I did the conversion last week. As I’ve talked about blogs and HTML5 are so natural the whole conversion probably took no more than 8 hours. Of course, that 8 hours was spread out over a few days. Which is one of the big reasons I didn’t post anything last week. I was busy getting this site moved into the future.

I’ve now got 3 sites running on the shiny new futurespec and I can now say I officially like the new semantic elements. I also feel like I’m getting a good handle on them.
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I thought I’d (gently) toss some links at you:

• I read an Introduction to sessionStorage a couple of weeks ago. I approve.

  As it stands, I’m always storing bits of data in globally accessible places (either in the DOM or in a namespaced Data object,) and I always have to document what I’m doing so having a standard place to park data is great.

  The fact that it stretches across an entire session? I love it. Especially since it’s so straightforward when compared with cookies. I hate dealing with cookies. It feels like coding through a time machine. sessionStorage is much more modern. Convenience FTW.

• Of less interest to me on a practical level was Computing with JavaScript Web Workers. It’s cool, but for the stuff I do? Not immediately useful.

  Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’ll get some computationally expensive problem and will end up using them next week or something.

• JavaScript is represented strongly on the 30 Most Influential People In Programming list. Care to guess at the JS names included?
• Interested in the ongoing discussion of web fonts (the embeddable, fancy kind?) one of my co-workers, Colin Henson is working on a great series outlining the whole shebang. check out: Web Fonts part 1 and Web Fonts part 2.

  We worked together on the redesign of CramerOnline.com where we used Cufon for headers, so it’s very topical around the office.

  Quick verdict on Cufon, btw? Slightly tricky, but definitely ready for prime time

• While I appreciate all the grassroots efforts to rid the web of Internet Explorer 6, the real way we rid ourselves of that beast lies not with us, as developers, but with IT departments where they control every piece of software on their users machines.

  It’s with that in mind that the good press Windows 7 is getting should be greeted with great joy by web developers the world over. While many IT departments skipped over upgrading to Vista (I know of what I speak, we use XP at work), the lure of Windows 7 might be too much for them to ignore.

  Which would mean IE8 would get a big bump.

  And I would dance a little jig.

1. New elements in HTML 5

   An older (2007) article, but still pretty interesting. I’ve been slowing working my way through some HTML5 stuff. This was part of that effort. If, like me, you’re fascinated by where the web is going*, you should definitely check the article out.

2. Event Tracking Guide

   With event tracking open to everyone we’ve been going nuts with them at work. I’ve also been going nuts with them at home.

   I’m basically smothered in event tracking.

   I’m glad to have it. It saves me from doing non-standard stuff (faking page views) and it saves our analytics analyst the time of having to filter out fake page views from the data.

   Yay Google.

3. Whiteboard Friday – How Do We Plug the Nofollow Leak?

   This isn’t a read, it’s a video But, if you’ve got any interest in SEO, then this discussion of the recent change in the way Google treats rel=nofollow and the way PageRank flows is a must-view.

   SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – How Do We Plug the Nofollow Leak? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

4. 8 fonts you probably don’t use in css, but should

   While I’ve been messing with “real” fonts on the web using Cufon, it’s still a hell of a lot easier to just use old school fonts. The referenced article does a great job of pointing out some neglected fonts that might come in handy on a project.

5. Event delegation in JavaScript

   Attaching an event handler to the document and then delegating based on the target has been on my mind a lot recently. I like the idea and it’s actually come up in two code reviews this week as an alternative to traditional event handling.

   Serendipitous then, that Nicholas Zakas decided to write it up so that I have something fresh to point to when I reference the technique.

*I’m also fascinated by where the web is and where the web has been, so I’m not really picky on those fronts.