I’m not at An Event Apart: Atlanta. Which is a shame because by all accounts I missed some wicked banjo playing by Dan Cederholm. And I love listening to some good banjo.

However, I am following along via Twitter, and saw this announcement by Jeffrey Zeldman, web design godfather and co-founder of An Event Apart:

.@simplebits just unveiled Pears pea.rs, an open source web design pattern library/WP theme. #aea

Pea.rs looks like a convenient little tool for web designers to bookmark, a library of sorts where commonly needed HTML/CSS patterns for common page elements like navigation, lists and such can be quickly grabbed and used. I’m sure you’re all so amazing that you don’t need it for your markup, but I also think for prototyping some page elements this might be a good resource to go-to to quickly grab and paste. You might also find a few new ideas on how to arrange your markup or CSS, too.

Check it out.

Over at the Mindfly Studio Blog I’ve added a small tutorial on how to vertically align your text with CSS. Yes, it annoys the hell out of me to use display: table-cell (which was the source of Monday’s comic on this very topic), but for now it’s the best thing we’ve got. If you’re wrestling with just this, pop on over for a simple explanation.

If you’ve got a better method, please tell me in the comments. I’m open to new and strange things, like Texan sushi.

I’ve finally (albeit weeks later than intended) created a primer on linear gradients with CSS. It’s a shallow dip into the deep pool of CSS gradients, but it’ll help get you started on taking advantage of gradients with Webkit, Firefox and even Internet Explorer! (Yes, really.)

It’s posted over here at Mindfly Web Design Studio. If you’re curious about gradients but scared of the syntax, check it out.

Usually when I mention Mark Pilgrim, it is with a dismayed tone that is meant to paint him as a dastardly villain who is elbow-deep in foul rituals meant to permanently stain the reputation of the HTML5 effort; an implication is made that he is resurrecting some great beast that will swallow the earth whole and enslave our souls.

What I’m saying is that, on average, I’m not a fan of his work.

However, his recent blog post “Tinkerer’s Sunset” clearly states the case of why the direction the iPad is moving the market is a sad affair. A man who learned his craft on an Apple IIe, he’s dismayed at the thought of the next generation of tinkerers, who will have to pay a fee or commit crimes in order to look under the hood of their own computers.

Many claim the iPad represents what the future of computing will look like: tailored, “safe” devices with little room for modification or customization (unless you plan on spending some time in court). Maybe that’s how it’ll be, and there’s little to be said or done. But Mark helps illustrate why that future will be a sad one. Go read his post.

Last Friday in response to a question by Tyrun I posted a little micro-tutorial about how I achieve the parallax scrolling header for the site, walking through the steps on setting up images, CSS, HTML and JavaScript (in particular, I use jQuery). I also learned a thing or two about how annoying WordPress can be with code snippets in posts (Use <pre>. Really. I don’t know why I didn’t.)

Everything in the tutorial is exactly as it was on my site at the time of writing. However, this is no longer the case. Over the weekend I got a tweet from William Flake indicating a modification he made to the code to prevent a “jump” that occurred when you first moved the mouse into the header. I liked his alterations so much that I’ve made use of them in my code.

This week William wrote about his code alterations over at his site Unfinished Thoughts in a post entitled Of Squirrels and Men. If you enjoyed my parallax code, please take a look at what changes he made. They’re definitely worth a gander.