Twenty years ago today, Wired launched a seminal redesign of its website that helped catapult forward web technology and what our industry understood as possible for commercial websites.

A few years back, I added the redesign date to my calendar to help mark the passing of time. Each year, just as baseball’s Postseason ignites in early October, I get a reminder that takes me back to the early days of the web, even before the dot-com craze. It was a different era, marked by experimentation, exploration, and curiosity. continued

Ten years ago today, we pulled back the curtains on a redesign of Wired.com. The actual design and the code that rendered it are long gone. But they were significant in their time.

The redesign of Wired News in 2002 marked the first time a large, well-known, daily-content publisher had dropped tables for layout, and embraced the separation of markup and style in a rather new (at the time) approach to web design. Several prominent blogs, and niche content sites (zeldman.com, meyerweb.com, alistapart.com) had broken ground, and were already using and evangelizing a greater adoption of Web Standards.

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I love the optimism in Janice Fraser’s latest essay for Adaptive Path: It’s a Whole New Internet. Normally, an article similar to this would have just been another link. I guess this one deserved more. Janice captures a lot of the enthusiasm and energy building up around a new connected experience.

I happen to think it’s a little more than just Ajax though. Technologies are ripening everywhere. A culmination of lots of ingenuity at once. One small quote from the essay might be the key:

“Invention inspires invention.”

Embrace what’s happening around you. Contribute something of your own. And heed her words:

“Things are about to change in a very big way.”

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about XML syndication feeds, publishing redundancy, and how we link to those feeds. Dan Cederholm was wondering last week why we still support multiple feed formats. A few weeks before, Molly Holzschlag surveyed a few sites to determine how they link to respective feeds, and where those links are located on the page. continued

After more than a year of implementing my own measures, I think it’s time to help raise awareness of email security. And in doing so, document the way I use SSH to secure email when I’m on a wireless network. If you’re concerned about strangers having open access to your usernames and passwords, and all the email you send and receive while connected to a public wireless network — whether you use a Mac or not — you’ll want to read this. continued

I’ve given a few public presentations this year, and still have a few more to go. I could have used PowerPoint, or the more logical Mac alternative, Keynote, to assemble the visuals for each presentation. But I’ve never liked that route. Given the material I usually cover, I like to present in the same format I’m talking about. continued

The very slow lane. I returned from Austin a little over a week ago. Once here, I had to face the reality: I needed to use a dial-up connection to get online from home. Something I haven’t needed to do (at home) for almost five years since DSL was installed. Our office has high-speed wifi, as do the cafes I frequent. Even when traveling, many airports and hotels are now set up with a high-speed wireless network. So I seldom experience dial-up speeds. continued

Only a couple days left for the current Blogstakes contests. Win a three-book collection from The Onion or a hard-shell CD case. It couldn’t be easier to get entered if you already have a blog — just add a link to one or both of the contests somewhere on your site where others will find it. Nothing else required is from you. Someone reading your site clicks the link you made, they fill out a simple form on Blogstakes. If they win, you win too. Two girls for every — no, scratch that — I mean: two winners for every prize. continued

This is interesting. HP and Apple are joining forces to create an HP-branded digital music player based on Apple’s iPodâ„¢. The device will be due out this summer. I had mixed reactions upon first seeing the news. My immediate thoughts went back to the Mac clones of 7 or 8 years ago. But I’m assuming Apple and Jobs know what they’re doing by OEMing the device for another brand powerhouse.

It certainly seems this could continue the increase in exposure of Apple’s hardware and software. According to the release:

As part of the alliance, HP consumer PCs and notebooks will come preinstalled with Apple’s iTunes® jukebox software and an easy-reference desktop icon to point consumers directly to the iTunes Music Store, ensuring a simple, seamless music experience.

If nothing else, it’s an interesting experiment while Apple is enjoying the market leader position in the digital music player space. Will Apple benefit in the long run? Who knows? But it’s a brave step either way.