A List Apart Reloaded

For the last several years, A List Apart has been the premier web resource for web developers. It’s essentially an online magazine, and published new articles on a regular basis. The articles were always relevant to the practice of web development, from semantics to accessibility to exciting tidbits of code. I always looked forward to the next issue from A List Apart. For the last couple months, the site has been quiet, with no major news or articles appearing.

Until today.

A new issue has been published, containing three new articles. But perhaps even more wonderful was the new design. If you haven’t already, go check it out: I’ll wait. There, done enough ooohing and aaahing? Time to continue.

The new design looks fantastic, and the site is even easier to use. Some of the best names on the web worked on the new site and design, including Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jason Santa Maria. Besides the new design, the architecture of the site was completely redone using Ruby on Rails (which seems to be gaining a lot of popularity these days). I’m still exploring the new site, but I love it already!

Zeldman has written a great article about the redesign. So has Jason.

I’m certainly not the first person to be writing about this, but just had to put in my two cents. ALA has helped me a lot in developing my web skills, what with their excellent assortment of useful articles on various web development subjects. Just for fun, I’ll list some of my favorite articles below:

  • Sliding Doors of CSS - Douglas Bowman writes how to create nice rounded tabs for a navigation list using only one image.
  • Faux Columns - Dan Cederholm shows how to use an image and a little CSS to create the appearance of two columns, where both columns appear to be the same length (when they are often not).
  • Print it Your Way - Written by Derek Featherstone, this article gives advice on how to use user stylesheets to specify how to print webpages.
  • Suckerfish Dropdowns - Patrick Griffiths demonstrates how to create a CSS-based dropdown menu for your website.
  • Invasion of the Body Switchers - guides the creation of a better stysheet switcher. By Andy Clarke.
  • Taming Lists - Mark Newhouse shows how to style (un)ordered lists to suit you and your design.
  • Going to Print - CSS guru Eric Meyer tells how to create a printer-specific stylesheet for your website, so you no longer need to create a printer-friendly version of each page.

Whew, that’s a few all right, but the ones that have been most useful or educational for me.

I’m now looking forward to more regular articles from ALA…long live A List Apart!

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