Jonathan Kahn at A List Apart on choosing a CMS solution:

The rise of content strategy is dealing the content management industry a huge kick up the backside. In the web’s Wild West era, the CMS was run by the IT department—or sometimes a lone webmaster who knew HTML—so CMS choices were based on features, price, and cultural fit, rather than web or content strategy. It was the classic IT drill: selection committees, feature matrices, and business lunches with men wearing neckties.

The times they are a-changin’. According to Lisa Welchman, the web is now “the organization’s primary communications, sales, marketing, and transactional vehicle.” A CMS vendor’s target audience used to be the IT Director, and a successful outcome meant each department could easily update their content silo. Now, the target audience is an organization’s internal editorial infrastructure; and a successful outcome is a complex mix of achieving business objectives, implementing a content strategy, and crafting a user experience. The game just got more serious.

He goes on to discuss customizing the CMS around organization’s content model. I feel this is one area where Expression Engine, my CMS of choice, excels: publish and edit forms can be customized endlessly to fit your content structure and metadata needs.

Just came across this list of 35 best practices for speeding up page loads. Some of these recommendations are common sense, but several are new to me: choose <link> over @import, host static components on a separate domain, put scripts at the bottom of the page, etc.

Worth a bookmark.

“This is a visualization of the network packets of a YouTube video, slowed down 12 times. You can clearly see the handshake, some odd client/server negotiation, and the full ramp-up.”

Packet Flight: RickRoll @ 12X from Carlos Bueno on Vimeo.

PIE stands for Progressive Internet Explorer. It is an IE attached behavior which, when applied to an element, allows IE to recognize and display a number of CSS3 properties.

HTC file that enables CSS3 styles in IE6-8. Could save a lot of headaches.

Library of “user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done.” If you’ve spent any time on the web, each of these will be familiar.

In order for your images (and text) to maintain their “real” size all you need to do is add in a meta tag (below) to your site’s head section.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0">

Effectively this is telling Safari (these meta tags are Apple specific) to set the scale to 1, in other words render everything at the original/native size.

Via Think Vitamin

Validates your site’s HTML, CSS, RSS, etc. from one URL.

Craig Hockenberry on the lure of native iPhone apps:

With such great tools available and talented developers that know how to exploit them, the iPhone should be overflowing with web applications, right? Actually, the opposite is true: there are over 100,000 titles on iTunes and only a handful of popular applications have been created with web standards.

He suggests most iPhone apps begin as cross platform, web standards-based apps. But…

Eventually, you’ll encounter situations that can’t be solved with web standards. Maybe it’s something like feature requests from users who want to upload photos or access their list of contacts. Some users will explicitly ask for an iPhone app because so many of their other favorite sites have customized solutions.

There can also be internal pressures from your own designers and developers. They’ll find that navigation and data management are more difficult as the scope of the application increases. When you start to feel like you’re reinventing the wheel, sometimes it’s best just to use the wheel that Apple’s already built.

The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI framework.

…The mobile web is desperately in need of a framework that is capable of working across all browsers, allowing developers to build truly mobile web sites. We’re doing all we can to ensure that jQuery Mobile fills that need.

Nice. Love the jQuery.

Via Daring Fireball

CSS reset, suggested site structure and a rudimentary HTML5 template all in one package. Nice way to get started with HTML5 and CSS3 development. Includes Modernizr.js, templates for @font-face and CSS media queries, etc. Looks super handy.