Link archive: December, 2012

Page Weight Matters | Chris Zacharias

An excellent tale of performance optimisation …complete with a coda on looking behind the numbers when it comes to analytics data.

Interstellar Hard Drive - The Morning News

Investigating the options for off-world backups.

Data is only as safe as the planet it sits on. It only takes one rock, not too big, not moving that fast, to hit the Earth at a certain angle and: WHAM! Most living species are done for.

How the hell is your Twitter archive supposed to survive that?

Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog

A fascinating blog documenting the secrecy around nuclear weaponry, past and present, by Alex Wellerstein of the American Institue of Physics.

www-talk

Here’s a treasure trove of web history: an archive of the www-talk list dating back to 1991. Watch as HTML gets hammered out by a small group of early implementors: Tim Berners-Lee, Dave Raggett, Marc Andreessen, Dan Connolly…

Be proud to be a web developer — yatil. Eric Eggert about web development

An ever-timely call-to-arms from Eric:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web as open and accessible for everyone, no matter where they comes from, what speed their connection is, how capable their browsers are or how good their eyes or hands or both work. I feel proud every day to make that vision reality, and it is the job of web developers to make it a reality.

He’s right. We have tremendous power and privilege, and correspondingly tremendous responsibility.

Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold. - Slurtha

The best review of The Hobbit.

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.

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.

Why you should say HTML classes, CSS class selectors, or CSS pseudo-classes, but not CSS classes - Tantek

I love that Tantek is as pedantic as I am …although I don’t think “pedantic” is exactly the right word.

Lamps: a design research collaboration with Google Creative Labs, 2011 – Blog – BERG

Beautiful thoughtful work from the BERGians.

Deploying New Image Formats on the Web - igvita.com

A well-reasoned argument for tackling image optimisation on the server, using content-type negotiation.

Connecting (Full Film) on Vimeo

A short film about interaction design.

adactio’s 2012 Jam Odyssey

This is simply wonderful! Get all of your This Is My Jam songs condensed down into one mix.

Here are all my song choices from 2012 compressed into three minutes. I love it!

10 Years of Scrobbling Timeline – Last.fm

A really nice interactive timeline of data from ten years of scrobbling music to Last.fm.

Andy Hume: CSS for Grownups, SXSW 2012 - YouTube

The slides and audio from Andy’s exceptional talk earlier this year at Southby, combined into one video.

It really is excellent, although he does make the mistake of pulling the “dogma” card on those who woud disagree with him, and he really doesn’t need to: his argument is strong enough to stand on its own.

The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud

VC funding that actually makes sense, from the always-sensible Maciej Cegłowski.

Main element - WHATWG Wiki

Tantek has put together a wiki page to document the arguments for and against adding a new “main” element to HTML.

The Web We Lost - Anil Dash

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.

Altitude 2013 - A web event in Portsmouth, 100 meters above sea level

In a very mundane take on the cliché of a climactic showdown, I’ll be having a chat with Paul Boag at the top of Spinnaker Tower in February. Come on by if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Fragmented world: what two years of traffic data teaches you about mobile | Info | guardian.co.uk

A great breakdown of mobile traffic to The Guardian website over time.

APIs First « Just Getting Started

The best “Mobile First” strategy is an “API First” strategy:

“Mobile first” companies really are just a front end selection accessing a solid API driven backend infrastructure.

I think Luke would agree. He built a command line interface for Bagcheck, for example, before there was even a UI—mobile or otherwise.

Black Marble - City Lights 2012 - a set on Flickr

Gorgeous pictures from the Suomi satellite, just released by NASA

Street Mogs

A part-time postman documents all the cats he meets on his round:

Includes long haired mogs, short haired mogs, lazy mogs, active mogs, bashful mogs, brash mogs, brushed mogs, grand mogs, great mogs, wee mogs, twee mogs, affable mogs, unsociable mogs, mean mogs, clean mogs, smelly mogs, incarcerated mogs, liberated mogs, liberal mogs, loud mogs and quiet mogs.

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

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

JoshEmerson.co.uk · Blog · Code Club Raspberry Pi Hack Day

Code Club + Raspberry Pi + Hack Day = Awesomeness from Josh

On Open Platforms, Wifi, Home Automation, and Kitty Litter | John Battelle’s Search BlogJohn Battelle’s Search Blog

This echoes Scott Jenson’s call for more open standards when it comes to networked devices. We’ll need it if we want “If This, Then That” for an internet of things.

I Don’t Need No Stinking API: Web Scraping For Fun and Profit | Hartley Brody

A handy step-by-step guide to scraping HTML to get data out. Useful for services (—cough—Twitter—cough—) that keep changing the rules of their API use.

Twitter Engineering: Implementing pushState for twitter.com

A really nice explanation by Todd Kloots of Twitter’s use of progressive enhancement with Ajax and the HTML5 History API. There’s even a shout for Hijax in there.

Ethan Marcotte AEA Boston June 18, 2012 on Vimeo

Ethan’s excellent talk from last year’s An Event Apart.

In this session Ethan reviews strategies for handling trickier elements that would make even the most seasoned designer quail: stuff like advertising, complex layouts, deep navigation patterns, third-party media, and, yes, actual, honest-to-goodness content.

The Smashing Conference: Exclusive Videos And Interviews | Smashing Magazine

Here’s an interview I did during the Smashing conference in Freiburg.

The Pastry Box Project | 7 December 2012, baked by Cennydd Bowles

Beauteous and true.

Real design is political.

Missed High Five

Schadenlulz.

Upstream Color | Shane Carruth

I am giddy with excitement at the prospect of a new Shane Carruth film:

A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism.

The Useless Web

Don’t do it. Don’t click that button just one more time. Don’t.

Audio clips from Full Frontal 2012 | Lanyrd

All the talks from this year’s excellent Full Frontal conference in Brighton, available in audio form for your huffduffing pleasure.

A Whole Lotta Nothing: Listening to podcasts piecemeal: huffduffer

This makes me so happy! Matt is using Huffduffer. Specifically, Matt is using Huffduffer together with Instacast and this is how he’s doing it.