As more academic and academic related staff adopt the ‘individual as institution’ approach, institutions must reflect on their response. Readers familiar with Twitter may be familiar with the phrase “The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the views of my employer”. This is an often cited phrase designed as a response to risk averse “social media policies”, which have the effect of further distancing the individual and individual thought from host institutions.
A train arrives at the M Shed
How to spend a Sunday
Add nth-child to your css toolkit
I have skimmed over nth-child (css) for the past few years, effectively ignoring it and boy was I silly for doing so. Picture this typical scenario:
I often have items in a list that are laid out horizontally and covering multiple rows. Until I discovered nth-child I was closing that list at the end of each row and starting a new list for each row so that I could control the margins and padding to ensure each item was correctly aligned.
Although this works it is very wasteful and assumes that all rows are different which isn’t always true. Then I stumbled across a tutorial by Trevor Davis who works at the amazing Viget. In a tutorial about css-transforms and diamonds I discovered he was using nth-child to change the margin for items that start on each row and it was this explanation that was my light-bulb moment with nth-child.
Over at Css-tricks where I could lose days learning new techniques they explain how nth-child works very well and I suggest you head over there now to see it in action.
I have just added nth-child to my base templates and implemented it for a current project for CUPP. On the Shop page I have used nth-child to space the 4th and 5th items so they can sit nicely between the row above.
A blog as ebook
This week Amber Thomas released an ebook of all her blog posts from the Jisc digital infrastructure team blog.
Having read pretty much all of those posts over the years and getting a lot out of them, returning the favour by way of an ebook was the least I could do.
Amber explained how everything went pretty well so I don’t have much to add except that including any comments from a blog is a rather interesting point for consideration which i’ll save for a future ramble.
So dust off your ebook reader (oh no he didn’t!) and enjoy the best of Amber Thomas.
Hello World: travels in virtuality – the ebook
At the weekend I wrapped up a project turning ‘Hello World: travels in virtuality ‘ by Sue Thomas into both Kindle and epub files.
The book was originally released in dead-tree’s format back in 2004 and digital publishing has allowed us to breath a new lease of life into the book and be easily available to the world!
If you want to hear more about how I made the book let me know and i’ll write something but you can just as easily read Ahab! by Craig Mod which covers all the ground and points you to a helpful sample project. One of the key resources in Craig’s article is to the Kindle previewer which will display the ebook file in all generations of Kindle, saving you having to purchase all of the devices. My top tip is to start with the newest versions and work back until you get bored.
The Kindle version is now available to purchase for only £2.05.
Audio recordings from Responsive Day Out
Last week I attended the very affordable one day Responsive Day out in Brighton. It was on the subject of emerging practices within the web industry on responsive web design. I really enjoyed the day and think the format of 3x 30min talks per block is really good and I didn’t miss any of the pricey conference “things” they skipped out on to keep the cost down – more of this please!
All of the sessions were recorded and are now available to listen to, enjoy.
04 Publishing jargon
On my ebook publishing journey I have begun to stumble across processes, stages and phrases that use traditional print terminology. I will note them here for my own sanity and maybe that of others as I figure where it makes sense we should use existing and established phrases.
- Galley proof – used to describe review copies of a print book
- Uncorrected proof – commonly used in place of ‘galley proof’ for digital books
- Name of punctuation and general typography – a list down the right of key technical terms…. a tilde is not a squiggle!
My reading list for 2013
Another year, another list of the long form books I have read. 2013 is the first year that I have my own personal Kindle (dedicated digital book reader for anybody reading this after about 2015) and it will be interesting to see if I get more read and also “where” I read. I also have a stack of print books that could see me through the next couple of years.
- Chimero, Frank. The Shape of Design. 2012 [kindle] – finished 5th January
- Bjarnason, Baldur. Knights & Necromancers 2: Loot, kill, obey. 2012 [kindle] – finished 9th January
- Stephenson, Neal. Reamde. 2012 [kindle] – finished 29th January on London underground
- J-Zone. Root for the villain. Rap, bullshit, and a celebration of failure. Cambria Heights, NY, Old Maid Entertainment, 2011. [kindle] – finished 4th February at home
- Kawasaki and Welch. APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How to Publish a Book, 2013 [kindle] – finished 15th March
- The Standardistas. The Craft of Words. Five Simple Steps Publishing Ltd, 2013 [Kindle] – finished 15th March
- Wurz, Julia. SuperEgo. 2013 [kindle] – finished 12th April
- Guillebeau, Chris. The $100 Startup. 2012 – finished 1st June
- Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup. 2011 [paperback] – finished 11th August
- deWitt, Patrick. The Sisters Brothers. 2011 [paperback] – finished 15th August
- Hammersley, Ben. Now for then – how to face the digital future without fear. 2013 [kindle] – finished 17th September in Bordeaux France.
- Allen, David. Getting Things Done. 2002 [Kindle] – finished 30th October
Force Kindle to display frontmatter first
When you first load a kindle file it may start on any number of pages as set by the book designer. I am not sure if an ebook should start on the cover as this is visible in the library.
Anyway, a problem I had today was that my book kept starting on the first chapter and bypassing the frontmatter, foreword and introduction.
After various wimperings on the #eprdctn hashtag I stumbled across the solution and am documenting it before I forget.
To control/force the kindle to start on your page of choice you need to do the following it seems:
- open content.opf
- scroll to the GUIDE section
- You only need three items in here – i originally had all chapters but reading around seems to say this is pointless: cover, toc, and your chosen first page as references.
- Change/add a reference for your chosen page to <reference type=”text” href=”frontmatter.html”/></reference>
- Done
Setting the reference to type fixed the problem. I had read that you need to use “start” but that seemed to be where I failed.
It is interesting to think about what page should be first, would a reader care about frontmatter or just the author and publisher?…. a post for the future me thinks.
Thanks to Tom for leading me to the correct path.