I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.
Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).
I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.
I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.
Excellent in-depth research by Tim on how the major frameworks affect performance. There are some surprising (and some unsurprising) findings in here.
I wish with all my heart that this data would have some effect but I fear there’s an entire culture of “modern” web development that stick its fingers in its ears and say “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.”
I never thought of combining the datalist element with input type="color"—it’s pretty cool that it just works!
80 geocoding service plans to choose from.
I’m going to squirrel this one away for later—I’ve had to switch geocoding providers in the past, so I have a feeling that this could come in handy.
The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?
We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.
This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.
The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.
Have fun with this little machine, tweaking the parameters for generating a Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell-Burnell data visualisation.
The interface is quite delightful!
This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.
Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.
An absolutely gorgeous piece of hypermedia!
Data visualisations and interactive widgets enliven this maze of mathematics. Dig deep—you may just uncover the secret passages that join these concepts together.
A lovely little bit of urban cartography.
This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.
The goal in putting these stories together has never been to create a warm glow, or lull anyone into a false sense of complacency. The challenges facing the human family right now are big and scary and there’s no guarantee we will overcome them.
As millions of people have demonstrated in the past 12 months though, action is possible, better solutions are available and a better future can be built.
After showing us the size of space, here’s a fascinating intereactive visualisation of the ocean depths.
Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!
The design history of the New York subway map.
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?
A one-stop shop for all the metacrap you can put in the head of your HTML documents.
Celestial objects ordered by size, covering a scale from one astronaut to the observable universe.
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.