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.
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.
Oh, my! This excellent, excellent post from Anil Dash is a great summation of what has changed on the web, and how many of today’s big-name services are no longer imbued with the spirit of the web.
Either you remember how things used to be and you’ll nod your head vigorously in recognition and agreement …or you’re too young to remember this, and you won’t quite believe that is how things worked.
This isn’t some standard polemic about “those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!” I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.
A worrying look at how modern web developers approach accessibility. In short, they don’t.
Jeffrey quite rightly singles out Derek Powazek for praise.
It was his site Fray that made me realise I wanted to build things on the web.
I think Derek is on to something here. Maybe online communities and profit are simply incompatible?
The bigger you go, the harder the road. Meanwhile, small, focused, and yes, exclusionary community sites flourish.
You know what? I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.
What Erin has written here makes me want to be a better person.
The history of the WELL, a truly remarkable community.
I love this! A volunteer-run hotline for answering JavaScript questions (set up by the awesome Garann Means, who literally wrote the book on Node.js).
I think I might volunteer my services.
Evan’s experiences of—and thoughts about—South by Southwest mirror my own to an uncanny degree.
There’s a W3C community group now for looking at the responsive images question.
Rachel tells the tale of how she came to be the splendid web worker she is and finishes with some advice for up-and-coming workers of the web:
Make 2012 the year you go out and do it.
This. This is why I love the web.
Not only does the web make publishers of those willing to put in the work, it also makes most of us free sharers of our hard-won trade, craft, and business secrets. The minute we grab hold of a new angle on design, interaction, code, or content, we share it with a friend — or with friends we haven’t met yet.
Cennydd is a gent, slow to anger. So it took a lot to get him wound up enough to write about this issue. I’m glad he did.
A call-to-arms for web developers combined with a handy list of projects you can get involved in.
This is great idea! A website for putting the digital makers of Brighton in contact with the city’s student population.
A nice little round-up of some techniques for dealing with trolls in online communities. I must remember some of this stuff for The Session.
Rebecca Murphey on the continuing evolution and maturity of the JavaScript world.
It'll be interesting to see how this service works out: people can report accessibility problems with any website, and other people can volunteer to help fix the issues.
What he said. "The wonderful thing about the web is that anyone can contribute to it. If you have something to say, there are plenty of places to say it. But your right to post to someone else’s site rests with that someone else."
An exercise in collaboration and perspective: let another designer touch your website while you touch theirs.
A nice resource (built in HTML5) to connect developers and designers who want to Make A Thing.
A sobering article on the cost of being a truly global website. This gives some context to Last.fm's recent pricing model decision.
An even more speculative version of The Long Bet. Given a supposition (e.g. "What will the world be like when custom satellites are as easy to design and launch as your own website is today?"), you can add to a list of positive and negative outcomes.
An approach to releasing community-driven books that is more like software than traditional book publishing. Think versions instead of editions.
Brighton has a new co-working space right 'round the corner from the Clearleft office: The Skiff.
It looks like Brighton is getting its own dedicated geek coffee bar thanks to Josh.
Ben has been working hard to upgrade the microformats wiki. His hard work has paid off: it looks great!
A nice little report on community management at Flickr.
Mark Pesce's closing keynote from Web Directions South 2008. Great stuff, as always.
Not all communities are created equal. The web needs Metafiltering and less YouTubing.
A super simple lightweight piece of forum software from Stuart in just one PHP file. Drop it in a directory and you're done.
It's baaa-ack!
This Ning competitor has a lot of really nice UI touches. Also, the fact that you can play around a lot without signing up is a plus point.
Find out whether you really need a car in your neighbourhood. My place got a score of 75 which is pretty darn good.
Jeffrey's only gone and turned on comments. Who's next? Joe? Me? I just hope he remembers the corollary of Sturgeon’s Law for blogs.
Someone else who doesn't have comments enabled on his site explains his reasons.
In a very meta move, I've seeded Newsvine with my post about comments (and Newsvine) with an eye to soliciting comments.
This is the plain vanilla look.
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