Adactio: Links

Break the Page

A lovely site with thoughtful articles on the long-term future of the web.

There’s audio too, which is unfortunately locked up in the unhuffduffable roach motel that is Soundcloud, but I’m hoping that might change.

Building the Great Libraries of the Internet with a DNS time machine by Ben Ward

Ben proposes an alternative to archive.org: changing the fundamental nature of DNS.

Regarding the boo-hooing of how hard companies have it maintaining unprofitable URLs, I think Ben hasn’t considered the possibility of a handover to a cooperative of users—something that might yet happen with MySpace (at least there’s a campaign to that effect; it will probably come to naught). As Ben rightly points on, domain names are leased, not bought, so the idea of handing them over to better caretakers isn’t that crazy.

Own your turf - Austin Kleon

Prescient.

The irregular musings of Lou Montulli: The reasoning behind Web Cookies

A fascinating look at the history of cookies …from the inventor of cookies.

Laurent Eschenauer: What’s next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

The litany of open standards that Google has been abandoning: RSS, XMPP, WebDav…

The $12 Gongkai Phone

A fascinating analysis of a super-cheap phone from another world.

Welcome to the Galapagos of Chinese “open” source. I call it “gongkai” (公开). Gongkai is the transliteration of “open” as applied to “open source”. I feel it deserves a term of its own, as the phenomenon has grown beyond the so-called “shanzhai” (山寨) and is becoming a self-sustaining innovation ecosystem of its own.

Just as the Galapagos Islands is a unique biological ecosystem evolved in the absence of continental species, gongkai is a unique innovation ecosystem evolved with little western influence, thanks to political, language, and cultural isolation.

You should write about yourself more

Yes! Yes! YES!

Tom is spot-on here: you shouldn’t be afraid of writing about yourself …especially not for fear of damaging some kind of “personal brand” or pissing off some potential future employer.

If your personal brand demands that you live your life in fear of disclosing important parts of your life or your experience, the answer is to reject the whole sodding concept of personal brands.

Do things I write about my personal life threaten my personal brand? Perhaps. Are there people who wouldn’t hire me based on things I write? Probably. Do I give even a whiff of a fuck? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway.

Teenage Diaries Revisited

Fascinating fodder for Huffduffer:

Beginning in 1996, Radio Diaries gave tape recorders to teenagers around the country to create audio diaries about their lives. NPR’s All Things Considered aired intimate portraits of five of these teens: Amanda, Juan, Frankie, Josh and Melissa. They’re now in their 30s. Over this past year, the same group has been recording new stories about where life has led them for our series, Teenage Diaries Revisited.

CSS is not an amoral monster.

I’m in general agreement with this rousing defence of CSS. I think it does a pretty great job of balancing a whole ton of use cases.

Code Club Queens Park

Josh has been teaching HTML and CSS schoolkids. I love the pages that they’ve made. I really mean it. I genuinely think these are wonderful!

SpaceWarps

Zooniverse have done it again. Now you can help in the hunt for sources of gravitational lensing.

It’s informative. It’s fun. It has genuine scientific value.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

I know jQuery. Now what?

A terrific piece by Remy—based on a talk he gave—on when he uses jQuery and, more importantly, when he doesn’t. His experiences and conclusions pretty much mirror my own, but of course Remy is far more thoughtful and smart than I.

Really good stuff.

Those who teach, learn.

I concur with Ryan’s findings:

The best way to get better at what you do is to teach others how to do it, too.

CRAPCHA: Completely Ridiculous And Phony Captcha that Hassles for Amusement

These seem just about as reasonable as any other CAPTCHA.

On pattern portfolios | Clear Thinking - The Clearleft Blog

Jon gives some insight into how and why we use pattern portfolios as deliverables at Clearleft.

Thoughts on Blink

A good history lesson in rendering engines: KHTML, WebKit, and now, Blink.

datalist experiment

This is wonderful stuff! I’m a big fan of the datalist element but I hadn’t realised how it could be combined with input types like range and date.

So nifty!

Fictive Kin, The Joke’s On Us?

The story of one site’s disgraceful handling of acquisition and shutdown (Punchfork, acquired by Pinterest) and how its owner actively tried to block efforts to preserve user’s data.

Abandonedography

Armchair travelling to Ballardian locations.

