Today’s comic explores a subject that is one of the most difficult, for me at least, to approach humorously. Featuring Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman and Dylan Wilbanks (I love his site’s content), I think I manage it with the grace and agility only a fifty-foot lizard could manage.

Over the past couple weeks, some people have died. Well, thousands die every week, even without disasters like the one that has recently struck Haiti. With no disrespect meant to the many who have died, it was the death of two specific individuals that caused an attention-worthy explosion of conversation in my Twitter feed, and I didn’t know either one of them: Brad L. Graham and Jack Pickard. I linked their Twitter feeds, as I don’t know how enduring the website of either individual will be after their death (a topic addressed in more detail below).

Their passing started a discussion on death, both theirs and that of others.

Eric Meyer had a couple of tweets that highlighted the poignancy of loss, even over a digital medium. Jeffrey Zeldman, in a post entitled Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture, addresses the Big Question (well, its little cousin): “Where do our sites go when we die?” I’d like to think that the entire readership of my site are aware of how fragile the survival of sites on the Internet is, as highlighted in this strip that discussed the end of Geocities.

If we hope to have any lasting legacy for friends, family or a curious future, we can’t hope for a copy of a book resting on a shelf for a few hundred years. Instead, we need to think, while alive, about how we’re going to preserve our digital identities (which have become a huge part of who we are) long enough so that those who come after can decide for themselves whether it was worth it.

Dylan Wilbanks recently had a presentation at Ignite Seattle about this very topic. Everyone Coredumps, he reminds us, and he addresses both the grieving process and how to preserve your online data for future generations. He also discusses viking funerals. Check out his slides for thoughts on the topic, especially the tips on keeping your websites alive beyond the grave.

I recently was reminded by my registrar that I need to get this site’s domain registration renewed. It’s disturbing to think that if a bus hit me today, the laughs I’ve created would simply disappear at the end of the month, well before any tears from my passing would (hopefully) have ended.

I think I’m going to go get that renewal handled right now.

I’ll try to tone down on the self-marketing, but following through with reader requests, there is now “I’m With Squirrel” t-shirts (and other apparel) available through Zazzle.

Get your T-shirt here!

I welcome any feedback you may have about the experience and product quality from anyone who does order a shirt through Zazzle. Thanks again!

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled commentary on the world of web design and standards.)

Hay Fezgig!

Yo, dude, what’s up?

This cheeseburger is too big! Can you show me how to eat it?!

Dude, you gotta flip open your mouth like this for cheezeburgers!

After that, Kyle ate the cheeseburger. And it was good.

As I discussed on Monday, I’m working towards making this site more accessible. I’m starting with creating access to the comic for visually-impaired visitors, although I know that’s likely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making something truly accessible.

Today I finally set up a system for linking a transcript of the comic via an aria-describedby attribute on the comic’s image tag. As I learned, making a transcript is a time-consuming process. So far, only the most recent comic has a transcript, and it took me well over a half hour to do with little outside distraction. I can understand, then, one major barrier to accessibility being more common on the Internet: laziness.

It’s easy enough for me to consider that my comic has a very small cross-section of people that it’s targeting: web designers and developers. Of that demographic, even less have accessibility issues significant enough to prohibit them from enjoying the comic (or in some cases like deafness, the comic doesn’t have any feature that they’d be missing out on without added support). But the fact is, if even one person is interested in my work, and they can’t experience it because of a barrier that I should be trying to help overcome, then I’m doing something wrong.

Over the next few days or weeks (depending on how much free time I have for the project) I’ll continue to make transcripts for the past comics. All future CSSquirrel comics going forward will have a transcript created when it is first made.

If you’re a person who makes use of screen readers, can you take a chance to examine comic #34 (Squirrel in the Dark) and tell me if the feature is working correctly, or if there’s any other work I should make to enhance it? I’d appreciate that very much.

Last night was the inaugural session of Refresh Bellingham, which is something like a cross between a single-presentation micro-conference (for FREE!) and a bar/grill social event for web geeks. Taking place at Extremes Sports Grill (yes, their website terrifies), it turned out to be a blast!

The speaker was Jeff Croft, who is some sort of hybrid between a super-designer and a karaoke megastar. His presentation was on grids in web design, and was a speedy trek through the history of grids in typography and the ways to apply them to your websites in this day in age. He’ll have slides at some point, so I’ll put them up as soon as I get the link. It was great to watch, and now I’m closer to understanding what the point is for line-height.

It’s for conga lines, right?

After the presentation, the crowd (I saw at least 45 people there, we had people standing during the presentation) walked across the way into what I’ll call the “party room” and proceeded to eat, drink, or do a combination of both while chatting away with people from Bellingham to Mt. Vernon to Seattle.

If you live in or near Bellingham, and want to have a great opportunity to learn more about web standards, talk shop with people who care about such things, or just have an excuse for a night out, I suggest you take the opportunity to come to the next Refresh (we’re on the third Wednesday night of every month. Check out the website for more.)