For the past month or so, I've been playing around in my sandbox with an elastic layout. Things were coming along pretty well, when suddenly I threw a fit over the increasing slowness of my web host, DreamHost. I've been with them for about 3 years and we've had our ups and downs, but lately my patience has worn thin.

The middle of a redesign is probably not the best time to switch web hosts. But considering this is primarily a playground, I've thrown caution to the wind and uploaded the whole darn dev site to Media Temple. I've heard a lot of good things about them and am hoping like mad that they're true.

So a word of warning while this half-constructed heap of code changes home—watch for teetering beams and chunks of falling plaster.

This ought to be interesting.

The technical savvy of today's kids sometimes leaves me flabbergasted. Yesterday my seven-year-old, who is in a combined second/third grade class at school, said to me,"You know Eli Hernstein, Mom?"

"Sure, he was in your kindergarten class," I said...

I have the patience of a gnat. I promised myself I'd wait 6 months before buying an iPhone. It was hard, though. So, around my birthday, I starting hinting broadly and got my husband to buy one for me instead.

I love my new iPhone. The design is brilliant. It's a pleasure to look at, a pleasure to hold, and a pleasure to use. If it weren't for one thing, it would be as close to perfect as you can come...

After coding a few dozen or more forms, it finally occurred to me one day that I was going about form creation the wrong way. Writing the code from scratch for every new form was a pain. So I created a list of the most common form elements that I can copy-n-paste for quick-n-easy forms.

Beginners to CSS have a rough time of it. There's no escaping that tough, frustrating early stage before the light bulb clicks on and CSS becomes the coolest tool in your web kit. But don't despair—grab yourself a copy of Virginia DeBolt's newest book and you'll work your way through the newbie stage in no time at all.

Maybe it's because I just had a birthday. Or maybe it's that I recently passed my 10th anniversary of building web sites. But lately I seem to hear more people than usual wondering if this "working with the web" business isn't a younger person's game.

I recently spent a great deal of time on the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site, combing through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 working draft. There's a lot of very fine material in that document. Unfortunately, for the average designer it's pretty much, well, inaccessible.

Web Standards Creativity is a fascinating look at how some of the best designers in the business use web standard compliant markup and CSS to take web design to new heights of style and function. Based on actual "case studies," it's also an intriguing look inside these designers heads. The decision-making process they reveal teaches us as much about good design as the methods they're describing.