Link archive: January 10th, 2018

Legends of the Ancient Web

An absolutely fantastic talk (as always) from Maciej, this time looking at the history of radio and its parallels with the internet (something that Tom Standage touched on his book, Writing On The Wall). It starts as a hobbyist, fun medium. Then it gets regulated. Then it gets used to reinforce existing power structures.

It is hard to accept that good people, working on technology that benefits so many, with nothing but good intentions, could end up building a powerful tool for the wicked.

My Pod

Merlin mentioned this service on a recent podcast episode. If you have an Amazon Echo, you can authenticate with this service and then point it at an RSS feed …like your Huffduffer feed, for example. From then on, Alexa becomes a Huffduffer player.

Tiny Wins

Making low effort/high impact changes to interfaces.

This reminds me of something we talk about at Clearleft a lot called “tiny lessons”—it’s the idea that insights and learnings don’t always have to be big and groundbreaking; there’s a disproportionate value in sharing the small little things you learn along the way.

Little UI details from @steveschoger, in HTML and CSS

Suggestions for small interface tweaks.