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…