Items of Interest

Collecting amazing and interesting things on the web.

Page 43

A List Apart: Articles: Facilitating Great Design

June 28, 2012

a list apart / business / design

Today’s web design professionals practice any mix of graphic design, information architecture, user interface design, usability testing, user research, and front-end or back-end development skills. The value of the modern web design professional is not those disciplines, however, but the ability to combine them to solve real problems, especially as a group. Effective group work requires structured, strategic meetings, and good facilitation provides that structure.

A List Apart: Articles: Building Books with CSS3

June 28, 2012

a list apart / books / css / css3 / design

While historically, it’s been difficult at best to create print-quality PDF books from markup alone, CSS3 now brings us the Paged Media Module, which targets print book formatting. “Paged” media exists as finite pages, like books and magazines, rather than as long scrolling stretches of text, like most websites. With a single CSS stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an ePub file.

Experimental Theology: Justification and Works Based Righteousness

June 27, 2012

new testament / paul / richard-beck / spirituality

I think this is the deep issue the Apostle Paul was speaking to in his letters. We tend to think of works based righteousness in moral terms. That we could be “good enough” to earn our way into heaven. No doubt moral performance can be a part of this. But few of us feel that we are saints enough to make such a claim. Despite what the “faith alone” preachers say, moral forms of works based righteousness aren’t all that common, if they exist at all. I’ve never encountered a soul who felt they were good enough to merit heaven.
But we do name drop. We do attach ourselves to titles and positions. And in each of these cases we are trying to justify our existence, to prove that we matter, to give evidence that we are significant. This is the sickness I think Paul was really after.