THE INTERNET — Opte
Visualising the growth of the internet.
Link tags: data
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Nature 150 Interactive
A beautiful interactive visualisation of every paper published in Nature.
Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination - Spotlight at Stanford
There are some beautiful illustrations in this online exhibition of data visualisation in the past few hundred years.
Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System
A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.
Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer
A Creative Commons licensed web book that you can read online.
Carbon dioxide removal at a climate-significant scale is one of the most complex endeavors we can imagine, interlocking technologies, social systems, economies, transportation systems, agricultural systems, and, of course, the political economy required to fund it. This primer aims to lower the learning curve for action by putting as many facts as possible in the hands of the people who will take on this challenge. This book can eliminate much uncertainty and fear, and, we hope, speed the process of getting real solutions into the field.
Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy
This sounds a lot like Do Not Track …but looking at the spec, the interesting part is the way that this is designed to work in combination with legal frameworks. That’s smart. I don’t think a purely technical solution is workable (as we saw with Do Not Track).
Creating websites with prefers-reduced-data | Polypane Browser for Developers
There’s no browser support yet but that doesn’t mean we can’t start adding prefers-reduced-data to our media queries today. I like the idea of switching between web fonts and system fonts.
CSS Stats
A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:
CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.
Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.
An Ocean of Books
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
List of Physical Visualizations
A timeline showing the history of non-digital dataviz.
‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth | WIRED
The title says it all, really. This is another great piece of writing from Paul Ford.
I’ve noticed that when software lets nonprogrammers do programmer things, it makes the programmers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling indulgently and start talking about what “real programming” is. This has been the history of the World Wide Web, for example. Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real programming,” and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is.
Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate
This is a handy tool if you’re messing around with Twitter cards and other metacrap.
British & Exotic Mineralogy
A really lovely unmonetisable enthusiasm:
All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.
You can dive in and explore or read more about the project and how it was made.
It reminds me of Paul’s project, Bradshaw’s Guide: the both take a beloved artifact of the past and bring it online with care, love, and respect.
Is my host fast yet?
This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:
Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.
Why I hate the log graph, and you should too - Geek in Sydney
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.
SofaConf 2020 - a technical write-up | Trys Mudford
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.
The Cost of Javascript Frameworks - Web Performance Consulting | TimKadlec.com
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.”
Limiting input type=”color” to a certain palette (from an image) | Christian Heilmann
I never thought of combining the datalist element with input type="color"—it’s pretty cool that it just works!
getlon.lat
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.