I think it’s been a really exciting year for our industry; the explosion of web browsing away from the desktop, HTML5 beginning to prove itself as the best option for cross-platform development, the newly-resurgent Microsoft making good browsers again… if you make your living from building the web you can’t fail to be heartened by this flourish of new life. There’s been a great appetite for discovery of new browser features, with lots of demos being made using cutting-edge and experimental CSS, HTML and JavaScript, so the curious amongst us have had plenty to satisfy us.

Part of my contribution to tutsplus.com’s experts(!) review of 2011.

I’ve been writing some articles for different websites in the latter half of this year, and it strikes me that I haven’t done a very good job of promoting them on here. So please allow me to correct that, with this brief rundown in reverse chronological order.

I’ve put together my list of the 20 Best CSS Sites of 2011 for .net Magazine. Choosing only 20 turned out to be really difficult, as I wanted to get a broad range of approaches. I’m sure there are plenty I missed out, including any that aren’t in the English language.

For The Sass Way I wrote about How Sass Can Shape The Future of CSS, showing how many of the features contained in the pre-processed CSS extension are under discussion for inclusion in future versions of CSS.

Webdesigntuts+ interviewed me about my book and my opinions on CSS3, including what I’m excited about for the future, and things to beware of when using cutting-edge properties.

And again for .net Magazine I discussed The Future of CSS Layouts, a subject I’m really excited about at the moment, which led to an article that was very popular with .net’s readership.

I currently have two more articles waiting for technical review and proofreading, which I hope will see the light of day shortly, and have promised to write another two as soon as I get time (as well as one for a dead tree publication). I’m very happy to be writing about my craft, and appreciate feedback or further requests for articles from other sources — although, I won’t be able to write quite as much next year as I’m planning to start my second book.

Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Metaphwoar! 2011 last month. The brief is very loose: talk about anything related to the web, but use metaphor (similes are also valid). I chose to talk about what I do, trying to define what it is — but in a very lighthearted way, and in less than 15 minutes.

I enjoyed giving this talk, and the whole event is worth a watch. You can see all the other videos on Vimeo. Bonus: See if you can spot the point where I completely forgot what to say next. It’s quite early on…