Wildes continued to whittle away at our tweets, limiting them to 140 characters or fewer on principle.

After all, if we could deliver fully functioning website in 10K or less, we could surely craft deathless sentences from a tightly constrained character count. Right? Of course right!

Only connect

Years later, with a huge international user base, the idea persisted that a globally connected free and open messaging network like Twitter could help humanity do less evil and more good.

If you wanted proof, you could look to the first Arab Spring, to Me Too, to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter—movements that were greatly abetted by the busy, worldwide network. 

Of course, while many cheered and participated in these activist-driven movements, others saw them as threatening. Some felt the world was changing too fast, and that their views on social issues, like their once-good jobs, had no champion among the ruling classes. We all know how that turned out. 

And now a brief digression about power and megaphones:

How I got over

Nearly two decades before Bluesky and its sweet starter packs, Twitter hired creatives to recommend selected  users to newcomers. Some of the coolest people I know did that work.

Web design was at its peak, so quite naturally the in-house team put together a list of influential designers, developers, and writers for new users to follow. And for a variety of reasons, I was among those early recommended follows. (I may still be listed there, if the current X still welcomes newcomers with follow recommendations.) Which is how, at my Twitter peak, I ended up with a blue checkmark and 355,000 followers.

Even now, on wretched “X,” where I no longer post, I still retain 305,000 followers. At least, that’s what the stats told me when I popped in just now to find out. But are there really that many folks following me there?

How many of my current Twitter/X “followers” used to participate but have since quit quietly, without bothering to close their accounts? Lots, I reckon.

Some may avoid the site but keep their accounts open for strategic reasons, such as preventing someone else from hijacking their name (not that the owner can’t take over your account whenever he feels like it—but I digress).

Mainly, I’m guessing a lot of folks lost interest in the site but forgot to close their accounts. In other words, the data says 305K, but it’s probably less than half that many active users at most, few of whom would even see my tweets if I still posted there, as the algorithm throttles texts from folks like me.

Who cares, besides me? Nobody. Nor should they. And, besides, except as a temptation to stay, my follower count is beside the point.

Come play with us, Danny

The point is that the former Twitter has become a hateful cesspool, not simply mirroring but amplifying its owner’s profound insecurities, god-awful beliefs, and self-serving lies, and forcing that insanity into the public consciousness, whether we avoid X or not.

Thus, millions of Americans who don’t use Twitter/X nevertheless believe conspiracies that the owner and his favorite acolytes use the site to broadcast.

And there’s no doubt that, in consequence of the above, X helped determine the results of the last US presidential election. (I use the phrase “last election” here to mean “most recent election,” although I fear it may come to mean more than that.)

So, in the interest of not supporting fascism, do I abandon these readers? Thanks for asking! Pretty much, yeah.

If you like my longer-form writing, you can find it here on zeldman.com, at A List Apart, and in my books.

If you like my chatty posts, news bytes, and occasional brief confessions, join me on Bluesky.

Good luck to us all in the coming year.

The post Valediction. appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

Domain harvesting and the Twitter long game in retrospect

If you have a website that gets steady but diminishing traffic, and whose domain registration dates back at least a decade, you may encounter offers to buy your domain. These used to come mainly from pornographers, on the premise that your readers, upon encountering nudity instead of the morning farm report in their web browsers, would be momentarily confused—but at least a few of them would stick around to become customers.

Over the years, tricking people into seeing unexpected content and converting a small percentage of them into customers has proven to be an effective business tactic. Mindless, sure. Depressing, you bet. But effective. If all you want to do is make money, this is a way to do it. See also the penny rounding error crime from Office Space (by way of Superman III). It’s a numbers game. Make an infinitesimal profit a gazillion times, and it becomes a healthy profit. Buy skrillions of popular domains at a low enough cost, and rake in double your money in subscription fees and paid downloads.

These days, of course, the lowball domain harvesters are not limited to pornographers or even human beings, but the point of the transaction has ever been the same: to ambush your community and convert at least some of them into customers.

