Link archive: January 25th, 2018

Global Diversity CFP Day

Julie is organising the Brighton edition of the Global Diversity Call-For-Proposals Day (and I’m providing the venue) on Saturday, February 3rd from 11am to 3pm. If you’ve ever wanted to speak at a conference, please come along:

On Saturday 3rd February 2018 there will be numerous workshops hosted around the globe encouraging and advising newbie speakers to put together your very first talk proposal and share your own individual perspective on any subject of interest to people in tech.

Microblogging / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul weighs up the pros and cons of using silos (like Twitter and Facebook) and using the Indie Web. This bit made me want to stand on my desk and cry, “Oh captain, my captain!”:

“The market has proven that consumers want freely available social networks that are easy to use, and used by everyone else. Only centralised services can provide this, not familiarity with a command line and a succession of acronyms and protocols”, says my not entirely fictional naysayer.

I’m not sure this argument follows. While the human desire to connect and communicate easily with each other has been proven many times over, it’s becoming clear that all-encompassing centralised networks are not the solution. That way lies algorithmically-skewed streams of consciousness, layered upon sordid business models and Californian ideology. Fuck that.

The web is agreement, but that doesn’t mean we agree to use the same websites.

PonziCoin

Yet another cryptocurrency …except that this was meant to be satire.

This has gotten crazy out of hand, I apologize but we will no longer be selling PonziCoin on this site because this was a joke.

Buttondown

This looks like an interesting alternative to TinyLetter for writing and sending email newsletters, like all the cool kids are doing.

The King vs. Pawn Game of UI Design · An A List Apart Article

I love this analogy and I love this approach—starting with the simplest possible thing and building up from there. This article talks about taking that approach for UI design, but it’s pretty much the same thing I talk about for development in Resilient Web Design.

As Shakespeare once didn’t say, progressive enhancement by any other name would smell as sweet.

Safari 11.1

Squee! The next time there’s an update for OS X and iOS, Safari will magically have service worker support! Not only that, but Safari on iOS will start using the information in web app manifests for adding to home screen.

That’s an impressive turnaround.