Link archive: December, 2011

On lucky breaks and saying yes « this is rachelandrew.co.uk

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.

BBC News - Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship

The network will interpret SOPA as damage and route around it …with SCIENCE!

College Misery: Henchminion Sends In the Tale of “The Magna Carta Essay!”

A trojan horse for plagiarised college papers, much like the fakery on maps (“Lie Close”, “Arlington”) and in dictionaries; traps to be sprung on the hapless copy’n’paster.

daniel sinker • Hacker-Journalism 2011: A year of “show your work”

A look back at some of the best code for journalism over the past year.

12412 - Experience and learn 12 new web technologies in 12 months

Here’s a challenge for the new year: use each month as an opportunity to try out a new web technology.

Set yourself small, achievable projects to work on and use 12412.org as a support group. We will all help to motivate each other and join in to offer help where we can.

The maker makes: on design, community, and personal empowerment – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

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.

On designing content-out (a response to Zeldman and others) | Stephanie Rieger

Stephanie details all the things we have to know about when designing for today’s broad range of devices: performance, capabilities, form factor, pixel density, and network latency.

These are all good points but I worry that if we just concentrate on the current device landscape, our processes won’t adapt to the future.

Leaving Old Internet Explorer Behind — Joni Korpi

Joni points out a great advantage to the mobile-first approach if you choose not to polyfill for legacy versions of IE: you can go crazy with all sorts of CSS3 goodies in the stylesheet you pull in with media queries.

A Responsive Design Approach for Complex, Multicolumn Data Tables | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

A really nice pattern for data tables in responsive designs. Just as with conditional loading, the key point is making a distinction between essential and optional content.

Bullshit – Marco.org

Everyone has their bullshit. You can simply decide whose you’re willing to tolerate.

One Cut - jonronson’s Space

This is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read …and it just happens to be posted on a blog. Please read it, particularly if you are a voter in the UK.

The ‘trouble’ with Android | Stephanie Rieger

Stephanie focuses on Android but this is a cautionary tale about trying to impose control over what you’re sending to the multitude of mobile devices out there.

Designing to fixed screen sizes is in fact never a good idea…there is just too much variation, even amongst ‘popular’ devices.

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz - tech - 27 December 2011 - New Scientist

Before there was phone phreaking there was …radio interception hacking?

A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi’s wireless telegraph

Predicting the Future of Computing - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

An interactive timeline where we, the wise crowd, can add our predictions (although the timeline for the past, showing important technological breakthroughs, is bizarrely missing Cooke and Wheatsone’s telegraph).

São Paulo No Logo - a set on Flickr

Photographs showing the “before” and “after” of São Paulo’s astonishing Clean City act banning all outdoor advertising.

Elite - Cobra Mk III

Rendered in canvas by the reverend Dan Catt. Now I really want to play Elite.

Buxton Collection

Bill Buxton’s collection of input devices going back thirty years.

What’s on the Menu? Help transcribe The New York Public Library’s historical menu collection

This is like Zooniverse’s Old Weather project, but for restaurant menus: help transcribe thousands of restaurant menus going back to the 1940s.

Confusion over HTML5 & WAI-ARIA | Karl Groves

This helps to clarify the difference between native semantics and ARIA additions.

Is the web dead?

View source.

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Anatomy Of An Idea

Steven Johnson describes the beautifully chaotic way that ideas collide and coalesce. Oh, and this bit…

Listening to Cerf talk about the origins of the Internet — and thinking about the book project — made me wonder who had actually come up with the original idea for a decentralized network. So that day, I tweeted out that question, and instantly got several replies. One of those Twitter replies pointed to a Wired interview from a decade ago with Paul Baran, the RAND researcher who was partially responsible for the decentralized design.

That reply on Twitter was from me!

British Sea Power

Oh, this is good! British Sea Power are doing a monthly residency at The Haunt in Brighton. I’ve got my ticket for the first show.

The Star Wars Holiday Special | magazine | Vanity Fair

Add this one to your Instapaper/Readability queue: the behind-the-scenes story of the train wreck that was the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.

REDbot: <>

Oh, this is very handy indeed: a quick lint tool for HTTP so you can see what kind of headers are being sent. There’s a bookmarklet in the footer too.

WORLDMOON

A masterplan for the moon as a global cemetery. Launch the ashes of your loved ones to the moon (leaving the buckyball container in lunarstationary orbit). Given enough ashes and enough buckyballs, the result is a fertile surface and a atmosphere-trapping layer of fullerine. Terraforming via recycled humans.

Or, if that’s too long-term for you, you can buy a scale-model moon jewel.

Where do Websites go to Die? « dpr-barcelona

Burying physical copies of dead websites in a Croatian cave.

A Christmas Carol read by Patrick Stewart on Huffduffer

Perfect seasonal entertainment. Perfect.

Rebecca Cottrell » Where visual design fits in a design process

I think Rebecca is on to something here. Everyone has been so quick to self-identify as a UX designer while marginalising visual design as a purely surface-level layer …but it’s all part of the design process.

Huffduffer | Joel Housman

Another satisfied convert to the world of huffduffing, Joel has written some very kind words about the site.

Interestingly, the fact that Huffduffer is free worries him. In this case his fears are unwarranted but it’s a legitimate worry with free services: what if it gets bought out and shut down?

3D Printing, Teleporters and Wishes - Anil Dash

Anil shares his thoughts on where there’s room for improvement in 3D printing, or as he calls it, teleporting.

