Adactio: Links

Onword

This is nice lightweight writing tool, kinda like Editorially without the collaboration. Just right for working on a blog posts.

It authenticates with Twitter and doesn’t ask for write permissions. Bravo!

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.

MATTER and Medium

The news is finally public: Bobbie’s Matter has been bought my Ev’s Medium. Fingers crossed that they don’t fuck it up.

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.

They Keep Using That Word ∙ An A List Apart Column

David gets physidigital.

Control your own content

Honestly, if you value the content you create and put online, then you need to be in control of your own stuff.

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.

Offscreen 4: I got what I paid for by Jeff Porter

A really nice write-up of issue four of Offscreen magazine, wherein I was featured.

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.

Issue 4 — Offscreen Magazine

There’s an interview with me in the new issue of Offscreen Magazine. Some of sort of clerical error, I’m guessing.

Olaf Stapledon

The out-of-copyright books of Olaf Stapledon are available to download from the University of Adelaide. Be sure to grab Starmaker and First And Last Men.

30 Great Reads from 2012 - Readlists

Some of the past year’s best long-form non-fiction, gathered together into a handy readlist for your portable epub pleasure.

Jan V. White

Eight of Jan White’s excellent books on graphic design are now available for free online, licensed under CC0 …they’re in the public domain now.

All he asks in return is that you might buy one of his books still in print, and maybe make a donation to the Internet Archive.

Jan V. White is a mensch.

Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek - Multimedia Feature - NYTimes.com

Excellent journalism combined with excellent art direction into something that feels just right for the medium of the web.

A New Canon | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton

An excerpt from Mark’s forthcoming book, which promises to be magnificent.

The Subcompact Publishing Reader - Readlists

A nice Readlist based on that excellent article by Craig on digital publishing:

This reader is made up of Craigmod’s essay “Subcompact Publishing” and essays linked to in the footnotes.

Subcompact Publishing — by Craig Mod

Very smart thinking from Craig about digital publishing.

display: none; | Laura Kalbag

Laura explains the problems with hiding content for small screens, and uses this as an opportunity to elucidate why you should blog, even if you’re think that no-one would be interested in what you have to say:

The point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t be fearful of writing about what we know. Even if you write from the most basic point of view, about something which has been ‘around for ages’, you’ll likely be saying something new to someone. They might be new to the industry, you might just be filling in the holes in someone’s knowledge.

Matter: A Look At A New Way To Read About Science - Download The Universe

Just a few hours after launch, here’s the first review of Matter complete with some speculation on where it might go.

YOU CHOSE WRONG

Documenting all the ways you could die in a choose-your-own-adventure book.

Migrating from Kindle to iBooks - zacwe.st

A step-by-step guide to unDRMing your Kindle books—a prudent course of action given Amazon’s recent unilateral wiping of Kindles.

Guardian Truncation Team

Celebrating the work of the tireless men and women who shorten headlines so they’ll fit on your iPhone.

The Brand New Printed Smashing Book: “The Mobile Book” | Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine are publishing a book on mobile and the web. I’m writing the foreword. I should really get on that.

Announcing Newspaper Club Minis | Newspaper Club

Ooh, these look nice! Smaller, more manageable newspapers from Newspaper Club.

The Humble eBook Bundle (pay what you want and help charity)

This looks like an excellent deal: buy eight sci-fi books for as much money as you think is fair. Lauren Beukes, Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow …all good stuff.

Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks

I like this skewering of the cult of so-called-neuroscience; the self-help book equivalent of eye-tracking.

The Past 100 Years of the Future

This (free!) PDF looks like it could be a nice companion piece to Chris and Nathan’s recent book:

Human-computer interaction in science-fiction movies and television.

It’s a work in progress. You’ll notice a lot of placeholders where the images should be. That’s because the studios are demanding extortionate rates for screenshots.

Five Simple Steps - Pocket Guides

These short pocketbooks from Five Simple Steps look like they’ll be very handy indeed. Shame they won’t be available in dead-tree format: I bet they’d be really cute.

Scott Jenson | Exploring the world beyond mobile

Excellent! Scott has his own URL now. If you haven’t read everything he has written so far, start from the start and read every single post.

Make it So | Interface Design Lessons from Sci-Fi

Chris and Nathan’s book is finally out. I’m going to enjoy reading through this.

DOM Enlightenment

This looks great! It’s a CC-licensed book by Cody Lindley (whose work I’ve admired for many years) aimed at teaching DOM Scripting for modern browsers. You can read the whole thing online or wait for the paper version from O’Reilly.

