The grid has gone fluid, and I am having more fun with the web than I have had in a while.
Media queries are arriving in earnest. We can finally ask a browser how wide it is and answer sensibly, instead of guessing and hoping. Percentages and ems are quietly taking over from the fixed pixel widths I spent five years defending. A layout has stopped being a thing you place and started being a thing that flows.
Inside the Grey Nuns I am building small sites, little microsites for programs and departments, and on the side I am taking freelance work and learning WordPress properly. That combination has turned out to be the real education. A microsite has to go up fast, hold the brand, and then be handed to someone else to run, which is exactly what a good content system is for.
So I am up to my elbows in PHP, which is a loose and forgiving language, and that is both its gift and its danger. It will let you do very nearly anything, including a fair number of things you probably should not. Learning where its edges are has become part of the work.
What I find genuinely exciting is that the tools and the thinking are arriving together. Fluid grids, flexible images, media queries, and a content system that lets a business speak for itself. Hold those in one hand and you can build something that meets a person wherever they happen to be, and keeps living after you have gone.
There is a version of me that misses the certainty of a fixed canvas, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the web was never really a canvas. It was always closer to water, and I think we are only just learning to work with it.