What I’m working up to is that, for some reason, this morning I woke up recognizing that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a far more expensive—and destructive—version of that same old grift. It was conversion en masse. To seize a public commons shared by 600 million readers, writers, and keyboard adrenalin addicts, and to profoundly change the conversations they were having. A digital takeover with historic and deeply tragic real-world consequences.

For sale: personal, imperial power

Musk’s “folly,” it turns out, wasn’t the ego-fueled, soon regretted impulse purchase it looked like. At least, if it was that, it was not only that. It was also, as we can see now, a plan to buy not merely a U.S. presidential election outcome, but, with it, personal, imperial power. Whether that was always the plan, or only became the plan after Musk found himself stuck with the $44B Twitter deal and decided to make the best of it, the consequences for our world are the same. And, from Musk’s point of view—at least until he and the man he helped put in the White House have their inevitable supervillain falling out—the plan worked.

A psychological detail here is that, in contrast to the lowballing sleaze merchants whose tactics he otherwise emulated, Musk appeared to have wildly overpaid for his prize. How could he be so stupid, we grinned at each other—and put him out of our minds. Which gave him that much more freedom to make his moves. Which, although evil, were not stupid.

As an unelected U.S. co-president in an administration in which two-fisted self-dealing will be expected, and will go unreported by a weak and cowering press, Musk will become his own Treasury Department in his role as a cutter of “government waste.” (End Medicare. Get a job, Grandma! Launch Medicare dollars into SpaceX. While we’re at it, let’s stop pampering our military veterans with health care. And so on, ad nauseum.) And if that’s not enough—and somehow it never is enough for these people—he’ll also rule over economic realms in which his companies compete for astronomical government contracts. Gee, I wonder how that will go?

Either Musk deliberately spent enough to make his enemies think he was an idiot, and stop paying attention to him. Which is evil-genius-level chess-mastery if it was, in fact, planned that way. Or else he overspent as a bluff, got tripped up in his own hubris, ended up stuck with Twitter, decided to wreck it while high on Ketamine, and somehow blundered his way into a revenge plan for the history books—if we’ll still be allowed to have those. Either way, the rest of us are in the same bad trouble.

All things considered, the Titanic sank quickly. Our democracy has just a tad more time. What can good people do today to give non-billionaires a fighting chance?

The post Domain harvesting and the Twitter long game in retrospect appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

Of Books and Conferences Past

[image error]

Just as nobody who marries spends their wedding day planning their divorce, almost nobody starts a business contemplating what rocks it will eventually splinter and break upon, and how to build a life raft for themselves.

I take that back. Some folks I know, who played pivotal roles in the evolution of the web, actually started their businesses with a clear goal of selling them to somebody bigger. Like Typekit was designed to sell to Adobe. Or Blogger was designed to sell to Google.

Such folks, several of whom are now post-economy wealthy, lived in the Bay Area in the 1990s and early 2000s, where building to flip was widely discussed and accepted.

Meanwhile, in NYC…

I, on the other hand, live in New York. So I started my web businesses (like Happy Cog design studio) to serve clients, as NYC creatives have always done, and with no understanding that I would one day need to leave the company and should have an exit plan. Why would I exit? Why would I ever stop doing work that brought excitement and meaning to my life?

Similarly, I started my personal site with its “Ask Dr. Web” tutorials in 1995, and co-founded my web design publication, A List Apart, in 1997, for the sheer joy of sharing knowledge, with no concept of making money, let alone of one day selling the business.

Eventually, despite my naivete, and mostly thanks to Jim Coudal and Jason Fried, A List Apart began making money by running one carefully screened ad per page. I used that money, as you will expect, to pay our writers, editors, and producers. And when it came time to stop running ads, I slowed our publication schedule, paid writers out of my own pocket, and worked with a small crew of fellow volunteers, who published ALA because we believed in the mission. (Still do.)

If I had come of business age in San Francisco, I likely would have sold A List Apart to somebody like O’Reilly, but that was never my plan because I make toys to play with, not to give away.