If all your JavaScript currently consists of writing jQuery plugins, I highly recommend you read this.

Unsung Heroes of Web and Interaction Design: Derek Powazek – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

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.

An e-reader is more like a book than you think | Books | The Observer

James muses on the physicality of ebooks in this week’s Observer.

Platforming Books — by Craig Mod

Craig describes the many different ways he’s publishing his book, including putting the whole thing on the web for free:

Why do this? I strongly believe digital books benefit from public endpoints. The current generation of readers (human, not electronic) have formed expectations about sharing text, and if you obstruct their ability to share — to touch — digital text, then your content is as good as non-existent. Or, in the least, it’s less likely to be engaged.

I also believe that we will sell more digital and physical copies of Art Space Tokyo by having all of the content available online.

Your words are wasted - Scott Hanselman

Amen, Scott, A-MEN:

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.

Stories and Tools - Anil Dash

This post is ten years old, but I think it might still be the best attempt to demarcate a difference between web “sites” and web “apps”: think of them as stories and tools.

It’s also remarkably prescient about the need for an effort exactly like HTML5:

A widely-distributed, standards-compliant, browser and platform-independent library of functions that would perform the basic user interface functions for a web-based tool, relying on the server side only for the logic and data sourcing.

We could make history — I.M.H.O. — Medium

I quite the look of Medium, but Dave Winer absolutely nails it with this feature request:

Let me enter the URL of something I write in my own space, and have it appear here as a first class citizen. Indistinguishable to readers from something written here.

I think it might get a tattoo of this:

There’s art in each individual system, but there’s a much greater art in the union of all the systems we create.

Distant Shape: 10 Years of Daring Fireball

A nice visualisation of Apple’s transition From desktop to mobile over ten years, one Daring Fireball article at a time.

Oh, and happy birthday, Daring Fireball.

House of Cards | Contents Magazine

Maybe HyperCard is an idea whose time has come. Think about it: the size of mobile screens: perfect for a HyperCard stack.

The Internet of Things - Readlists

Those articles about the “Internet of Things” I linked to? Here they are in handy Readlist form.

The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero

Frank has published his book online in HTML. Very lovely it is too.

Implementing Responsive Design | Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web

Tim’s book is ready for pre-order. Looks like it’s going to be good one.

A List Apart: Articles: ALA Summer Reading Issue

How about this for a trip down memory lane—a compendium of articles from over a decade of A List Apart, also available as a Readlist epub. It’s quite amazing just how good this free resource is.

The only thing to fault is that, due to some kind of clerical error, one of my articles has somehow found its way onto this list.

If this were Twitter, you’d be at-replying me with the hashtag “humblebrag”, wouldn’t you?

The Manual

I’ve written a piece for issue three of The Manual. Despite that, it’s well worth getting your hands on a copy.

Monday 31 May 1669 (Pepys’ Diary)

Nine years and five months after he began publishing every entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary, Phil Gyford posts the last entry.

The Publication Standards Project

Like the Web Standards Project but for ePub. I approve of this message.

Readlists

This looks like a really handy service from Readability: gather together a number of related articles from ‘round the web and then you can export them to a reading device of your choice. It’s like Huffduffer for text.

The Daily Torygraph

There’s two years(!) of doctored headlines here. Yes, it’s puerile but it’s also very funny (to my puerile sensibilities).

GATHER. A Graphic Novel by Anton Peck — Kickstarter

Anton is a fantastic artist. Therefore, this graphic novel will be fantastic. Therefore, you should back the hell out of it.

Maureen Johnson, THE ADVENTURE OF THE RANDOM HOUSE

There’s a chain of hotels, one of which is in Brighton, called “My Hotel.” I bet they have stories like this one.

The Truth About the East Wind

This is a terrific piece of writing from Robin Sloan, entertaining and cheeky. Plug in headphones, and start reading and scrolling.

The East Wind was about to get a call from an angry star.

ARC 2012: The future is on its way - New Scientist

A new publication from New Scientist dedicated to future thinking. The first issue has articles and stories from Bruce Sterling, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Alastair Reynolds.

It’s a bookmark. But it’s also a magazine.

It’s a blog. It’s a bookmark. It’s a magazine.

Markup / from a working library

A superb rallying cry from Mandy on the importance of markup literacy for professionals publishing on the web: writers, journalists, and most importantly, editors.

Jeremy Keith: One Web — Update 2011 - YouTube

My short talk from Aral’s Update conference in Brighton last September. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. If I only I had a handheld mic—then I could’ve done a microphone drop at the end.

