As you probably heard, Gowalla recently revamped their service.

In doing so, I found myself no longer able to view my activity history on their website.

However, I found a way to retrieve my activity history using their API and PHP. So I thought I would share that method with others.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether designers should code lately. Again.

Here’s my take.

One definition of design is solving problems in a visual way.

Some of the problems involved in web design include:

Responsive web design allows our content to shine no matter the screen size, so it can be accessed easily on multiple devices.

However, devices are also starting to vary based on screen resolution. Can responsive web design handle that as well?

I believe it can, and it must. Here’s my take.

Right now, the iPhone 4 has a retina-display, with much higher pixels per inch than an iPhone 3GS.

The 3GS is 165 ppi, the iPhone 4 326 ppi, the iPad 132 ppi. That’s just for iOS devices. Resolutions abound.

Recently, a number of high-profile government website redesigns have launched with giant search boxes front and center.

This includes utah.gov, calgary.ca and pretty much every entrant in a recent New York City hackathon. Each of these feature a huge search box, and typically a gorgeous photo, with very little additional content on the home page.

Today, An Event Apart came to my turf, the Twin Cities. Last year, I attended An Event Apart Minneapolis: it rocked. Mind-blowing sessions, whip-smart attendees and some of the most accomplished speakers in the industry. This year, due to a number of reasons, An Event Apart Minneapolis was an event from which I am apart.

I tuned into A Feed Apart, which collects tweets using the #aea hashtag used at the event. There you can find a ton of great little nuggets to read, encapsulating some of the most potent ideas expressed at An Event Apart.

Reading these tweets and attending An Event Apart are not the same thing.

Microsoft has decided to remove conditional comments from Internet Explorer 10. This is not cool.

While IE has had more CSS bugs than other browsers, conditional comments have allowed us to target fixes not only to Internet Explorer, but to specific versions of Internet Explorer.

Try doing that with any other browser: it is extraordinarily difficult unless you use some truly hacktastic CSS, and that will likely hose things up down the line.

I love Google+. I have been trying it out for the past week. Lots of fun, easy to use. There is a ton of great potential here.

But is it a Facebook killer? Or even a Twitter killer?

The content I have seen people share on Google+ is in many ways similar to what I see on Facebook. Lots of fun videos, pictures, some status updates. The discussion and article sharing that does go on tends to be about Google+ itself. That makes sense: people are still figuring out how Google+ works. My guess is this will changes as people use it more.

A few months ago, Adriel Hampton convinced me through his incessant tweeting to give Empire Avenue a try. For those of you, who are not familiar, Empire Avenue—or EAv, as it often goes by—is a stock market for social media, where you can invest in people based on how they use social media.

If you haven’t tried it already, you can check it out at empireavenue.com. My stock ticker on the Ave is e(WEBDRUM).

I have been looking forward to upgrading sites to Drupal 7 for a while now. While I have played around with it a bit, you never really know how things work until you use it for a real working site. So I might as well test the upgrade process on my blog here. Before I do, however, I have to make sure everything is in place so that the site still works. Does everything have to be the same? No. But I do not want to lose major functionality

One of the first things to check is whether or not contributed modules will function in Drupal 7. Is there a Drupal 7 version? Is there an upgrade path? I started by taking a cursory look at the modules I currently use to see their Drupal 7 status.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about responsive web design, mobile design in general and the argument over web applications vs native apps. Here’s my take.