An ecosystem apart

In spite of A List Apart’s running at a loss, in the early 2010s I co-founded two businesses that spun out of it: An Event Apart design conference with Eric Meyer, and A Book Apart with Mandy Brown (later replaced by CEO Katel LeDu) and Jason Santa Maria. And during those first years, business was great.

We published HTML5 For Web Designers the day after Steve Jobs, waving an iPhone on the world’s biggest stage (okay, sitting at his desk), announced that Flash was dead because HTML5 would bring app-like dynamism to the web using open standards instead of proprietary code. It (our first book, I mean) sold brilliantly. “Gee, publishing isn’t that hard” I naively told myself. (No, I knew it was hard. My favorite publishers had been laying off my favorite editors for ten years before my partners and I took the plunge. But the early success did make me think the books we published about web design would always find a large, eager audience. In time, I would learn otherwise.)

And while we began the publishing house by relying on the best writers we knew personally to write about the topics they were most passionate about, I’m proud to say that, as we went along, we also discovered brilliant first-time book authors, helping them create perfectly polished, fluff-free manuscripts that made genuine contributions to our readers’ understanding of UX and all it entails. (And not just to our readers. The insights they brought to their work after digesting our books rubbed off on their colleagues.)

In giving these brilliant writers a platform, we not only helped them take their careers to the next level, we also helped people who create web content think and work better, which in turn helped the people who used the websites, applications, and products our readers designed and built. Of that, I am proud.

Stay hungry

An Event Apart (RIP) was also a damned fine early success. Web designers liked our innovation of a multi-day, single-track conference, with a holistic approach to web design, code, and content, and unifying themes between the individual talks. Our freaking-amazing speakers debuted Huge Ideas including Mobile First and Responsive Web Design—ideas which, like perfect contextual menus in UX, arrived at the very moment designers needed them.

Not only that, but these humble geniuses also sat in the auditorium with our audience for all three days of each conference event: listening to each other’s presentations, and updating their own presentations to better bounce off each other’s ideas and the evolving themes of that particular show. 

I could spend hours telling you how our producer Toby M. made miracles happen at every show, or how person-in-charge Marci E. brought joy to our community. How many of our speakers became authors. How some “graduated” from An Event Apart as newcomers replaced them. How the diversity of our speaking line-up, which wasn’t terrific in 2008, improved greatly each year. (Not that we ever said, “We need another black speaker” or “We need a trans speaker” or what-have-you. Just that we learned to swim outside the pool we came from, and discover great talent everywhere.) Our speakers were also almost uniformly Just Nice Good People, which doesn’t always happen when you’re collecting the greatest minds in an industry. 

That’s not even to mention the incredible people who attended our shows, some of whom became lifetime friends for me.

So why, given the joy these businesses brought to everyone connected to them, including me, would my partners and I have even conceived of an exit strategy? We wanted the Good Times to roll on forever.

But of course they never do.

Things end

COVID did in An Event Apart. Some conferences survived, of course. Different priorities, different overheads, different business models. Some that survived do not pay their speakers. Others, where the conference is an adjunct to a bigger business, laid off or reassigned conference staff while the pandemic made live events impossible. Others that survived mostly rely on volunteer labor, whereas we had paid staff. They were worth their weight in platinum, and we’d have paid them more (because they were worth more) if the pandemic and six-figure hotel contracts hadn’t made continuing the show impossible. My partner and I earned nothing during the business’s last five years, and got personally stuck with a six-figure debt when the event closed. It is what it is.

Although books should be COVID-proof, multiple financial problems eventually beset our publishing house as well. For most of the run of the business, my partner and I earned nothing beyond the glow of contributing to our community’s knowledge. We paid our CEO, authors, and editors, kept nothing for ourselves, and tried, oh how we tried, to keep the business going as its revenues tanked.