National Geographic Found

Celebrating 125 years of National Geographic, this Tumblr blog is a curated collection of photography from the archives. Many of the pictures are being published for the first time.

First public use of what Became Proxima Nova by Mark Simonson

Who knew? The reissue of the classic thirteen-part Star Wars radio series was the first appearance of a proto-Proxima Nova.

The canonical smart city: A pastiche by Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird

Sorta sci-fi from Adam.

Consider this a shooting script for one of those concept videos so beloved of the big technology vendors.

Ten tips guaranteed to improve your startup success by Anil Dash

It’s a big ask, but if you can action these ten tips from Anil, your startup will crush it.

Our Incredible Journey

A collection of those appalling doublespeek announcements that sites and services give when they get acquired. You know the ones: they begin with “We’re excited to announce…” and end with people’s data being flushed down the toilet.

Google Keep? It’ll probably be with us until March 2017 - on average

Charles Arthur analyses the data from Google’s woeful history of shutting down its services.

So if you want to know when Google Keep, opened for business on 21 March 2013, will probably shut - again, assuming Google decides it’s just not working - then, the mean suggests the answer is: 18 March 2017. That’s about long enough for you to cram lots of information that you might rely on into it; and also long enough for Google to discover that, well, people aren’t using it to the extent that it hoped.

Instant artist statement: Arty Bollocks Generator

Don’t let James Bridle get a hold of this.

Kyle Bean - Portfolio

Kyle’s new site is looking lovely and responsive (thanks to Josh). But mostly it just gets out of the way so you can take in his truly amazing work.

Map Projection Transitions

A lovely way of demonstrating the differences between map projections. Drag for extra fun.

Specializing yourself into a corner by Scott Kellum

I can empathise with Scott’s worries about fragmentation on the front-end with Saas, Styles, LESS, Compass, yada, yada, yada.

I want to share my code with everyone who writes CSS, not a subset of that group.

Moving on by Harry Brignull

I’m going to miss having Harry around at Clearleft. Sounds like he might miss Clearleft too:

What I’ve loved about Clearleft is that it’s just so different to any other agency I’ve worked at. There’s no company process – everyone’s encouraged to experiment and try different techniques to suit the client’s needs. There’s hardly any internal meetings. I’ve never once had a conversation about my billing efficiency. The focus is on quality, and profitability is almost seen as a by-product. You’re encouraged to share your learnings externally rather than keep them in-house. Everyone’s trusted and given a lot of independence.

TEDxSummerisle

Oh, God!

Oh, Jesus Christ!

ROCA: Resource-oriented Client Architecture

I like these design principles for server-side and client-side frameworks. I would say that they’re common sense but looking at many popular frameworks, this sense isn’t as common as it should be.

Ideas of March — All in the head

A wonderful rallying cry from Drew.

The problem:

Ever since the halcyon days of Web 2.0, we’ve been netting our butterflies and pinning them to someone else’s board.

The solution:

Hope that what you’ve created never has to die. Make sure that if something has to die, it’s you that makes that decision. Own your own data, friends, and keep it safe.

Notes on remixing Noon, generative text and Markov chains

Jeff Noon and Markov chains—a heavenly match by Dan.

inessential.com: Why I love RSS and You Do Too

Brent Simmons pens a love-letter to RSS, a technology that you use every day, whether you realise it or not.

They Keep Using That Word ∙ An A List Apart Column

David gets physidigital.

On Silos vs an Open Social Web by Tantek

Tantek steps back and offers some practical approaches to reclaiming a more open web from the increasingly tight clutches of the big dominant roach motels.

Notice that he wrote this on his own domain, not on Branch, Medium, Google+, Facebook, or any other black hole.

Dark Archives in Contents Magazine

A really lovely piece on the repositories of information that aren’t catalogued—a fourth quadrant in the Rumsfeldian taxonomy, these dark archives are the unknown knowns.

Science Fiction Film as Design Scenario Exercise for Psychological Habitability: Production Designs 1955-2009

A white paper that looks to sci-fi films as potential prototypes for habitats for humans in space, with an emphasis on dealing with the psychological issues involved.

A List Apart Issue № 371

This issue of A List Apart is a great double-whammy. Lara Swanson has a ton of practical tips for front-end performance enhancements, and Brian dives deep into making your own icon fonts.

We’re not ‘appy. Not ‘appy at all.

