Textastrophe
These are mostly just mean …but kinda funny.
Tags: text
Content Parity on the web
A couple of years ago, the benefits of separate sites were more clear to me. Today, I can’t think of a good reason to maintain a separate mobile site.
Notes on remixing Noon, generative text and Markov chains
Jeff Noon and Markov chains—a heavenly match by Dan.
Designing with context : Cennydd Bowles
A great meaty piece from Cennydd, diving deep into the tricky question of context.
Sparkicons and the humble hyperlink by Mark Boulton
I really like Mark’s idea of standardised “sparkicons” …for a while there, reading this, I was worried he was going to propose something like Snap Preview. shudder
Text Adventure: Zork Creators Honored With Pioneer Award | Game|Life | Wired.com
This might well be the best thing Wired has ever published. I wish every article were in this format.
Web History, a timeline
This is right up my alley: a timeline of the history of hypertext, starting with Borges.
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.
We’ll tell you what you really want: Mobile context, top tasks, and organization-centric thinking | Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Content Strategist
An excellent follow-up to the recent posts on the myth of mobile context.
You often hear about cutting content to cut clutter. I support this—if you’re cutting the clutter from everywhere, not just a mobile experience.
Maybe the answer isn’t cutting. Maybe it’s learning better skills for designing and structuring complex information to be usable and enjoyable in small spaces.
Mobile > Local « Karen McGrane
Yes, yes, yes! Karen drives home the difference between mobile and local (and there’s more about the myth of the mobile context).
If you’re making an argument for delivering different content to mobile users, or prioritizing content differently based on their context of use, stop for a minute and ask yourself if you mean local content. And if you do mean local content, then say that. Claiming that your travel example extends to cover the “mobile use case” leaves out millions of tasks and users.
Just to belabor this point: people use mobile devices in every location, in every context. Just because you know what type of device someone is using or where she is doesn’t tell you anything about her intention.
Great Works of Fiction Presents: The Mobile Context | The Haystack.
A really great article from Stephen on how we are mistakenly making assumptions about what users want. He means it, man!
As We May Think - The Atlantic
Vannevar Bush’s original 1945 motherlode of hypertext.
Welcome to History Mesh
This is rather wonderful: a DevFort project for navigating interweaving strands of history, James Burke style.
NoisePNG - Generate noisy PNG-images with alpha-transparency
If you’re adding some noise texture to your backgrounds, this little service might be handy. I usually base-64 encode these kinds of background images: it would be nice to see that added as an option here.
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 origin of the blink tag
Have you thought “There must be a good reason for the blink element.” Well, read on.
Descriptive Camera
Oh, this is just wonderful: a camera that outputs a text description instead of an image (complete with instructions on how to build one yourself). I love it!
ARCHIVE TEAM: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack - YouTube
Jason’s rip-roaring presentation from Defcon last year.
russell davies: SXSW, the new aesthetic and writing
Russell was the final panelist to speak at the New Aesthetic South by Southwest tour-de-force, taking a look at how our relationship to text is being changed.
The Jason Scott Adventure | Glorious Trainwrecks
Download and play the Jason Scott Adventure — only you can help Jason save the internet!
JoshEmerson.co.uk · Blog · The Responsive Process
Josh goes through the talking points from the recent Responsive Summit he attended. Sounds like it was a great get-together.
Typography Effects with CSS3 and jQuery
Most of these are pretty over the top but they’re good proofs of concept.
Scripting News: Why apps are not the future
Spot. On.
The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub.
Space Ipsum
This is officially the best lorem ipsum generator yet.
Mobile web content adaptation techniques | mobiForge
This is article is mostly a decent round-up of development approaches to mobile but the summary lets it down by assuming that desktop users couldn’t possibly want the same functionality as mobile users — in my opinion, inferring people’s desires based purely on their device is extremely dangerous and downright patronising.
Welcome to Small Demons
Turning text into hypertext. Pivot on people, places and things mentioned in books. I really, really like this.
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?
Latin Text Generator for Mac OS X - LittleIpsum
A cute little lorem ipusm generator for the mac.
Fillerama: A Filler Text Generator
One more alternative to lorem ipsum.
Vegan Ipsum
A veggie alternative to bacon ipsum.
Bacon Ipsum | A Meatier Lorem Ipsum Generator
A meatier alternative to lorem ipsum placeholder text.
susan jean robertson » Mobile Portland Notes
Susan’s comprehensive notes from the roundtable discussion about the mythical mobile user.
LukeW | Mobile Context Revisited
Yes! Luke nails the fallacy of the mythical mobile user. Instead of trying to mind-read intent, play to the strengths of mobile devices instead.
susan jean robertson » We are the minority
Another great post from Susan. Not only are we making unwarranted assumptions about what the mythical mobile user wants, we’re basing those assumptions on the worst possible user base: ourselves.
Links Don’t Open Apps « Cloud Four
A timely reminder from Jason of the killer feature of the web: hyperlinks.
susan jean robertson » Assumptions
Susan pushes back on the notion of the mythical mobile user.
Fit To Scale | Trent Walton
More documentation of a responsive redesign, this time from Trent Walton. Be sure to check out the FitText jQuery plug-in that was created as a result.
It’s the Little Things - “Mobile” versus “Small Screen”
- A “small screen” user is not necessarily a mobile user.
- A “small screen” device is not necessarily a mobile one.