Douchey Account Guy

It’s funny and heartbreaking because it’s true.

How To Build a Modern Website in 2011 - Tom Milway - Blog

A good round-up of what web development means today …and what web developers need to do to keep pace.

Typography Effects with CSS3 and jQuery

Most of these are pretty over the top but they’re good proofs of concept.

Heaven Devoid of Stars – a tale of cross-browser kerning | Clagnut § Browsers · Typography · CSS techniques

Richard dives into the differences in how browsers handle kerning. Be sure to click through to the beautiful finished result.

Support Vs Optimization | Brad Frost Web

Brad is on a roll. He knocks it out of the park again, this time talking about the difference between supporting the huge range of mobile browsers out there compared to trying to optimise for them.

Position: fixed revisited - QuirksBlog

PPK tests the various ways that mobile browsers handle position:fixed, complete with videos.

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.

Film on Paper

A blog that takes a detailed look at the art of the film poster.

The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history | VentureBeat

Some future-friendly musings on mobile from Mozilla and Yahoo.

Designers, what’s the rush? | Normative - Design for Devices and the Web

A plea for more time.

We tend to think in 2 to 5 year scales, maybe we need to be thinking in longer time lines about our own careers and skills.

Mobile content strategy link-o-rama 2011 « Karen McGrane

A great round-up of links and posts relating to the increasingly-important role of content strategy and structured content in our multi-device, responsively-designed online world.

yongfook - Design is Horseshit!

There’s a good point buried in this tirade.

Here’s a more positive spin: with this much horseshit, there’s gotta be a horse in there somewhere.

Cross-stitch iPhone case #2 - Jane Dallaway

A brilliantly cool handmade iPhone case by Jane.

Design Principles // Speaker Deck

The slides from my presentation at this year’s An Event Apart. Such a fantastic event …it was an honour to be on the roster.

HTML5 and CSS3 Advent 2011

Here’s a geek advent calendar I missed. There are some great CSS techniques here.

inessential.com: Apps and web apps and the future

Brent Simmons follows up on that Dave Winer post with some future-friendly thoughts:

If I had to choose one or the other — if I had some crazy power but I had to wipe out either native apps or web apps — I’d wipe out native apps. (While somehow excluding browsers, text editors, outliners, web servers, and all those apps we need to make web apps.)

That’s not the case, though. Nothing has to get wiped out.

I think instead that we’ll see a more tangled future. Native apps will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more. Web apps will appear more often on smart phones as launchable apps.

The 20 Unhappiest People You Meet In The Comments Sections Of Year-End Lists : Monkey See : NPR

It’s funny because it’s true.

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.

An open letter to Arran Ross-Paterson : Cennydd Bowles

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.

Polyfilling The HTML5 Gaps With JavaScript

An in-depth look at browser polyfills: what they are, how they work, and how you can make your own.

The Mobile Case for Progressive Enhancement | Brad Frost Web

A great, great reminder from Brad on the importance of progressive enhancement especially on mobile. There seems to be a real mindset amongst developers working on mobile sites that JavaScript is a requirement for building anything (and there’s a corresponding frustration with the wildly-varying levels of JavaScript support). It ain’t necessarily so!

Jeremy Keith - There Is No Mobile Web - BD Conf, Sept 2011 on Vimeo

The video of the opening keynote I delivered at the Breaking Development conference in Nashville earlier this year. It expands on the One Web presentation I gave at DIBI, focusing on the language we use to talk about our approaches to web development.

Simon Collison | Colly | Journal | My digital preservation utopia

Colly’s thoughts on digital preservation are written in a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek way but at least he’s thinking about it. That alone gives me comfort.

Don’t Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog)

Maciej delivers a rant worthy of Paul Robert Lloyd.

That “JavaScript not available” case | Christian Heilmann

A great reminder from Christian that making JavaScript a requirement for using a website just doesn’t make much sense.

Silicon Valley Buzz - Science for the everyday man - YouTube

Ariel is interviewed by Seth Shostak. Science! Science! Science!

Shimizu’s Dream - Shimizu Corporation

Among the proposed projects from the Shimizu corporation are a space hotel, giant lakes in the desert, and a ring around the moon to harness solar energy.

iOS scale bug stays (mostly) « « David Goss David Goss

Well, this is very intriguing: it turns out that the infamous orientation/scale bug in Mobile Safari isn’t present in in-app browsers (UIWebView). Most odd.

We Are Historians | 1sixty

A beautiful reminder that by publishing on the web, we are all historians.

Every color you choose and line of code you write is a reflection of you; not just as a human being in this world, but as a human being in this time and place in human history. Inside each project is a record of the styles and fashions you value, the technological advancements being made in the industry, the tone of your voice, and even the social and economic trends around you.

Rhizome | She Was A Camera

Remembering the camgirl community.

astronautdinosaur.com

Ballardian astronaut paintings by Scott Listfield.

ART LIES | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

James Bridle in untrue art exposé: read all about it!

The comments are simply epic.

Future Drama

Past predictions of the future in concept videos.

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.

InstaCSS | Instant CSS Documentation Search

A fantastically useful resource! Don’t let the name fool you: this provides instant access to documentation for CSS and HTML and JavaScript!

Put this one on speed dial.

Occupy George

A stroke of genius: turning money itself into the carrier for infographics on wealth distribution in America.

Athena - MediaWiki

Documentation of an ongoing project to create a mobile-first responsive MediaWiki theme.