The Icon Handbook | The Hickensian | Hicksdesign

Jon gives us a run-through on what to expect from his new book. I’ve had a sneak peek and it looks amazing—I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

inessential.com: The Readable Future

Brent Simmons writes about the desire of regular web users—not just the geeks—to have a comfortable reading experience. Publishers ignore this at their peril.

Babies and the Bathwater | Contents Magazine

Mandy’s inaugural article for Contents Magazine is a wonderful piece of thinking and writing.

Enjoy reading this.

Newsstand Is Promising, Yay! But Enough with Issue-Based Publishing (Global Moxie)

Josh nails it: publishers need to stop thinking in terms of issues:

Publishers and designers have to start thinking about content at a more atomic level, not in aggregated issues. That’s how we already understand news as consumers, and we have to start thinking that way as publishers, too. This is why Flipboard, Instapaper, and other aggregators are so interesting: they give you one container for the whole universe of content, unbound to any one publisher.

The New Value of Text | booktwo.org

A rallying cry from James: since when did we decide that text couldn’t stand by itself without extra layers of “interactive” shininess?

Is the app economy killing online publishers? — Mobile Technology News

An excellent article that examines the supposed benefits of publishing through someone else’s app store instead of the web.

The shape of our future book — Satellite — Craig Mod

Craig has written down his dConstruct talk, the one that completely polarised opinion. Personally, I loved it.

How Responsive Web Design becomes Responsive Web Publishing - AQ » Blog

Some interesting questions (and one or two answers) about how responsive design affects publishing on the web.

SVK - Products - BERG

This comic is the result of a collaboration between Warren Ellis and BERG. It must, therefore, be splendid. I’ve ordered mine.

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing — by Craig Mod

Take some time out to read this. Read all of this. Craig’s thoughts on the nature of publishing today:

Digital’s effect on how we produce, distribute and consume content.

Book of Speed

An online book about website performance by Stoyan Steganov, released into the public domain. Excellent!

Web Typography – The Book

Mark, Richard and Jon are writing a book together (on web typography, of course). It will undoubtedly be excellent.

“Six-Penny Anthems II” - A classic Bearskinrug Article.

Rejoice! For Kevin Cornell’s new book is available to you through the power of print on demand. I’ve ordered mine. And should you.

웹디자이너를 위한 HTML5 - a set on Flickr

A peek behind the scenes of the printing of the Korean version of HTML5 For Web Designers.

Customer Stories: A Book Apart | MailChimp

A wonderfully made video on the story of A Book Apart. Mandy should have her own show.

Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement — Easy Readers

Buy. This. Book.

I mean it.

Push Pop Press: Al Gore’s Our Choice

This looks like a beautiful way to present information, although it seems a real shame that the information is locked to just one class of device.

In Radiolab We Trust

A great way of supporting the best podcast on the planet: a limited set of prints by five designers, illustrators and artists. Grab yours quick before they’re all gone.

Cranking | 43 Folders

I got your work/life balance right here. Merlin means it, man.

I love him.

The Technium: What Books Will Become

Kevin Kelly asks “What is a book?” and provides some thought-provoking answers. There’s some inspiring crystal-ball gazing in here.

A List Apart: Articles: Orbital Content

A great piece about the changing nature of content ownership and distribution. And now I share it with you, validating its central premise.

New Titles in Lending Library! « The Open Library Blog

You can now borrow HTML5 For Web Designers through the Open Library. Nice one, George!

Story Matters

Magazine creators share their experiences of going digital.

A History of the Future in 100 Objects | Mssv

Adrian Hon’s Kickstarter project has already reached its goal. I can’t wait for the podcasting to start.

Publishing Experiences | booktwo.org

I wish I could’ve attended James’s talk at Tools of Change. It sounds like it was great.

Maria Fischer · Portfolio · Traumgedanken

What a brilliant idea! This book on dreams uses physical threads as hyperlinks. The result is a gorgeous object.

The Universal magazine - Google Books

A proto-wikipedia from January 1749.

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)

An excellent piece of writing on the fundamental question of the web: Why Wasn’t I Consulted?

No More Sharecropping!

A site dedicated to the principle of homesteading your data.

The 24 Ways Annual 2010 | Five Simple Steps

All of this year's 24Ways articles are available as an £8 book with all the proceeds going to UNICEF.

Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook | booktwo.org

James Bridle propsed Open Bookmarks during a presentation at Tools of Change in Frankfurt today: "Open Bookmarks is not a thing, it’s a proposal, a flag in the ground. We need to agree on a way of sharing and storing annotations and bookmarks, reading attention data and everything around the book: that aura."

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