mezzoblue § 10 Years

Wow! The CSS Zen Garden is a decade old. Crazy! It’s a true piece of web history …and it’s back!

A Stormy Sky of Cranky Clouds by Scott Jenson

Scott points out a really big problem with the current state of the “internet of things”: everyone is inventing their own proprietary walled-garden infrastructure instead of getting together to collaborate on standards.

The single biggest fallacy I want to blow up is this utopian idea that there is this SINGLE thing called ‘The Cloud’. Each company today reinvents their own cloud. The Cloud as a concept is dead and has been for years: we are living within a stormy sky of cranky clouds, all trying to pretend the others don’t exist.

In The Name of Willie Clancy « Arbutus Yarns

A really nice short film about the Willie Clancy Summer School. It makes me want to get back to Miltown Malbay this July.

Ghostlab

This looks like it could be a handy app for synchronising a whole bunch of devices when testing. I’ll have to give it a whirl on the device lab.

Also, it has a perfectly fair one-off price, rather than the Mafia-style protection fee model that Adobe uses for Edge Inspect.

The Case for Using Mad Lib Sign Up Forms (Hint: Mad Conversion Increases)

A look at how Huffduffer-style forms might improve “conversion”.

Whatever. Let’s face it: it’s just quite nice when a form isn’t just your typical form (which this article makes a good point of mentioning):

Where the traditional sign up form is a regular, everyday brown cow, the mad lib form is a purple cow - a shiny object. We’re naturally easily distracted by, and drawn to, what’s new or out of the ordinary! Take advantage of that.

A Book Apart celebrates its third anniversary

Aw, my l’il ol’ book is three years old!

To celebrate, you can get 15% off any title from A Book Apart with this discount code for the next few days: HAPPY3RD.

The open internet and the web

A history lesson from Vint Cerf. I can’t help but picture him as The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented and released the World Wide Web (WWW) design in late 1991, he found an open and receptive internet in operation onto which the WWW could be placed. The WWW design, like the design of the internet, was very open and encouraged a growing cadre of self-taught webmasters to develop content and applications.

The First Website by Mark Boulton

Mark writes about his work with CERN to help restore the first website to its original URL.

I have two young children and I want them to experience the early web and understand how it came to be. To understand that the early web wasn’t that rudimentary but incredibly advanced in many ways.

Cern

It was twenty years ago today:

On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish.

Here is today

A long-zoom data visualisation.

Scalable Bitmaps

Some thoughts (and code) on responsive images.

Dragons

Just as every instance of “the cloud” can be replaced with “the moon” or “my butt”, so too can every instance of the word “markets” in business reporting be replaced with the word “dragons”.

James has got you covered with this bookmarklet to do just that.

The dragons reacted strongly to the news.

A Digital Tomorrow on Vimeo

A design fiction video depicting technology that helps and hinders in equal measure.

Google Poetics

The accidental beauty in Google’s autosuggest algorithm.

Internet Archive on Vimeo

A beautiful short film on the amazing work being done at the Internet Archive, produced on the occasion of their 10 petabyte celebration.

Truly awe-inspiring.

Textastrophe

These are mostly just mean …but kinda funny.

Tech companies that only hire men

Job postings that only use male pronouns.

See, this is why using “they”, while technically incorrect, can often be the least worst option.

Brewster’s trillions: Internet Archive strives to keep web history alive

A profile in The Guardian of the Internet Archive and my hero, Brewster Kahle (who also pops up in the comments).

Quietweet - A Simpler Twitter Reader

A cute little read-only Twitter client from James that only displays fully-formed tweets: no hashtags, no @-replies.

Responsive Inspector

A handy plugin for Chrome that always you to inspect media query breakpoints and take screenshots at any of them.