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?…

After two and a half great years working and (occasionally) living in web.burza, I’m fast-forwarding to a new chapter on my path to make the internet a better place. Even though I’m still a kind of emotionally attached to web.burza, I took the opportunity to work in a project-oriented environment in Adria Media Zagreb (AMZ for short), one of the leading media groups here in Croatia.

AMZ is a joint venture of Sanoma Magazines International B.V. and Gruner + Jahr AG & Co. AMZ is also partially owned by Styria Medien AG. Those three companies are already having a few significant web projects in the local markets around Europe. As such, AMZ is very ambitious about being a top player in the Croatian internet space, so they were determined to secure the productive environment for a team of in-house experts.

Kristijan Soldo, the Manager of the Internet Department, approached Tomaš, Marko and me and since we set conditions and met each other’s expectations surprisingly early, we all accepted the offer very quickly.

Working on one project at the time without insane deadlines and demanding clients on a budget made a switch for me, as well as the opportunity to fully focus on a limited number of specialized internet destinations from the grounds up. To prune such a project, twist it and help it grow without lengthy presentations, argumentations or technical debates was another plus. Kristijan is a long-time internet professional with clear goals, fully confident in his team members capabilities.

Web.burza was an extraordinary place to work in, participate in handful of diverse projects, learn about new technologies and experiment with various new media concepts. My work in web.burza resulted in tremendous hands-on experience with front-end development and resulted in a few popular client-side development methods. I had a chance to deploy web standards in a real-life scenarios and practice modern web design on a dozen of high-profile projects — once again proving that there is a place for accessible CSS-based layouts beyond blogs and personal web pages.

Even though the three of us are leaving to AMZ, web.burza still has a bags of young talents fully capable to keep its position as a most awarded and innovative web agency in Croatia. With the extensive portfolio of pieces released in the last two years being visually extraordinary, yet fully standards compliant web sites/applications, web.burza set the standards for all the other local and world-wide agencies to follow.

The most noticeable projects web.burza produced in the last couple of years include web.burza.hr, www.hellgatelondon.com, www.coolinarika.com, www.vegeta.com, www.nacional.hr, www.oktal-pharma.hr, www.rtl.hr, www.borja.org, www.groovecaffe.com… as well as a dozens of small and medium business web sites…

But, the true heartbreaker is leaving web.burza people… I will miss morning coffee in the office kitchen, Mac evangelism and random photo shootings. “What if… ?” meetings and deadline overnights in the office (well, at least the social aspect of these…).

I’m not only leaving a bunch of gifted colleagues, but also a group of great friends. This is by no means a “Good bye.”, more like “See you around!”.

— photo by Mirko Beović

Take a look at more beauties of Croatia…

Impressed? I have 4 cards for 4 recepients. Drop me a line with your postal address and I’ll send you one. Unfortunately, we are out of cards, but all your addresses are in queue for the next round!

I went to a local computer store the other day to buy myself a new keyboard. I lost the ‘space’ on the old one.

My fellow colleague pho went with me and that was fatal… He made me do it… I bought Logitech G-15 gaming keyboard.

Damn! The keyboard is great! And apparently, my MX510 mice is in love with my new keyboard.

Do you remember the Dom scripting book by Jeremy Keith? Well, the guy is going to speak at the one day workshop about the AJAX at the Digital Sandbox, NYC.

Why I’m telling you this? Because, unfortunately, I had to refuse a special invitation from the organizers (sorry, guys)… (Ed: First, I missed the @media, now it seems I’m going to miss this one, too.)

Nevertheless, if you’re going, don’t forget to pick up your Survival Kit (or better said a ‘Surprise’ Kit) and, of course, say ‘hello’ to NY in my behalf.

I’ll be visiting the world’s largest dog show, the Kennel Club Crufts 2006 from 8-12 March.

The show is held at the Birmingham NEC, so if you’ll be anywhere near, drop me a line and we can drink a beer in a local pub and chat about web development and/or life in general… (speaking of which, feel free to recommend some food & drink places in Birmingham).

On the side note, the British embassy is lifting of visa restrictions on nationals of Croatia after 22 March 2006. And yes, I had to go through all this visa procedure, including paying the application fee (argh!), ‘cause the agreement is still not active. And no, it’s not funny.

Anyway, this will be my first trip to the UK. Unfortunately there will be no time for museums and such, but hell, missus promised someday we are going to visit for the sole tourism purposes.

The other day, I spoke with a friend about how much he will pay for the internet connection, once he come back to Croatia from the USA.

