Link archive: July, 2013

Tumblr Shuts Down Popular Blogger: Who’s Next?

Yet another cautionary tale on why you should be homesteading instead of sharecropping.

The Pixar Theory by Jon Negroni

I like this theory!

Butterick’s Practical Typography

There’s a lot of very opinionated advice here, and I don’t agree with all of it, but this is still a very handy resource that’s been lovingly crafted.

Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See on Vimeo

Sit back, relax, and enjoy this classic documentary on graphic design, courtesy of its producer Edward Tufte.

collision detection: “Wired Love”: A tale of catfishing, OK Cupid, and sexting … from 1880

The Victorian Internet indeed.

RIP, Change.gov

This is why the Internet Archive matters. It is now the public record of Obama’s broken promise to protect whistleblowers.

I feel very bad for the smart, passionate, talented people who worked their asses off on change.gov, only to see their ideals betrayed.

Online communities

Caterina Fake takes a heartfelt look at the history of online communities:

The internet is full of strangers, generous strangers who want to help you for no reason at all. Strangers post poetry and discographies and advice and essays and photos and art and diatribes. None of them are known to you, in the old-fashioned sense. But they give the internet its life and meaning.

NSA: The Decision Problem by George Dyson

A really terrific piece by George Dyson taking a suitably long-zoom look at information warfare and the Entscheidungsproblem, tracing the lineage of PRISM from the Corona project of the Cold War.

What we have now is the crude equivalent of snatching snippets of film from the sky, in 1960, compared to the panopticon that was to come. The United States has established a coordinated system that links suspect individuals (only foreigners, of course, but that definition becomes fuzzy at times) to dangerous ideas, and, if the links and suspicions are strong enough, our drone fleet, deployed ever more widely, is authorized to execute a strike. This is only a primitive first step toward something else. Why kill possibly dangerous individuals (and the inevitable innocent bystanders) when it will soon become technically irresistible to exterminate the dangerous ideas themselves?

The proposed solution? That we abandon secrecy and conduct our information warfare in the open.

100,000 Stars

A gorgeous interactive visualisation of our local galactic neighbourhood.

The slippery slope | 90 Percent Of Everything

The transcript of a terrific talk by Harry on how dark patterns are often driven by a slavish devotion to conversion rates.

cityofsound: Journal: PayPal, and the word “Iranian”

The politics of code.

Responsive design: we are not there yet

A call for developers to let standards bodies know what we want:

It is important that we as developers focus on the right things again. If you encounter a bug, you should not only fix it for your site; you should reach out to browser vendors and web standards people to fix this in a long-term solution. It might cost you a few minutes, but brings a lot of improvement to the whole developer community.

Media Query Events Example

A page to demonstrate the conditional CSS technique I documented a while back.

Responsive Navigation: Examples of Navigation in Responsive Design

A nice collection of navigation patterns for responsive designs. The demos aren’t using a mobile-first approach, and they’re reliant on jQuery, but they could be easily adapted.

From Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter, a short story by Bruce Sterling

H.P. Lovecraft meets James Bridle in this great little story commissioned by the Institute For The Future.

Installable Webapps: Extend the Sandbox by Boris Smus

This a great proposal: well-researched and explained, it tackles the tricky subject of balancing security and access to native APIs.

Far too many ideas around installable websites focus on imitating native behaviour in a cargo-cult kind of way, whereas this acknowledges addressability (with URLs) as a killer feature of the web …a beautiful baby that we definitely don’t want to throw out with the bathwater.

Declaration of Content Independence

I approve of this message.

Wrong. — Medium

This is a great piece of writing by Lance Arthur. It breaks my heart that I have to read it on Medium instead of Glassdog.

Style Guide Boilerplate

A very handy starting point for creating a front-end style guide.

‘Kitten kitten kitten kittens’, Medium & TED(x) and RSSing since 2003.

Dan’s blog is rapidly turning into one of my favourite destinations on the web.

I hope he comes to an Indie Web Camp.

The Problem With Medium

A good article on Medium on Medium.

Issue 18850005: Disable double tap zoom on mobile sites, to remove 300ms click delay - Code Review

Well, this is interesting: it looks like Chrome might stop waiting 300ms for potential double-tap-to-zoom events if the site is using a meta viewport declaration that sets the width to device-width.

ANAGRAMATRON

There’s something quite lovely about this: pairs of tweets that are anagrams of one another.

The Hut Where the Internet Began by Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic

A wonderful article looking at the influence that Vannevar Bush’s seminal article As We May Think had on the young Douglas Engelbart.

A few words on Doug Engelbart

A beautiful eulogy for Doug Engelbart by Bret Viktor, not celebrating the laundry list of his inventions, but celebrating his intent in making the world a better place.

Engelbart had an intent, a goal, a mission. He stated it clearly and in depth. He intended to augment human intellect. He intended to boost collective intelligence and enable knowledge workers to think in powerful new ways, to collectively solve urgent global problems.

Designers’ Friend

I kind of love the interaction design of this site.

Progressive enhancement is still important by Jake Archibald

Another great post on using progressive enhancement for JavaScript, this time by Jake. He does a great job of explaining the performance bottleneck that is created when you start doing everything on the client side.

The Future Of The Web — A Draft – TNG - The Nitty Gritty

Six months ago, Bastian wrote this fantastic vision of decentralised social web. I want to start making this a reality at the next Indie Web Camp.

“What is Design?” as Principles Compiled by Jeremy Keith

Well, this is rather nice. John Maeda uses my list of design principles as a jumping-off point for investigating the differences between design for people and designing for machines.

Lockdown – Marco.org

A superb piece by Marco Arment prompted by the closing of Google Reader. He nails the power of RSS:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

And he’s absolutely on the money when he describes what changed:

RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).

I share his anger.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

A Silent Forest

Hypertext adventure.

Progressive Enhancement: Still Not Dead. - That Emil

A great post by Emil on the importance of using progressive enhancement for JavaScript — an increasingly unpopular position in today’s climate of client-side-only frameworks and libraries.

There’s something fundamental and robust about being able to request a URL and get back at least an HTML representation of the resource: human-readable, accessible, fault tolerant.

Nearby - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I sense the hand of Tom Morris in this. Wikipedia has created a “nearby” page for browsers with geolocation, much like the Wikinear mashup that Simon created with Fire Eagle five years ago.

Enough with the JavaScript already!

A great set of slides from Nicholas, all about the disturbing trend in “modern” web apps to depend entirely on JavaScript as a single point of failure.

United Pixelworkers — Future Friendly

You can now purchase some very fetching Future Friendly T-shirts from United Pixelworkers and fly your Future Friendly freak flag high!

Best of all, all the profits go to the Internet Archive.

The spread of link rot by Felix Salmon

What I fear is that the entire web is basically becoming a slow-motion Snapchat, where content lives for some unknowable amount of time before it dies, lost forever.