Speaking only for myself, I’ve learned that I am good at starting businesses and keeping them going creatively, as long as somebody else figures out the money. I suck at that, and I’m obsessed with the notions of fairness and self-sacrifice that were drummed into me by a narcissistic family that valued me for taking on the roles they were emotionally incapable of handling—such as bringing up my baby brother in my father’s absence, which no child is  equipped or should be asked to do, and yet it happens all the time. Growing up this way made me put my own self-interest last. Which is also why it never occurred to me to plan an exit. And by the time I needed to do so, the businesses were not in shape to sell.

Closing a conference is bad, but attendees can go to other conferences, and speakers can speak at other conferences; closing a conference doesn’t end a community. It sucks for the business but doesn’t strand participants.

But closing a publishing house hurts like hell, and you feel you let everybody down. I know how much our closing hurt some of our authors, and I think about that, instead of the good we achieved, when I look back. 

No doubt when my partner and I write the large personal checks to cover our deceased business’s outstanding debts, we’ll be regretting the harm our closing caused, not basking in the warm glow of how many careers we changed for the better. Like the standup comedian who obsesses about the guy who’s frowning at table 3, and doesn’t hear the laughter of the rest of the crowd. We also, hopefully, won’t focus too closely on our financial wreckage. Just pay the bill, and move on.

Anyway, I hadn’t publicly addressed the endings of these businesses, so I figured it was time to do so. I’m sharing my experience only. If you ask any of the people I worked with on these projects, they might have a different story to tell. And that would be their story, and it would be every bit as valid as anything I’ve said here.

I also didn’t ask permission of my partners, speakers, or authors before sharing these thoughts. Probably I should have. But, hey. As I’ve said. I’m speaking here only for myself.

So, anyway.

Parting gift

Is it worth the risk of starting a web-related business that isn’t a venture-backed startup? I still think it is, and I applaud all who try. Heck, I might even do so myself someday. If you’re doubtful because of (((gestures at everything))), it might be worth noting that I started Happy Cog during the dot-com crash, when studios were closing all around me. And we launched A Book Apart during the world financial crisis of late 2008. Don’t let (((all this))) deter you from trying something bold. Let me know when you do. I’ll keep watching the skies.

P.S. Under swell third-party ownership and management, Happy Cog is still going strong. Check it out!

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How to Join Blue Beanie Day: Wear and Share!

Saturday, 30 November 2024, marks the 17th annual Blue Beanie Day celebration. It’s hard to believe, but web standards fan Douglas Vos conceived of this holiday way back in ’07:

The origin of the name of the holiday is the image of Jeffrey Zeldman on the cover of his book wearing a blue knit cap.[7][8][9] Over the years, the Blue Beanie Day also became an action day for web accessibility, for which the correct use of web standards is a basic requirement.[8] — Wikipedia

How can you join this year’s fun? That’s easy! Snap a self-portrait wearing a blue beanie and post your Blue Beanie Day photo to Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Facebook, your blog (you’ve still got one, right?), and whatevs. Hashtag: #BlueBeanieDay.

No blue toque to call your own? Kevin Cornell’s venerable illustration to the rescue! Download the zipped Photoshop file here. If you like, you can ping this web page with a link to your post’s URL. See below for details.

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Lessons from Cats: Jasper’s Clever Cleanup Routine

My daughter and I have three cats—all rescues:

There’s Snow White, our 16-year-old queen and my daughter’s consigliere, who, despite requiring thrice-a-week medication injections to keep her kidneys functioning, rules this place absolutely.

There’s subtle Mango, whose first year of life involved struggling to survive—and avoid human contact—in a weedy vacant lot adjoining the United Nations Secretariat building, and who, since entering our family, spends nearly all day, every day hiding. He hides under my bed until it’s time to hide in a closet. Once hidden in a closet, he becomes magically invisible until he chooses to reveal himself, hours later, staring at us from the end of a hallway, meowing softly, or waking me for cuddles at 3:00 am. (Somehow if I am on my back, asleep, I am less frightening to him than when standing or moving, and this lessening of fear allows him to settle near me and assure me that, despite all his hiding, he loves me.)

