Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 22nd June 2009
3 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
What you see here is the “Geek Hand Sign” T-shirt by British designer Roger Denyer. Roger designed the shirt so you could demand some respect from your fellow geeks. If you are a web developer or coder use this sign and you’ll get a nod of respect from your fellow computer geeks.
Or maybe you will once and for all prove the world how incredibly geeky you really are.
Either way, the shirts are for sale at RubyRed T-shirt Design for €21,46 (that isn’t a random price of course but a number that only real geeks understand the meaning of) in a variety of colors.
If you are a REAL geek you will have to ask your sister which color will look good with your zits and pimples.
Written on 27th May 2009
8 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Wonder where it says <small></small>…
What other lame HTML Tattoo jokes can you come up with? Yeah, throw in some PHP, CSS and Javascript while you are at it.
Written on 26th January 2009
20 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Hey Robin! If you are too lazy to build your own forms at least make sure you change the details!
One of our friends checked out the sign-up form at Plugg.eu and noticed that one of the examples listed our Office address. He checked the source code and sure enough; Plugg copied our Start-up Rally form!
That street address example is our street address!
That Postal code is our postal code!
And just to remove any doubt, this is what it says in the source code:
Don’t you know: Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources!
But seriously: Plugg is a great event and if you are considering going we can highly recommend it. The sign-up form for the Plugg Startup Rally is here and ticket sales are here. And check out their excellent site here too.
PS: just so you know, Plugg and The Next Web are media partners and ♥ each other!
Written on 22nd October 2008
8 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
I used to teach HTML. My favorite part of the workshop was always explaining tables. They seemed so incredibly difficult until you understood their logic. Then it would all become clear. Loved the look on peoples faces when they (hand coded) their first complex Table Layout.
Then CSS came and suddenly Tables were out of fashion. CSS and “Float:Left” ruined my life. I used to be the “King of Tables”! Now I’m nobody, an outcast, a ‘Table’ guy. Other designers laugh behind my back.
Not anymore!
Digital Web Magazine has an excellent in depth article about CSS TAbles support titled “Everything you know about CSS is wrong“:
“When released, Internet Explorer 8 will support many new values for the CSS display property, including the table-related values: table, table-row, and table-cell—and it’s the last major browser to come on board with this support. This event will mark the end of complex CSS layout techniques, and will be the final nail in the coffin of using HTML tables for layout. Finally, producing table-like grid layouts using CSS will be quick and easy.”
Oh yeah, I’m back!
Written on 29th July 2008
3 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
Rss is still getting more important for many bloggers, as co-blogger Boris update our blog for RSS last May:
“Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that.”
Since the updates, subscribers on thenextweb have been increasing tremendously! (subscribe here if you haven’t done allready) Here at TheNextWeb office we have been trying out different programs to read the feeds of other sites, and today I found one on Techcrunch with a new time saving approach:
Open source program Apprise allows users to not only read, but also share news directly from your RSS reader. The project is developed by Christian Cantrell, an Adobe Employee and editor on WatchReport.
The reader is based on Adobe Air, users can simply add and aggregate feeds. Its not world changing, but I believe this is the first RSS reader that can share your articles this easy.
(more…)
Written on 20th May 2008
6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
My personal blog attracts between 150 and 250 visitors a day but has more than 800 Feedburner subscribers. This is a fact that I discovered today and it might have some impact on how I blog. Most bloggers spend a lot of time optimizing for search engine and making sure their websites look good.
Here at the Next Web Blog we always look for nice illustrations to go with our posts because we know people like to look at nicely formatted posts. In general I write my posts with a preview window open next to it so I can see how the text flows around the images and what goes below and above ‘the fold’.
What I don’t do is optimize for RSS. As I have written before in a post title RSS Awareness Day: “According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it”. So why bother spending too much time on it?
Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that. One example are the images. The image I used here is scaled down a bit in html and placed on the right with a CSS class. All of that is ignored in RSS. That means that if you read this post via your RSS reader the image is huge and displayed right on top of the article.
With more and more traffic going straight to RSS it makes sense to start optimizing for it. I want a Wordpress plugin that adds a ‘preview this post’ button so I can preview it in both the browser AND in RSS readers.
Then we get to the issue of cross platform compatibility. You might have your HTML and CSS working fine in Explorer and Firefox on Window and Macintosh and Linux but how does it look in Google Reader? Or My Yahoo? And have you checked NetNewsWire on a Mac VS NewsGator on Windows?
As RSS becomes more popular this becomes an aspect of webdesign we can no longer ignore…
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