An excellent explanation from Tom Loosemore on why the Government Digital Service is putting its energy into open standards and the web, rather than proprietary native apps.

There Was Once a Certain Kind of Cinema

A magnificent piece of writing from Michael, examining the influence of Sergio Leone on George Lucas.

Antiphonal Geometry · Harmony and proportion in responsive web design

This is the full text of Owen’s talk at the Responsive Day Out. It makes for a terrific read!

The Accessibility Project

This is a great initiative. I’m going to learn a lot from it. I hope that I might even be able to contribute to it sometime.

For discussion: viewport and font-size data in client hints

The “client hints” proposal looks really interesting: a way for user-agents to send data to the server without requiring the server to have a library of user-agent strings. But Scott has a few concerns about some of the details.

Mailappapp by Visual Idiot

Revolutionising the way you revolutionise email.

Quotes and Accents

Jessica’s handy guide to writing the right quotes and accents on a Mac keyboard.

The World Wide Web is moving to AOL! by Brian Bailey

Biting satire that hits its mark superbly. Ouch! Be careful — this is sharp …and funny.

What can I plant now?

This is handy—a month by month list of which vegetables you should be planting right now.

Springboard – Coming soon from Clearleft

The latest Clearleft product will be like having an intensive set of discovery, collaboration, and exploration workshops in a box. Perfect for startups and other small businesses short on time or budget.

It starts in Spring but you can register your interest now.

Anatomy of a responsive page load

The slides from Andy’s excellent pragmatic talk on performance and aggressive enhancement at the Responsive Day Out.

Antiphonal Geometry: harmony and proportion in responsive web design

The slides from Owen’s magnificent talk at the Responsive Day Out …but you really had to be there.

The gradient chart by Cennydd Bowles

A very handy technique from Cennydd for answering the “it depends” question of when you might need a separate device-specific site (‘though I think that a separate can be a good option in addition to a responsive site, rather than instead of).

Creating a physical internet to save money and energy on logistics

I remember a talk and discussion at SxSW a few years back about trying to improve the efficiency of trade networks by making them more web-like: there are ships full of empty cargo containers, simply because companies insist on using the container with their logo on it. I really, really like the idea of applying the principles of packet-switching to physical networks.

But here’s the hard part:

The technology is not a problem. We could do it all in 10 years. It’s the business models and the mental models in people’s minds.

Write The Future by Tom Hunter — Kickstarter

Now this looks like my kind of event:

A new micro-conference on science, technology, communication and fiction, organised by the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Our Work Here is Done - The Web Standards Project

The WaSP is closing its doors. It has been a privilege and an honour to serve with such a fine organisation.

Device lab

These device holders/stands look really nice, and they’d be a real help keeping my spaghetti cables in check.

Impact of Responsive Designs

I heartily concur with Luke’s call for sharing of data:

If you’ve had success with a responsive design, my plea to you is to please share what you’ve learned.

I’m going to see if I can get some Clearleft clients to open up.

Protip: All browsers that support SVG background images also supports multiple background images.

A very hand tip from Ben on using SVG background images with a PNG fallback for IE8 and below.

Support Scrunchup

If you’re coming along to the Responsive Day Out and you’ve got some tech books you no longer need, bring them along. We’ll collect them and distribute them to schools.

Scarfolk Council

Dispatches from the disturbing town of Scarfolk, where it is permanently the 1970s:

Scarfolk is more than its famous sewage treatment works, it’s more than its high security mental facilities; it’s more than its world renowned covens; it’s more than its fine reputation which it rebuilt after a spate of grizzly serial killings…

It’s funny and creepy in equal measure. Actually, the creepiness may be the larger measure.

Inside the Battle of Hoth: The Empire Strikes Out

A damning analysis of the Empire’s military strategy at the battle of Hoth, complete with illustrations. The comments are good too:

Guys, cut Palpatine some slack. He’s still in his first term as Emperor…

Forty Years of Movie Hacking: Considering the Potential Implications of the Popular Media Representation of Computer Hackers from 1968 to 2008

An in-depth look at the portrayal of hackers on film.

The Vanilla Web Diet by Christian Heilman

I like the sound of the book that Chris is writing for Smashing Magazine. It sounds like a very future-friendly approach to front-end development.

Editorially: Write Better

A collaborative writing tool built by a dream team. I’ve been using it for a while now and it’s very nice indeed.

