Some random bits for the day...

For one thing, I'm finding Digg to be a nice little alternative to SlashDot for generally nerdy technically oriented interweb news and ideas.

Check out this blog called The Shape of Days.  It's written by a fellow in Dallas named Jeff Harrell.

For one thing, the web design is stunningly beautiful.

But he's got some very interesting ideas there.  I'm especially intrigued by his hack that automatically adds dropshadows to all images using JavaScript and CSS (!!!).  I'm not sure if it's really the most *proper* way to do it, but it sure is slick.

And I like his writing on politics.  And other random stuff.

[Later: Sad to report that The Shape of Days is no longer. The domain now hosts some childish anonymous Democratic party propaganda site.]

Last week I picked up a book called The Zen of CSS Design.  It's a collection of notes and analysis for the Zen Garden CSS project.

Now... I didn't know about this.  Here check it out: http://www.CSSZenGarden.com.

What they did was create an HTML web page with some basic content, and then challanged web artists and designers to make creative presentations out of it.  The trick is that the presentations had to be implmented entirely in Style Sheets, and the HTML page itself could not be changed at all.  That's quite a challange, and since true artists love challanges and limitations, the results are pretty remarkable.

Some of my favorites are:

• Bonsai Sky
• Kelmscott
• C-Note
• Tulipe

Oh, and for contrast, the original page is here.

Impressive, eh?

(I guess I'm going to have to apply some of this soon.)