I launched the redesign of DrunkenFist.com last night. It’s my second HTML5 site. I took a lot of what I learned from the work we did on A Wider Net and applied it to a much larger project. Fun times.

A couple of notes.
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You’ve all seen this, but now here it is from the official channel.

Speaking of WordPress and HTML5, I’m knee deep in the process of getting DrunkenFist.com relaunched and I’ve been doing the WordPress component for the past few days. It’s super complicated. Which means, of course, I’m having a blast with it

I just wanted to point folks to the small project I started on Google code- Starter Assets.

It’s based on some work I did at Cramer to standardize the development process there. The idea was to provide a standard set of files and a standard file/folder structure for people to start with whenever they were initiating a new project. I’ve expanded on it in this case to (eventually) include several doctypes (right now it’s just xHTML strict- HTML5 will follow soon) and links to popular JavaScript libraries on the Google Ajax Library CDN (just jQuery for now.)*

To use, you’d just download or SVN export the folder that corresponds to the doctype/library combination that strikes your fancy and you’re good to go.

I’ve released it in advance of a blog series I mentioned during my JavaScript presentation this past Thursday. It’s a step-by-step tutorial on how I build web sites called, “Building a Modern Web Site.”
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And here it is:

Slides.

Just in time for me to do it all over again tonight at the Boston JavaScript Meetup. Well, not completely all over again as it’s a new presentation tonight, but it’ll still be two times at NERD this week.

Owing to the contrast on the A/V system, my last slide was illegible, so here are all the links that folks couldn’t see.

The presentation itself:
HTML5 + WordPress

And the resource links:

The working group
http://www.whatwg.org/
Mark Pilgrim’s HTML5 book
Dive into HTML5
The Modernizr library
Modernizr
The outliner
http://gsnedders.html5.org/outliner/
The post talking about Kubrick
I’m Messing Around With an HTML5 Version of the Default WordPress Theme

My other sites:
DrunkenFist.com (art portfolio)
@robreact

I’ll have video of the presentation up shortly (I hope!)

WordCamp Boston is less than a week away, and as part of my presentation I wanted to show the new elements in an environment that basically everyone that works on WordPress sites will recognize- the default theme. To that end, I mocked up a functioning HTML5ized version of the home page to use as an example. That was both easy and fun.
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Mark Pilgrim published his chapter on the new HTML5 form input types:

A Form of Madness

Everybody knows about web forms, right? Make a <form>, a few <input type=”text”> elements, maybe an <input type=”password”>, finish it off with an <input type=”submit”> button, and you’re done.

You don’t know the half of it. HTML5 defines over a dozen new input types that you can use in your forms. And when I say “use,” I mean you can use them right now — without any shims, hacks, or workarounds. Now don’t get too excited; I don’t mean to say that all of these exciting new features are actually supported in every browser. Oh goodness no, I don’t mean that at all. In modern browsers, yes, your forms will kick all kinds of ass. But in legacy browsers, your forms will still work, albeit with less ass kicking. Which is to say, all of these features degrade gracefully in every browser. Even IE 6.

We used the basic ones on the AWiderNet redesign. Quick review: I like them (by basic I mean email, url, etc) as they parallel the things I’ve been doing all along. Beyond the possible user agent enhancements, I’m happy to be able to target CSS using attribute selectors instead of meaningless* classes.

I’m really excited for support for the “fancier” new types. There’s a lot of code overhead out there in the wild for things like sliders and date pickers. Having native controls for very common elements is a big deal.

*Meaningless in that User Agents can’t infer anything from class="email". Clearly humans editing the code can guess what class="email" is all about…

Looking to 2010, these are the big things I’m hoping to accomplish (tech wise):
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We relaunched the Cramer blog today. It’s a soft launch. We’re hoping to shake out any kinks over the quiet time around the holiday. I did the initial HTML5/CSS3 templates and then shepherded the project for a couple of weeks* until I was freed up enough this past week to get the thing out the door.
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I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be speaking at the 1st WordCamp Boston. I’ll be talking about the marriage of two of my favorite technologies: WordPress and HTML5.

The Future is Now: WP Themes With HTML 5

Excited about HTML5? Wish you could start using the new semantic elements right now? You can. In this presentation Rob Larsen will show you how to create cross-browser, HTML5 enhanced WordPress themes using nothing more than a little extra JavaScript, basic WordPress knowledge and some knowledge of the new elements.

Check out the rest of the program.

It takes place January 23, 2010 and is being held at:

Microsoft New England Research and Development Center
1 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142

Thanks once again to Microsoft for hosting pretty much every technology group in the area