onidle(…)

Yesterday was Minnebar and it was great! There have been several recaps and other specific posts related to particular sessions so I’ll just cut to the chase:

Justin Grammens, Dan Grigsby and I hosted a group discussion on Coworking and the turn out was good. It appears that there is some interest in the concept. In an effort to keep this on the radar I’ve created a Google Group to continue the discussion. Join in!

I also want to publish the notes I took during the session:

Who?

1. Independents with no office (cafe companies)
2. Startups
3. Corporate workers looking for collaboration, mentoring
4. Small companies

1. Community groups

   Models for funding the project

   • For Profit.
   • Mention of WorkSpace3 as well as Garrick’s recent post
   • “Health Club Membership”, 100 people $100 per month?
   • No Level of membership, some use it all day everyday, some not at all
   • Brings up issues of “seats and butts”, what’s the churn rate, would you have enough space for all that may choose to show up at any given moment.
   • Who Signs the lease?
   • Light weight, easy to implement now.
   • Non-profit
   • Seeks grants for local government, local tech companies
   • Provide mentoring, resources for donors, free or reduced rate consulting from member companies or individuals.
   • This is a kind of “incubator”, pool of talent for donor companies
   • Non Profit entity serves as logistics coordinator, arbitrator, organizer, single point of contact for the community as a whole.

• this is “heavy weight” and requires most time investment.

  I’ve omitted much of the conversation (my notes aren’t the greatest.) Please fill in the blanks by joining the group. The concept is pretty compelling. As Justin said to me once: “The atmosphere of Minnebar everyday” That sounds OK to me.

I wrote about the Yahoo! UI CSS components a while back. At the time I found an interesting article about vertical rhythm in Web typography. The article, Compose to a Vertical Rhythm from the 2006 24Ways list explains the how’s and why’s of nice-looking typography on the web. Turns out the Yahoo! UI Reset stylesheet is a great way to start with this technique since it basically “zeros out” all font sizes in a effort to achieve cross-browser rendering nirvana.

Fast-forward a few months… Geoffrey Grosenbach recently redesigned the PeepCode site using the same techniques for the type. Richard Rutter, author of the 24ways article, gave a talk at SXSW on the topic. What’s more, Geoffrey has published a great tool, the Baseline Rhythm Calculator, to generate the required CSS to implement Richard’s technique. Combine this with YUI Reset and you have good looking type with almost zero effort. Very nice! There are links to other relevant articles on the calculator’s page. Go check it out!