Over the past months I’ve given away dozens of Google Wave invites via my Twitter feed. Selfless? Yes. Kind? Of course. Generous? Always. So far I’ve simply given them away but now we’re going to play a new game!

The Plot

I’m going to keep this post open and you are going to ask me for a Wave invite via the comments section. As I get new invites, I will simply send them randomly. There is, however, a catch: you must post a link to your favorite photo of Christina Ricci. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

I’d like to take a moment this Thanksgiving to thank some people that deserved to be.

• I’d like to thank the MooTools team for all of the support and hard work. I feel truly honored to be around such intelligent, driven group of individuals. I’d like to specifically thank Aaron Newton and Valerio Proietti for being great leaders and advisers. MooTools FTW.
• I’d like to thank members of the MooTools community for all of their hard work. Sometimes I don’t think we all realize just how much we’re changing the web. Keep up the good work MooToolers!

Over the past two years I’ve run my Confessions of a Web Developer series.  Each one has been really popular and well-received.  It’s Friday and I’ve had a bad week so today I want you to confess your web development sins in the comment section below.  Purge your conscious at the end of the week and confess!

I hope to use these for a future post so make them juicy!

CSS-Tricks scribe Chris Coyier wrote a great post titled What Beautiful HTML Code Looks Like where he outlined (with a great image, no less) how a great HTML/PHP file looks when proper programming practices are used. The post was so popular that the featured image was promoted to the Digg homepage. Then the webmasters logged out of their guild chat long enough to bless the Digg comments with their wisdom. I present to you…

When Webmasters Attack!

Also, what kind of web designer doesn’t already know this? It’s called being organized. However, all that white-space is going to add-up and waste bandwidth, which makes this “beautiful code” (a self-serving, inaccurate, subjective description) not-so-perfect.

What kind of web designer doesn’t know how easy it is to GZIP content which compresses/eliminates all of the extra whitespace that makes code more maintainable?

I don’t think <?php .. is valid HTML 5 either.

This isn’t a “Hello Kitty” picture, Webmaster, so please don’t comment. This will get parsed by PHP and output as HTML.

This will probably shock you but I’m a programmer. Not a designer, not a copywriter, just a simple programmer. I’ve done some self analysis and realized that becoming a programmer wasn’t a choice — it was destiny. The following is my logic for why I became a programmer.

1. I’m Allergic to the Sun

I’m not as hot as Kate Beckinsale but I’m just as allergic to the sun as she was in Underworld. The second I see the sun I sneeze. What’s odd is that I used to play outside endlessly as a child — it wasn’t until I became a programmer that I developed this strange allergy to the sun. Today my skin is very white — a monitor tan is the only tan I get these days.