The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before - The New York Times
The design history of the New York subway map.
Link tags: data
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Just enough Internet | doteveryone
The carbon cost of collecting and storing data no one can use is already a moral issue.
So before you add another field, let alone make a new service, can you be sure it will make enough of a difference to legitimise its impact on the planet?
HEAD - A free guide to `head` elements
A one-stop shop for all the metacrap you can put in the head of your HTML documents.
The Size of Space
Celestial objects ordered by size, covering a scale from one astronaut to the observable universe.
Data Patterns Catalogue
I really like the work that IF are doing to document patterns around handling data:
- Signing in to a service
- Giving and removing consent
- Giving access to data
- Getting access to data
- Understanding automated decisions
- Doing security checks
Each pattern has a description, advantages, limitations, and examples.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]: More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search
Google’s pissing over HTML again, but for once, it’s not by making up rel values:
A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the “
data-nosnippet” HTML attribute onspan,div, andsectionelements.
This is a direct contradiction of how data-* attributes are intended to be used:
…these attributes are intended for use by the site’s own scripts, and are not a generic extension mechanism for publicly-usable metadata.
Manton Reece - Saying goodbye to Facebook cross-posting
Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web.
Related: Aaron is playing whack-a-mole with Instagram because he provides a servie to let users export their own photographs to their own websites.
Southern Mosaic
A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:
On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.
To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution | Technology | The Guardian
Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.
Offline listings
This is brilliant technique by Remy!
If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!
This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.
PWA asset generator based on Puppeteer.
Automatically generates icons and splash screens based on Web App Manifest specs and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Updates manifest.json and index.html files with the generated images.
A handy command line tool. Though be aware that it will generate the shit-ton of link elements for splash screens that Apple demands you provide for a multitude of different screen sizes.
Less Data Doesn’t Mean a Lesser Experience| TimKadlec.com
If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.
Spurious Correlations
Correlation does not imply causation.
The Decolonial Atlas
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Lights at sea
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites
1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.
We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.
mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes
Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.
Have we reached Peak Data?
Matt’s publishing a newsletter on the past, present, and future of tracking:
The last 100 years have been a journey to see how to measure ghosts - how to measure the invisible audiences at the end of technological distribution networks. With every decade, these ghosts have come more and more into focus, ending with a the last ten years of social media and digital advertising that has created unimaginable amounts of data about everything we see, read, click and like.
He sees the pendulum swinging the other way now …for those who can afford it:
If there’s one constant in the economics of audience data over the last 100 years, is that we only get free services if we pay for them with our attention. This has been true for commercial radio and television, free newspapers, mobile games and digital content. If we want privacy, we have to pay for it, and not everyone can afford this. Will the right to become a ghost only be for the people with money to buy premium products?
Medium | Stackbit
This is very handy! Export your data from Ev’s blog and then import it into a static site generator of your choice.
You may have noticed the recent movement of people looking to get off Medium. Most of us are motivated by a desire to own our content, have data portability and get more control over how/where our content is displayed and monetized. Most importantly many of us consider our blog/site to be a core part of our online identity and while Medium offers a fantastic writing experience it sacrifices other important values. Luckily there’s a modern approach to running your blog which aligns with these ideals, its called the JAMstack and its all around us.
How Ireland became Europe’s data watchdog - BBC News
The coming GDPR storm:
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, Helen Dixon, is expected to circulate her decisions on some cases by July or August, with final rulings made by the end of the year.
(That’s my sister-in-law, that is.)