Tags: fun

Sadly, this is not The Onion

It’s not funny, cause it’s true.

Let’s bring Fan Sites and webrings back! - bryanlrobinson.com

As the commercial viability of the web grew, we saw more and more users become consumers and not creators. Many consumers see websites as black boxes full of magic that they could never understand. Because of this, they would never think to try to create something.

This is a shame. We lost a little piece of the magic of the web when this culture came about.

A call to action to create a fan site about something you love. It would be an unmonetisable enthusiasm. But it’s still worth doing:

1. The act of creation itself is fun!
2. Sharing something you love with the world is worthwhile.
3. You’ll learn something.

So here’s the challenge:

1. Create a Fan Site.
2. Help someone create a Fan Site.
3. Create a webring.

Word Bubbles — The Man in Blue

Wheeee! Another fun experiment from Cameron.

Why isn’t the internet more fun and weird?

During the internet of 2006, consumer products let anyone edit CSS. It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.

The internet of 2019 is vital societal infrastructure. We depend on it to keep in touch with family, to pay for things, and so much more.

Just because it got serious doesn’t mean it can’t be fun and weird.

Building a Progressively-Enhanced Site | Jim Nielsen’s Blog

This is an excellent case study!

The technical details are there if you want them, but far more important is consideration that went into every interaction. Every technical decision has a well thought out justification.

The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED

Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.

We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.

Puzzle Montage Art by Tim Klein

Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable, and I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined. I take great pleasure in “discovering” such bizarre images lying latent, sometimes for decades, within the pieces of ordinary mass-produced puzzles.

Programming Sucks

There’s a theory that you can cure this by following standards, except there are more “standards” than there are things computers can actually do, and these standards are all variously improved and maligned by the personal preferences of the people coding them, so no collection of code has ever made it into the real world without doing a few dozen identical things a few dozen not even remotely similar ways. The first few weeks of any job are just figuring out how a program works even if you’re familiar with every single language, framework, and standard that’s involved, because standards are unicorns.

Introducing the Button element - HankChizlJaw

It’ll never catch on.

Web Developer Representation in W3C · An A List Apart Article

This is an excellent initiative by the Dutch Fronteers group to have professional web developers represented in W3C working groups. In this particular case, they’re funding Rachel for the CSS working group. This sets a great precedent—I really hope the W3C goes for it!

Unit deconverter - make your units less useful!

Take a perfectly useful standardised measurement of length, weight, speed or time, and convert to something far less useful (but much more fun).

Post Haste

Look, it’s Friday—were you really going to get any work done today anyway?

CSS: A New Kind Of JavaScript | HeydonWorks

A bold proposal by Heydon to make the process of styling on the web less painful and more scalable. I think it’s got legs, but do we really need another three-letter initialism?

We waste far too much time writing and maintaining styles with JavaScript, and I think it’s time for a change. Which is why it’s my pleasure to announce an emerging web standard called CSS.

American-on-American Action Abroad: Sorry For Travel Writing At You

I have been to Brighton, and seen the summer here, and have concluded that Britons must never be permitted to have summer again. It was as hot and wet as God’s lungs, and there was a man playing the banjo on a beach with no sand. A seagull screamed at me with the voice of a human baby.

ASCIIFlow Infinity

Is it a graphic design tool? Is it a text editor? Is it just good fun?

Insult Generator

Testing the theory that putting the word “total”, “complete”, or “absolute” in front of any noun automatically makes for an excellent insult.

Horrific Soccer Injuries

The horror …the horror.

The Official NoPhone Store

Like a nicotine patch for your phone hand.

I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

I started a Twitter account, and fell into a world of good, dumb, weird jokes, links to new sites and interesting ideas. It was such an excellent place to waste time that I almost didn’t notice that the blogs and link-sharing sites I’d once spent hours on had become less and less viable. Where once we’d had a rich ecosystem of extremely stupid and funny sites on which we might procrastinate, we now had only Twitter and Facebook.

And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself. Facebook had become, well … you’ve been on Facebook.

I Used The Web For A Day With JavaScript Turned Off — Smashing Magazine

Following on from Charlie’s experiment last year, Chris Ashton has been assessing which sites rely on JavaScript, and which sites use it in a more defensive, resilient way. Some interesting results in here.

A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Progressive enhancement means more robust experiences, with fewer bugs in production and fewer individual browser quirks, because we’re letting the platform do the job rather than trying to write it all from scratch.