Brighton Science Festival Edo Wonderpark Hack Day

There’s going to be mini Science Hack Day at Lighthouse as part of this month’s Science Festival in Brighton. Come along — it’ll be fun.

Barebones — An initial directory setup, style guide and pattern primer by Paul Lloyd

Here are some nice patterns that Paul uses for starting points in his own projects.

The dictionary of obscure sorrows

Ennuitastic.

Nick Cave Winning Competition Entries - a set on Flickr

Local music shop Resident Records ran a competition to win 20 pairs of tickets to an exclusive warm-up gig by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. To be in with a chance, you had to recreate an album cover. These are the winning entries.

You’ll spot Jessica’s creation in amongst them. We’re off to see Nick Cave tonight!

You can’t create a button by Nicholas Zakas

Related to my rant on links that aren’t actually links: buttons that aren’t actually buttons.

Search in a Giphy

A search engine for animated gifs. Oh, yes.

Submarine Cable Map

This year’s TeleGeography map of the undersea network looks beautiful—inspired by old maps. I love the way that latency between countries is shown as inset constellations.

Stratocam

Communal satellite eyes. A Mac screensaver is also available.

Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns by Steve Yegge

A classic of writing on the fundamental differences between programming languages.

The Creeping Garden

I, for one, welcome our slime mould overlords.

The slime mould is being used to explore biological-inspired design, emergence theory, unconventional computing and robot controllers, much of which borders on the world of science fiction.

Mercator Puzzle!

This is fun. Drag the red country outlines around and slot them into place on the map. Sounds easy, right? But the distorting effect of the Mercator projection makes it a lot tougher than it looks.

HTML5 in six steps by Andy Hume

You’re probably doing each of these already but just in case your’e not, Andy has listed six quick wins you can get from HTML5.

Metadesign at Hack Farm by James Box

James’s notes from the most recent Hack Farm show that, even without a finished product, there were a lot of benefits.

Life as German POW by Carl Lehman

My friend Dan’s stepfather Carl passed away recently, aged 90. His experiences during World War II were quite something.

Actual Facebook Graph Searches

Another Tom Scott project:

I had to take one more quick, cheap shot — and I think a Tumblr blog is the quickest, cheapest shot it’s possible to take.

Carousel interaction stats by Eric Runyon

I’ve never been a fan of carousels on websites, to put it mildy. It seems I am not alone. And if you doubt the data, ask yourself this: when was the last time you, as a user, interacted with a carousel on any website?

Owning your own words – is it important?

A fascinating discussion on sharecropping vs. homesteading. Josh Miller from Branch freely admits that he’s only ever known a web where your content is held by somone else. Gina Trapani’s response is spot-on:

For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web—even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful—I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.

When you get old and your memory is long and you lose parents and start having kids, you value your own and others’ personal archive much more.

On the styling of forms by Bruce Lawson

Bruce takes a look at the tricky issue of styling native form controls. Help us, Shadow DOM, you’re our only hope!

Soul Compare: Get the most for your soul.

The latest project from Tom Scott is like many Facebook-authenticated apps that ask you to sell your soul, but this one is literal. I think I might offer my soul (worth 56gigaMorgans) to Cthulhu.

The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8 by Troy Hunt

A good explanation of the litany of woes that comes from Internet Explorer 8 being the highest that users of Windows XP can upgrade to. It’s a particularly woeful situation if you are a web developer attempting to provide parity. But there is hope on the horizon:

2013 will see the culmination of all these issues; support for IE 8 will drop of rapidly, users of XP will find an increasingly broken web, the cost of building software in XP organisations will increase.

The Last Pictures: Contemporary pessimism and hope for the future by Paul Glister

From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the Pioneer plaques and Voyager golden records to Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures” project, Paul Glister examines the passage and preservation of art and information through time. Fascinating.

Or perhaps, as Paglen envisions, those who find a Pioneer Plaque, a Voyager Record, or one of our electromagnetic transmissions will be interested enough to search us out, coming upon a future Earth where all that is left of humanity are our terrestrial ruins and that artificial ring of geosynchronous satellites, with one of them having a particular golden artifact bolted to its pitted hull. In that scenario, about all that would be left for the visiting ETI to do in terms of learning about us would be grand-scale dumpster diving.

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