Link archive: March, 2014

Hemingway

A useful text editor that analyses your writing for excess verbiage and sloppy construction. It helps you process your words, as it were.

The Pastry Box Project: The Values of the Web by Brad Frost

I don’t work in the tech industry. I work on the Web.

Readmill Epilogue - Readmill

If your startup gets acquired and shut down by a larger company, this is the way to announce it—no “we’re excited to announce”; no “incredible journey”. Instead there’s an apology and regret (which is exactly what your users will be feeling).

Confessions Of A CSS Expert

Funny because it’s true:

The thing I regret the most is how my class addiction affected my relationship with HTML.

Rise of the IndieWeb - Amber Case - FutureTalks - YouTube

A great talk by Amber on the history of personal publishing and the ideas and technologies driving the Indie Web movement.

A Modern Designer’s Canvas | Smashing Magazine

The transcript of Malarkey’s recent talk. Good thoughtful stuff.

Patatap

Fun!

Layout in Flipboard for Web and Windows — Flipboard Engineering

A fascinating look at how Flipboard combines art direction and algorithms to generate layouts.

1995 Vannevar Bush symposium: closing Panel

So Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee walk into a panel…

Council Toolkit

A reusable set of responsive patterns and templates for UK councils.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Notes on accessibility of Web Components

Bruce’s thoughts on ensuring accessibility in Web Components. He thinks that the vocabulary of ARIA is up to the job, so that’s good enough for me.

Section for peer-reviewed Custom Elements · Issue

Some sensible thoughts from Addy on how Web Components might be peer-reviewed.

Aerotwist - Web Components and the Three Unsexy Pillars

A healthy dose of scepticism about Web Components, looking at them through the lenses of accessibility, security, and performance.

I share some of this concern: Web Components might look like handy ready-made out-of-the-box solutions, but the truth is that web developers have to do much more of the hard graft that was traditionally left to the browser.

Cleanup of Silicon Valley Superfund site takes environmental toll | The Center for Investigative Reporting

A terrific piece of well-illustrated data-driven journalism.

Spotlight – a pure JavaScript application for GOV.UK Performance | Technology at GDS

A nice tale of progressive enhancement from gov.uk, talking about how they made their analytics dashboards (which are public, by the way) using JavaScript on the server and on the client.

I believe this is what the kids are calling isomorphic JavaScript.

Type Connection

A cute approach to pairing typefaces: treat it like a dating game.

Making ubuntu.com responsive: intro | Ubuntu Design Blog

Yaili is documenting the process of retrofitting ubuntu.com to be responsive. I’ll be avidly reading each post in this series.

Meet the Geniuses on a Quixotic Quest to Archive the Entire Internet | TIME.com

A short video featuring Jason Scott and Brewster Kahle. The accompanying text has a shout-out to the line-mode browser hack event at CERN.

[this is aaronland] because ephemera are just memories that didn’t try hard enough

I like the way Aaron thinks. I also like the way he makes.

Our Comrade The Electron

This is a wonderful piece by Maciej—a magnificent historical narrative that leads to a thunderous rant. Superb!

Device-Agnostic by Trent Walton

A terrific post from Trent, touching on all the important facets of building for the web: universality, progressive enhancement, performance …great stuff!

BBC Radio 4 Extra - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Game - 30th Anniversary Edition

One of the most fiendish user-unfriendly (but oh-so-witty) adventure games of all time is now online for you to enjoy with some added graphical flourishes.

Learning about, and deploying IndieWeb tools | Dan Gillmor

Well, this is pretty nifty: Dan Gilmour is at Indie Web Camp in San Francisco and he’s already got some code up and running on his site.

Y’know, I’m not missing South by Southwest in the slightest this year …but I’m really missing Indie Web Camp.

Particle Fever

I can’t wait to see this documentary on the monumental work at CERN.

The Pastry Box Project, Scott Jehl, Friday, 7 March 2014

Scott writes an absolutely spot-on skewering of the idea that progressive enhancement means you’re going to spend your time catering to older browsers. The opposite is true.

Progressive Enhancement frees us to focus on the costs of building features for modern browsers, without worrying much about leaving anyone out. With a strongly qualified codebase, older browser support comes nearly for free.

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system

A lovely visualisation that combines two of my loves: space, and the correct use of the subjunctive.

Can This Alternative Smartphone Deliver Real Privacy to the Masses? | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

Fast Company features Aral’s tantalising Indie Phone project that he’s been working on at Clearleft Towers.

Good to see Oskar the dog getting the recognition he deserves.

On the top floor of a commercial building in the old maritime city of Brighton, England, Balkan has been quietly hacking away at Indie Phone for the last several months with the rest of his team—Victor Johansson, an industrial designer, Laura Kalbag, a professional web designer (and Balkan’s partner), and her Husky, Oskar.

Aerotwist - My Performance Audit Workflow

Excellent tips and tools from Google’s Paul Lewis on performance testing.

Mosaic - Wellcome Trust

I did some consulting with the Wellcome Trust on this new magazine-like project, and it’s great to see it go live—excellent stories of science, all published under a Creative Commons licence.

Mobile-first and IE8 Solution – Introducing grunt-legacssy (Updated) | Robin Plus

A handy way of automating the creation of old-IE stylesheets using Grunt. This follows on from Jake’s work in using preprocessors and conditional comments to send a different stylesheet to IE8 and below—one that doesn’t contain media queries. It’s a clever way of creating mobile-first responsive sites that still provide large-screen styles to older versions of IE.

CSS A/Z

The alphabet illustrated with CSS.

Node School in Brighton

Tom is running a Node School at 68 Middle Street on the evening of March 27th. I plan to attend and finally wrap my head around all this Node stuff.