There’re a few options of connecting currently vailable here in Croatia, and here are my average monthly costs: Continue reading ›

So far, I never had a need to chat via Mac, since the Skype covers it both – Win and Mac systems alike. What would be your Mac messenger of choice and why? Do Mac people generally practice instant messaging, or are they more the e-mail type?

Okay, so an average man can’t go to a vacation without TV or newspaper, if he don’t want to miss the world goes ‘round. I’m not that kind of person. Actually, I really enjoyed my vacation with the family. I did nothing for a week, just burned my skin in the sun and ran around the beach after my little monster.

The Return of the Dead

After that pretentious subtitle, there’s no a movie review.

Okay, up until now – every rat and his neighbor visited A List Apart. I’m so glad I missed all that mess around design decisions on it’s redesign. These debates are quite exhausting and often useless… Anyway, gg to the team.

What I’d like to see more than a sweet redesign – is the quality content we used to read more often at ALA (and not just there). Personally, I’d like to see a new ideas, edge pushing and such – more conceptual stuff. For me, the XHTML, CSS and DOM techniques became pretty secondary (no, I’m not saying boring). I see those in exact same way like my father, the tailer, sees the new cutting machine.

Oxton is back. That’s a good news. Hilhorst is creative (and conceptual from above paragraph). That’s even better.

Pre-election Promises or What’s Due

It’s code name is TypeTester. You should see it by the end of the week. That would be if you’re a beta tester. You’re not? Become one.

This blog will be reworked. It’s boring and limiting. Watch this space for… oh, crap – what a cliché! If it happens, you’ll know it.

In March 2004 unpljugged studio found and applied their flash replacement concept at Blackduke v.10.

Update

Just a small clarification: sIFR is by Mike Davidson (the s is for scalable). It is based upon IFR, which stands for Inman Flash Replacement. IFR was first mentioned in February 2004. and introduced and explained in April 2004.

Update 2

Actually, it was Duke himself who made the .swf file and also it was his idea, guys from UP just made it work.

Along with the announcement/release of IE7 beta, we at web.burza silently dropped support for IE5.01 for Windows. That decision came after we did quite a few high-profile general audience web sites completely with web standards, and after we found that there’s really, really low number of visitors viewing pages with that browser. We tend to believe that the most of the IE5 visitors on those web sites are ourselves, looking for unpredicted bugs. Continue reading ›

So far we know it’s not new maratz.com and it’s not Lorem ipsum generator.

It is a .GIF image, but that would be great answer if this was a trick question. It is some kind of widget, but not dashboard widget. It is designer’s tool, but not layout generator.

And a bonus riddle:

“I’m the beginning of the end
You can see me twice in a week but not in a day
Once in year but twice a decade
What am I?”

Blinksale is now available and I gave it a spin. The idea behind this application is management of the invoices you send to your clients. Nothing revolutionary—it’s simplified online contact/mail manager/organizer. Yet, what makes it different is its’ simplicity and top-notch interface. Continue reading ›

A book baton, another from the series of this years’ run-around-the-blogosphere marathons, has been passed to me by my fellow blogger Cody Lindley. I found this one interesting, because I swallowed quite a few books lately, some of them web design/development related. Continue reading ›

It’s not new maratz.com, it’s not Lorem ipsum generator.

Due to a sudden goodbye of John Oxton, Andy Arikawa and Dunstan Orchard to the standards blogging community, I felt strong sense of emptiness. It’s always far more difficult for those who stay, than to those who are leaving. There is, however, a constant fluctuation of the new hopes. Continue reading ›

Yesterday my wife and I celebrated our *cough* third anniversary *cough*. Being my best friend and the person who knows me best, she had no problem finding a perfect gift, the Veer Font Savant T-shirt.

Thanks for allowing me to be in love with you and I promise I’ll grow-up someday… but not today : )

Every year in the spring, I’m looking forward to weekends at the country-side at my parents’. Everything is blooming and flowers are all over the backyard—plenty of nice camera targets… Here’s what I came across:

So, you are doing interface design? How about designing user interface for my cooker? “Why?”—you ask. Well, the other day Luka’s grandma attempted to warm his bottle, but she had a problem guessing which switch-button is for which burner on our kitchen cooker… Continue reading ›

While the most of my neighbors tried to reach through to their cars, Bobbs had fun running over the field. Here’s a sequence of ‘the crazy run’… Continue reading ›

Sheesh! Since i started working in Burza, there’s so much goin’ on, but very little time to write about. I’m currently working on a new news portal, and (re)discovered some nifty CSS tricks. ‘Watch our next episode for more!’