See also: bandwidth.
txt2re: headache relief for programmers :: regular expression generator
I’m rubbish at regular expressions so this little tool might just save my skin someday.
Beyond the mobile web by yiibu
Aaaaaand once again, the Riegers show us the way. This time it’s Stephanie’s presentation at Breaking Development in Dallas. Bloody brilliant.
Experience Is What We Make It | UX Magazine
The Riegers are like emissaries from Planet Smart and we mere mortals are fortunate that they take the time to give us great articles like this.
text-align: centaur;
I am easily amused.
Weekend Reading: Responsive Web Design and Mobile Context « Cloud Four
Jason Grigsby pulls together a bunch of links related to responsive design, mobile web and that tricky context problem.
The Mobile context
Yes! Yes! Yes! Mark nails it: just because someone visits a site with a certain kind of device doesn’t mean you can make assumptions about their intentions.
- Mobile != low download speed
- Context != intent
Fillerati - Faux Latin is a Dead Language
The best alternative to lorem ipsum yet.
Gangsta Lorem ippzle dummy text generator
Spizzle up your tizzle.
David DeSandro
Drag the text 'round for a bit of fun.
Early History of HTML - 1990 to 1992
A wonderful document outlining the earliest history of the tags we know and love today.
Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus? | Culture | Religion Dispatches
A fascinating look at hypertext in illuminated manuscripts.
Telescopic Text © Joe Davis 2008
A wonderful experiment in expanding hypertext.
cyoa
An in-depth study mapping all the permutations in "choose your own adventure" books.
Whatcha Readin' For? - Handy TextMate tips for working with HTML & CSS
Some very handy Textmate tips from Emil ....especially the bit about doing calculations for vertical rhythm.
Shirky: In Praise of Evolvable Systems
A classic essay from Clay Shirky on the dumb nature of the web.
Web Typography Readability Test | by the User Experience team at Viget Labs
Jackson is gathering data to test on-screen readability. Sign up and join in.
tinyarchive.org
Blaine is doing his bit to battle the great linkrot apocalypse with an archive of short urls and their corresponding endpoints.
Chris Shiflett: Save the Internet with rev="canonical"
Chris Shiflett gets behind the rev="canonical" movement. This thing is really gaining momentum.
RevCanonical’s Blog
rev="canonical" has a posse.
The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized
This is the ur-spring: Tim Berners Lee's original proposal for "Mesh", later "World Wide Web."
StupidFilter :: Main / HomePage
Because the internet needs prophylactics for memetically transmitted diseases.
Lyttony
Past winners of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, "where WWW means Wretched Writers Welcome."
Wiki Paths
A greasemonkey-driven hypertext game: get from a starting Wikipedia page to your target solely by following links in the articles.
this is a working library
I love the design of this site almost as much as I love the content.
Bruce Lawson’s personal site : Is mobile web development compatible with the One Web?
An excellent write-up by Bruce of a talk he gave at the Betavine birthday party. Down with .mobi! One Web FTW!
How the Lowly Text Message May Save Languages That Could Otherwise Fade - WSJ.com
The importance of providing predictive text for minority languages (including Irish). To help preserve languages, advocates are pushing to make more written languages available on cellphones.
jCquard: The Do Less, Punch More JavaScript Library
This is certainly the most backwards-compatible JavaScript library out there.
malevole - Text Generator
An excellent alternative to Lorem Ipsum ...possibly even better than Anguish Languish.
Designing for hyper-connectivity - SlideShare
This talk that James gave in Bristol last week is chock full of great stuff. Well worth a read/look.
YouTube - experiencewii's Channel
Nintendo break the third wall to advertise Wario Land.
Subtitles
Now you can perform data analysis on the subtitles of the most recent series of Doctor Who, courtesy of the brilliant Matthew Somerville.
reboot10 - Jeremy Keith talks about Hypertext (Micropresentation)
Ooh, look what else I've found on the Reboot site.: this is my pecha kucha... I mean, this is my "micropresentation" about increasing the power of your hyperlinks (with microformats ...of course).
Extenuating Circumstances – SXSW: The Web That Wasn’t
Dan Hon's very extensive notes from Alex Wright's great talk at South by Southwest, The Web That Wasn't.
Empty Links and Screen Readers » Yahoo! User Interface Blog
Excellent research into how screen readers respond to empty links (i.e. A elements with no text between the opening and closing tags).
CSS Gradient Text Effect
A neat new CSS effect. You don't see many of those these days.
Collection of unfortunately placed ads | Ads of the World
Context is everything, as this collection of unfortunate juxtapositions shows.
Microformats: Toward a Semantic Web
An excellent overarching article looking at the current state of microformats adoption.
Anguish Languish
Tired of using "lorem ipsum dolor..." for placeholder copy? Use real English words that, while apparently non-sensical, transform into stories when spoken aloud.
Time, History and the Internet - barcamplondon2 on take one onion by Gavin Bell
Gavin Bell has posted the slides from his excellent talk at BarCamp London 2.
Urban Dirty: Free texture stock photography for your artwork, desktop and design
A nice collection of royalty free texture photos using the Flickr API.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Actor Baker becomes voice of text
Former Doctor Who actor Tom Baker is to be the voice of a talking text message service for three months.
Flickr: The Curator
A wonderful hypertextual essay in praise of Elsa's excellent photography.