Jasper the kitten

But today’s story is about the junior member of our feline menagerie, Jasper—discovered at age two months, challenging death by dashing back and forth across car-and-bus-and-bike-ridden East 34th Street in Manhattan, apparently quite lost. We adopted him pronto and eased him into his elders’ company. He’s now nearly a year old, is longer and bigger than his elders (with huge paws—mark that—indicating how much larger he will grow), is curious about everything and fears nothing, loves people and two particular dogs as much as he loves Snow White and Mango, and is keen-witted beyond his years … and beyond most people’s guess as to the limits of a cat’s intellect.

Want proof? Slightly after dawn this morning, Jasper did something very smart (but also quite disgusting). So set aside your coffee and crumpets while I tell the tale:

A morning surprise

All three cats share one giant litter box in my bathroom, giving the room less-than-spa-spotlessness. I never feel completely clean on stepping out of the shower, because, at the very least, my preternaturally alert yoga feet will provide detailed feedback on every speck of cat litter that somehow inhabits the floor, no matter how often I sweep and mop it. If I owned a house, I could stash the litter box somewhere else, but I live in a New York apartment, so my potty casa is their potty casa.

I cleaned the cat box yesterday. But somehow, despite the relative freshness of its sands this morning, Jasper got cat shit on the bottom of his paws.

There was also cat shit tracked all over my bathroom floor and the hall between my bathroom door and the door to my room.

I suspect that Snow White (who is, after all, saddled with sick kidneys, and who pees on “puppy training pads” about ten times a day) somehow knocked a buried turd out of the deep sand onto my floor. Either that, or a messy fragment of her morning meditation got stuck to her fur and thence tracked everywhere. Thus did a noticeable layer of shit end up coating young Jasper’s pads.

The clever bit

But the fun part is, seeking cleanliness, young Jasper jumped up on my sink counter, which is always slightly wet (because New York apartment plumbing is, well, legendary) and tracked shit prints all over my sink to get the shit off his paws.

The keen-witted kitten had calculated correctly that that a wet stone or formica surface would, if contacted repeatedly, eventually clean all the shit off of him. And it worked. It cleaned his paws, and left me plenty of janitorial tasks to perform.

Thus, before coffee or even a sip of water, my first duty on waking on this American holiday morning was to address a poo-streaked double sink and dreck-dappled tile floor.

Which I didn’t mind, because I enjoy tackling unexpected little handyman jobs, even deeply unglamorous ones, first thing in the morning. Gets the heart going. Keeps me from jumping compulsively into desk work by giving me something slightly more physical to do first.

And of course I was proud of little Jasper’s creativity in figuring out how to wash his hands, as it were. Good boy!

Anyway, I got it all clean this morning and took all the mess down to the recycling room. We don’t pay our porters enough.

The moral to my tale

I hope you enjoyed my story as much as I enjoyed sharing it. And please remember, the animals we’re privileged to live with are far smarter than we give them credit for. And, most mysterious of all, in spite of all that intellect, they love us. 

The post Lessons from Cats: Jasper’s Clever Cleanup Routine appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

A List Apart contributors list on Bluesky

I’ve started a Bluesky list featuring some of the brilliant writers, designers, coders, editors, and others who’ve contributed to A List Apart “for people who make websites” from the magazine’s first dawning back in the 19(mumbles). Bluesky fans, grab the list here:

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pgjpl4opnmqxxpb74n4vuabv/lists/3lbozpqe2kq2t

Why only *some* of the contributors? Simple. Several are, sadly, deceased. Many others are likely alive and well but not yet on Bluesky. We can’t unmake death, but we can offer the living networked comradeship and a wee increase in visibility.

So if you’re an A List Apart contributor who’s been thinking of joining Bluesky, consider this an incentive. Note: I’m not a partner in Bluesky, and have nothing to gain from inviting you, beyond the pleasure of your company—be it salty or sweet.

Once you join and have started a profile, ping me and I’ll add you to the list. (I’m zeldman.bsky.social on Bluesky.)

And, hey, if you haven’t yet contributed to A List Apart, your ideas are always welcome.

Online since 1998, A List Apart (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. About the magazine. | Complete list of Authors. | Style Guide. Cheers!

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