My ideal job offer would be something like: “Hey Marko, we’d like to have you in our team! Are you interested?”. Hell, now it’s too late, because i had that conversation 3 weeks ago. That’s right—i’m proud member of web.burza. Continue reading ›

“Content is the king”, but aren’t they also saying “what really matters is not what you say, but how you say it”? Building and managing better web sites became very complex task as the medium evolved from pure-text-plus-image-flyer to a multy disciplinary dynamic presentation of some information. I’m certainly not the top expert in the area, but let me point out a few things i’ve been thinking about recently. Continue reading ›

Just wanted to say “Hi!” to all of you visitors coming from Cameron’s. Interesting, some of you might experience bad things happening here this afternoon, because i’ve been playing with layout of the blog’s home page most of the day, today. Coincidentally. It really has nothing with the fact Cameron listed this site. No, really it hasn’t. Interested in more on Wicked Worn Look? Continue reading ›

Not so recent Jon Hicks’ “Geekend2” post made me thinking about what are people i virtualy meet over the Internet like in real life. I mean, we are reading each other’s thoughts and thinkings, and we are being influenced by other people writings in many ways. And depending on that—in fact pretty superficial social interaction—we are creating a certain image of that person in our minds. Continue reading ›

Some of my visitors had minor problems with display of the page. Basic design has three different static layers with transparent .PNG’s as background-images brought for the pleasure of Mozilla/Opera/Safari users. Internet Explorer don’t have this feature. It seems that older display adapters have some difficulties with rendering this kind of styling. ATI Radeon 9000 and above shouldn’t have any problems.

So now you have one more alternative—make yourself at home and play with the options placed at the top right section of each page, or just try it here:

• no shadow and scrolling background image
• no shadow, scrolling background image and the text color is black
• resets to default styling with all shadows and fixed background image

I like reading blogs, sharing oppinions and this whole trend of internet and how it helps people from different parts of the world to get to know each other in some level. But do these all individuals have a life beyond blogging around? What’s the center of their world? Is it their own blog or…? What’s the center of mine? Thanks for asking.

Intro

This little handsome on your left is the center of our world (my wife’s and mine). I didn’t want it to be that way, but it just happened. It is that way from the first moment i saw him in a hospital (i was there near my wife during deliverance). He occupies our time a lot, but we still can manage to do some activities, besides feeding, cleaning after him and playing.

Some secondary level activites (besides our jobs and internet) are going to a movie teather, having a good time spending evening with our friends drinking red wine or beer, eating enormous amounts of chinese food and different sorts of other spicy meals, walking and playing with our dog, …

Why writing a blog?

Lately, there have been a few posts discussing about how to achieve popularity of your blog and how to become world known blogger: 1, 2 and 3. I read those posts, but felt no need to join the race (not that i think bad of someone who did, on contrary).

“maratz.com” blog’s purpose is to be some kind of my public journal. It is my public journal and honestly if someone doesn’t find its’ content interesting, probably it’s a person i wouldn’t meet in the real world neither. On the other hand, a few of you who are actualy reading it, i guess we have some similar oppinions and i’m pleased to know someone of my kind.

A few less known, but my usuals are Dexlo, Moments and Cody Lindley (no particular order).

Sharing Tips

The coding tips i’m bringing once in a while are here for the sake of my moral obligation to return something to community. If you like it—use it. If you don’t like it—that’s your loss. If you know better—share it. If you know better, but don’t want to share—get out of here, i don’t need you.

Been bussy for some time collecting selected articles on Netiquette. “my best friend” threw some very interesting definitions of Netiquette. Very cute and actual is definition at RIO Glossary:

” network etiquette; an informal group of rules and ways of behaving on the Internet. Example: sending spam, unwanted E-mail, is bad netiquette. “

Any article would help (your or other people’s) – don’t be shy to share.

Marlon Brando, one of the best actors ever, dies at 80 and it hits me badly…

We all know how IE is a bad browser, but we’ll have no use of great technologies such as RSS, whitout offering to average visitors at least free piece of software, like Pluck. Works with IE 6.0 only, but it’s better than nothing. Not the best of a kind, but certainly a good start.

Went through some old notes, and added the most interesting parts to archives. Hint: right column > ARCHIVES : )

Hello to myself. This is my first official post here. If there’s someone else reading this, please reply…

Well, let’s start. Blog?… Done! Bullies?… Done! Webdesign?… Done! It appears website runs smoothly. Let’s see if you can find some bugs and report ‘em to me, so I can roll my sleeves up and get back to digging into the code : ).