The web is too much: trends, technologies and what you can do if you don’t need sleep…
If you live much of your life on the web, as we do at Freshleaf, you have days when you’re inspired by the sheer wealth of ‘new stuff’ which appears on a daily basis, and other days when it all makes you want to go hide under a rock somewhere.
I read a post recently on Pro-Blogger about a blogger who had just given up. Faced with the overwhelming amount of new developments in and around the world of web on an almost daily basis, he just didn’t want the pressure of keeping up with it all. And I think we’ve all felt his pain.
I have blogs and article sites that I love to read, partly because I hope they’ll keep me up to date, but mainly because they’re so damn well written and interesting. But I have to limit the amount of time that I spend reading them because while I end up better informed, I keep hitting ‘open link in new tab’, and before I know it I’ve got 96 tabs open and three hours have vanished.
Between the dialogue, the new developments, and the damn San Franciscan web designers who keep showing us all up because they have time to tinker with exciting new design stuff in between driving open top cars and going to parties at Google’s house… it can all start to feel a bit daunting. There all these things that you’re vaguely aware that you should be looking into, or would be nice to use, but you only actually get time for if you don’t need to, say, sleep.
For example: Google has just added benchmarking to its analytics: now I have to go check our site against everyone else’s, and do the same for all our clients. Two, yesterday Six Revisions posted “Innovative (and Experimental) CSS Examples and Techniques”, including a really nice transparent dropdown menu that I’d like to have a play with. And three, Wilson Miner has just upped the text size on his site to 16px, which it has been pointed out makes the text relatively the same size as if you were reading a magazine article at normal reading distance; and which as he rightly says actually reads easily and looks great… so maybe we should take that into consideration when designing our sites. And that’s just today. Tomorrow will bring a whole new raft of new, interesting information… and I just can’t assimilate it all!!
But, having said all that, I love the internet. Some days I might feel like I could drown in information, but if you took my connection away now it would be like losing a limb. I love all the new shiny things you can find out there every day, and I can’t complain about the great and ever changing tapestry which is the web, after all it’s why I love my job.
Reading List:
Wilson Miner on Relative Readability
Innovative and Experimental CSS Examples and Techniques
Pro-Blogger on being overwhelmed by Web2.0