Link archive: May, 2013

Screenshots of Despair

The existential angst of unfeeling feedback.

Slash Purpose

I like the idea of a /purpose page: I should add one to The Session and Huffduffer.

Exquisite Tweets from @genmon, @kellan, @anildash

I need to get Matt to an Indie Web Camp.

Text-align: Justify and RWD

Here’s a nifty trick: using text-align: justify to get a nice responsive grid layout.

Jessica Hische - Upping Your Type Game

A wonderful essay about type on the web by Jessica.

Huffduffer saves Web audio to your own podcast stream

This slipped past me somehow: a review of Huffduffer by Jason Snell for Macworld.

Thanks, Jason! Glad you like it.

In San Francisco, a house with its own Twitter feed in MIT Technology Review

A profile of Tom’s house.

It’s weird how normal this is.

Break the Page

A lovely site with thoughtful articles on the long-term future of the web.

There’s audio too, which is unfortunately locked up in the unhuffduffable roach motel that is Soundcloud, but I’m hoping that might change.

An acquisition is always a failure

An acquisition, or an aqui-hire, is always a failure. Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders.

Building the Great Libraries of the Internet with a DNS time machine by Ben Ward

Ben proposes an alternative to archive.org: changing the fundamental nature of DNS.

Regarding the boo-hooing of how hard companies have it maintaining unprofitable URLs, I think Ben hasn’t considered the possibility of a handover to a cooperative of users—something that might yet happen with MySpace (at least there’s a campaign to that effect; it will probably come to naught). As Ben rightly points on, domain names are leased, not bought, so the idea of handing them over to better caretakers isn’t that crazy.

Own your turf - Austin Kleon

Prescient.

The irregular musings of Lou Montulli: The reasoning behind Web Cookies

A fascinating look at the history of cookies …from the inventor of cookies.

Laurent Eschenauer: What’s next Google? Dropping SMTP support?

The litany of open standards that Google has been abandoning: RSS, XMPP, WebDav…

Progressive enhancement in the Government Service Design manual

A nice description of progressive enhancement by Norm, as applied at GDS.

Using icon fonts

A handy walkthrough of using icon fonts. The examples here use the excellent IcoMoon service

Is Android good yet?

Joking aside, this is a useful resource for keeping track of the current spread of Android versions.

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!

The $12 Gongkai Phone

A fascinating analysis of a super-cheap phone from another world.

Welcome to the Galapagos of Chinese “open” source. I call it “gongkai” (公开). Gongkai is the transliteration of “open” as applied to “open source”. I feel it deserves a term of its own, as the phenomenon has grown beyond the so-called “shanzhai” (山寨) and is becoming a self-sustaining innovation ecosystem of its own.

Just as the Galapagos Islands is a unique biological ecosystem evolved in the absence of continental species, gongkai is a unique innovation ecosystem evolved with little western influence, thanks to political, language, and cultural isolation.

If You Make It, They Will Come! Brighton Mini Maker Faire

It’s baaa-aaack!

This time Brighton’s superb Maker Faire will span two days: the two days right after dConstruct.

This is going to be one helluva weekend.

Posthaven is the safe place for all your posts forever

This is a breath of fresh air: a blogging platform that promises to keep its URLs online in perpetuity.

You should write about yourself more

Yes! Yes! YES!

Tom is spot-on here: you shouldn’t be afraid of writing about yourself …especially not for fear of damaging some kind of “personal brand” or pissing off some potential future employer.

If your personal brand demands that you live your life in fear of disclosing important parts of your life or your experience, the answer is to reject the whole sodding concept of personal brands.

Do things I write about my personal life threaten my personal brand? Perhaps. Are there people who wouldn’t hire me based on things I write? Probably. Do I give even a whiff of a fuck? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway.

Teenage Diaries Revisited

Fascinating fodder for Huffduffer:

Beginning in 1996, Radio Diaries gave tape recorders to teenagers around the country to create audio diaries about their lives. NPR’s All Things Considered aired intimate portraits of five of these teens: Amanda, Juan, Frankie, Josh and Melissa. They’re now in their 30s. Over this past year, the same group has been recording new stories about where life has led them for our series, Teenage Diaries Revisited.

On Thingpunk

Perhaps we are fetishising physical things because our digital creations are social media junk food:

It’s easy to fetishize Brutalist buildings when you don’t have to live in them. On the other hand, when the same Brutalist style is translated into the digital spaces we daily inhabit, it becomes a source of endless whinging. Facebook, for example, is Brutalist social media. It reproduces much the same relationship with its users as the Riis Houses and their ilk do with their residents: focusing on control and integration into the high-level planning scheme rather than individual life and the “ballet of a good blog comment thread”, to paraphrase Jane Jacobs.

I Don’t Want Your Fucking App

Doorslamming.

CSS is not an amoral monster.

I’m in general agreement with this rousing defence of CSS. I think it does a pretty great job of balancing a whole ton of use cases.

Code Club Queens Park

Josh has been teaching HTML and CSS schoolkids. I love the pages that they’ve made. I really mean it. I genuinely think these are wonderful!

SpaceWarps

Zooniverse have done it again. Now you can help in the hunt for sources of gravitational lensing.

It’s informative. It’s fun. It has genuine scientific value.

Responsive Day Out highlights on Vimeo

A lovely little highlight reel that Craig put together from the Responsive Day Out.

Size Isn’t Everything on Flickr

Colossus …in Lego.

Sensible jumps in responsive image file sizes

Some good thinking from Jason here. In a roundabout way, he’s saying that when it comes to responsive images—as with just about every other aspect of web development—the answer is …it depends.

A Woman’s Place — Everything Old is New Again — Medium

In a piece for Medium commissioned by Matter, Jon Norris describes a little-known aspect of the UK’s information technology history:

Gender equality is still a major issue in the technology industry, but 50 years ago one British company was blazing trails.

Inclusive Design: Where Accessibility Meets Usability

I’ll be speaking at this event in London on Thursday. It would be lovely if you could come along. It’s free!

mezzoblue § 10 Years

Wow! The CSS Zen Garden is a decade old. Crazy! It’s a true piece of web history …and it’s back!

A Stormy Sky of Cranky Clouds by Scott Jenson

Scott points out a really big problem with the current state of the “internet of things”: everyone is inventing their own proprietary walled-garden infrastructure instead of getting together to collaborate on standards.

The single biggest fallacy I want to blow up is this utopian idea that there is this SINGLE thing called ‘The Cloud’. Each company today reinvents their own cloud. The Cloud as a concept is dead and has been for years: we are living within a stormy sky of cranky clouds, all trying to pretend the others don’t exist.

In The Name of Willie Clancy « Arbutus Yarns

A really nice short film about the Willie Clancy Summer School. It makes me want to get back to Miltown Malbay this July.

Ghostlab

This looks like it could be a handy app for synchronising a whole bunch of devices when testing. I’ll have to give it a whirl on the device lab.

Also, it has a perfectly fair one-off price, rather than the Mafia-style protection fee model that Adobe uses for Edge Inspect.

The Case for Using Mad Lib Sign Up Forms (Hint: Mad Conversion Increases)

A look at how Huffduffer-style forms might improve “conversion”.

Whatever. Let’s face it: it’s just quite nice when a form isn’t just your typical form (which this article makes a good point of mentioning):

Where the traditional sign up form is a regular, everyday brown cow, the mad lib form is a purple cow - a shiny object. We’re naturally easily distracted by, and drawn to, what’s new or out of the ordinary! Take advantage of that.

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.