One year ago today I clicked delete on my Facebook account. Why did I do it? What's life like these days without it? Follow me below the cut to find out.

A few days before the official launch of Internet Explorer 9 I decided to take a look at the Traction website in the most recent IE9 release candidate. While we were developing the site it was still beta and CSS3 background gradients weren't supported. I decided to kick the can down the road and wait till the last minute just in case gradients magically became supported. Well they didn't. While working around that I discovered a new way to tie Photoshop comps into CSS3 code.

On January 3, 2011 David Friedman posted a pretty grand idea. Crowdfund a mission to put a monolith on the Moon. This would be an ultimate scale nerdy prank. But it set bells off in my head. Why not create fine art in space? And what form would it take?

Google is the most recent browser vendor to have stirred the html5 video pot. Passionate posts have flowed about if it's a good or bad of them to drop their support for h.264. And this all goes back to the debate in the html5 specs about which should be ~THEE~ codec for the video element. That never got resolved. You can think of the current spec as having handled the dispute by punting.

Are you hawking your wares online? Chances are you've focused a lot of effort into getting your customers attention, getting them to your site and making your product easy to find. Chances also are you've treated the actual act of purchasing your product as a commodity. A web form, what is there to think about? Well, online web comic The Oatmeal hasn't.

There's more than one way to do things from a front end web development perspective. Tables vs divs? Layout and mouseovers in css or javascript? GIF and JPEG and PNG, oh my! Engineering is an art of tradeoffs in many ways. I'd like to illustrate some of the reasons you might choose one thing over another when designing and building your front end code.