Links

Own Your Content on Social Media Using the IndieWeb—zachleat.com

A terrific—and fun!—talk from Zach about site deaths, owning your own content, and the indie web.

Oh, and he really did create MySpaceBook for the talk.

Quitting Analytics

What over a decade of number-crunching analytics has taught me is that spending an hour writing, sharing, or helping someone is infinitely more valuable than spending that hour swimming through numbers. Moreover, trying to juice the numbers almost invariably divorces you from thinking about customers and understanding people. On the surface, it seems like a convenient proxy, but it’s not. They’re just numbers. If you’re searching for business insights, talking to real people beats raw data any day. It’s not as convenient, but when is anything worth doing convenient?

2001 A Space Odyssey, Epilogue. Featuring Frank Poole on Vimeo

This is quite a beautiful homage to Kubrick’s masterpiece.

IndieWeb Link Sharing | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

Max describes how he does bookmarking on his own site—he’s got a bookmarklet for sharing links, like I do. But he goes further with a smart use of the “share target” section in his web app manifest, as described by Aaron.

By the way, Max’s upcoming talk at the Web Clerks conference in Vienna sounds like it’s going to be unmissable!

The lines of code that changed everything.

We construct top-10 lists for movies, games, TV—pieces of work that shape our souls. But we don’t sit around compiling lists of the world’s most consequential bits of code, even though they arguably inform the zeitgeist just as much.

This is a fascinating way to look at the history of computing, by focusing in on culturally significant pieces of code. The whole list is excellent, but if I had to pick a favourite …well, see if you can guess what it is.

Beyond automatic accessibility testing: 6 things I check on every website I build - Manuel Matuzović

Six steps that everyone can do to catch accessibility gotchas:

1. Check image descriptions
2. Disable all styles
3. Validate HTML
4. Check the document outline
5. Grayscale mode
6. Use the keyboard

Jeremy Keith & Remy Sharp - How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days on Vimeo

Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!

GitSheet

A handy translation of git commands into English.

Manton Reece - Saying goodbye to Facebook cross-posting

Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web.

Related: Aaron is playing whack-a-mole with Instagram because he provides a servie to let users export their own photographs to their own websites.

The World-Wide Work. — Ethan Marcotte

Here’s the transcript of Ethan’s magnificent closing talk from New Adventures. I’m pretty sure this is the best conference talk I’ve ever had the honour of seeing.

The rise of research ops — a view from the inside | Clearleft

I moderated this panel in London last week, all about the growing field of research ops—I genuinely love moderating panels. Here, Richard recounts some of the thought nuggets I prised from the mind casings of the panelists.

Paris Web 2019 - 10 octobre après-midi - Amphithéâtre - YouTube

Here’s the livestream of the talk I gave at Paris Web—Going Offline, complete with French live-captioning and simultaneous interpretation in .

Ne vous laissez plus déPOSSEder de vos contenus !

I saw Nicholas give this great talk at Paris Web on site deaths, the indie web, and publishing on your own site. That talk was in French, but these slides are (mostly) in English—I was able to follow along surprisingy easily!

100 words in a 100 days – Monique Dubbelman

I was chatting with Monique after her Paris Web talk on doing 100 days of code. I told her about my 100 days project and now she’s doing it too!

The “P” in Progressive Enhancement stands for “Pragmatism” - Andy Bell

With a Progressive Enhancement mindset, support actually means support. We’re not trying to create an identical experience: we’re creating a viable experience instead.

Also with Progressive Enhancement, it’s incredibly likely that your IE11 user, or your user on a low-powered device, or even your user on a poor connection won’t notice that they’re experiencing a “minor” experience because it’ll just work for them. This is the magic, right there. Everyone’s a winner.

You really don’t need all that JavaScript, I promise

The transcript of a fantastic talk by Stuart. The latter half is a demo of Portals, but in the early part of the talk, he absolutely nails the rise in popularity of complex front-end frameworks:

I think the reason people started inventing client-side frameworks is this: that you lose control when you load another page. You click on a link, you say to the browser: navigate to here. And that’s it; it’s now out of your hands and in the browser’s hands. And then the browser gives you back control when the new page loads.

Southern Mosaic

A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:

On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.

How to be a more productive developer | Go Make Things

Like Michael Pollan’s food rules, but for JavaScript:

1. Plan your scripts out on paper.
2. Stop obsessing over tools.
3. Focus on solving problems.
4. Maintain a library of snippets that you can reuse.

do you know your tags?

Test your knowledge of the original version of HTML—how many elements can you name?

Designing a focus style | Zell Liew

A deep dive info focus styles with this conclusion:

The default focus ring works. There are problems with it, but it can be good enough, especially if you can’t dedicate time and energy to create a custom focus ring.