Valentine’s Day finds me sitting in a client’s office, watching the rain hammering against the window, hoping it stops for long enough for me to make the forty-five minute walk back into town later.

This week’s post is pretty code heavy. The web is changing (as usual) and lots of stuff is coming – or at least being discussed – that will help us produce better, more flexible designs on the web.

It’s been an admin-heavy week. One of the joys of running a company — even a tiny one — is the sheer amount of stuff that always needs doing. My list is still fairly long, but at least it’s shorter than it was.

One of the more fun jobs I set myself this week was to subscribe to some RSS feeds.

One of my favourite things about Twitter when it was relatively new was the amount of great articles that would appear in my timeline daily. I learned a huge amount about design, development and running a business from articles I found on Twitter. That’s something that seems to have been lost over the last five or six years.

In the hope of recapturing something of that flow of content, I worked my way through https://personalsit.es, and subscribed to all the RSS feeds I could find. It’s been nice to check my feed reader (Reeder, if you’re interested) every day and find new articles sitting there for me to read.

On which note, I need to get an RSS feed up and running on here.

Anyway, on with the articles!

Last week I went to New Adventures conference. It was my first New Adventures, and my first time in Nottingham, and both were fantastic.

I had heard a lot about NA Conf and had always been curious – it has a reputation for thinking more widely than your typical common or garden design conference. You don’t get practical talks at New Adventures, people said. There’s very little code on show. At New Adventures, they tackle the meatier issues affecting our industry; worthy topics like Ethics and Diversity.

It sounded exciting, but to be honest, it also sounded a little intimidating. When early-bird tickets were released I returned to the website several times to hover my cursor indecisively over the Buy Now button. I hesitated so long the early-bird tickets sold out, at which point I immediately bought one at full price in sudden fear of missing out.

It’s a decision I’m very glad I made.

Weekend Reading is a weekly roundup of interesting articles I’ve found on the web in the preceeding week.

For ages, I’ve been bookmarking or instapapering articles I find on Twitter or on blogs. This helps me keep track of what I have read and when, and makes it easier to find things when I want to refer back to them. The Weekend Reading series is my attempt to do this in the open, partly to keep me accountable, and partly in the hope that other people might find these lists useful as well.

I know I get a lot out of the various newsletters I subscribe to, such as Andy Bell’s Picilili, Rachel Andrew’s CSS Layout News, Jake Bresnehan’s Web Design Weekly etc.

Starting as I mean to go on, the innaugural roundup post is a several weeks late, so actually contains posts since the start of the year.

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