People do use Add to Home Screen – Firefox UX
Oh no! My claim has been refuted by a rigourous scientific study of …checks notes… ten people.
Be right back: just need to chat with eleven people.
Link tags: home
62
A pretty sweet push notification solution for mobile Safari
An entire generation of apps-that-should-have-been web pages has sprung up, often shoehorned into supposedly cross-platform frameworks that create a subpar user experience sludge. Nowhere is this more true than for media — how many apps from newspapers or magazines have you installed, solely for a very specific purpose like receiving breaking news alerts? How many of those apps are just wrappers around web views? How many of those apps should have been web pages?
Web Push on iOS requires installing the web app - Webventures
Instead of doing what the competing browsers are doing (and learning from years of experience of handling Web Push), Apple decided to reinvent a wheel here. What they’ve turned up with looks a lot more like a square.
Streams of Consciousness · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
Your website is a way for you to share your stream of consciousness, that temporary and subjective and highly biased snippet of the universe, with everyone else, including your future self.
home sweet homepage
I can’t remember the last time that a website made me smile like this.
🐠 Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online
Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.
But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.
Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick
A personal site, or a blog, is more than just a collection of writing. It’s a kind of place - something that feels like home among the streams. Home is a very strong mental model.
Diana Ashktorab
This is my new favourite indie web site (super performant and responsive too).
Design for Safari 15 - WWDC 2021 - Videos - Apple Developer
There’s a nice shout-out from Jen for Resilient Web Design right at the 19:20 mark.
It would be nice if the add-to-homescreen option weren’t buried so deep though.
Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet | MIT Technology Review
Some suggested that the digital garden was a backlash to the internet we’ve become grudgingly accustomed to, where things go viral, change is looked down upon, and sites are one-dimensional. Facebook and Twitter profiles have neat slots for photos and posts, but enthusiasts of digital gardens reject those fixed design elements. The sense of time and space to explore is key.
Nils Binder’s Website
The “Adjust CSS” slider on this delightful homepage is an effective (and cute) illustration of progressive enhancement in action.
Home (BBC film of J. G. Ballard’s The Enormous Space) - YouTube
Here’s a BBC adaption of that J.G. Ballard short story I recorded. It certainly feels like a story for our time.
Software and Home Renovation | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog
Lessons for web development from a home renovation project:
- Greenfield Projects Are Everyone’s Favorite
- The Last Person’s Work Is Always Bewildering
- It’s All About the Trade-Offs
- It ALWAYS Takes Longer Than You Think
- Communication, Communication, Communication!
And there’s this:
You know those old homes people love because they’re unique, have lasted for decades, and have all that character? In contrast, you have these modern subdivision homes that, while shiny and new, are often bland and identical (and sometimes shoddily built).
node_modulesis like the suburbia/subdivision of modern web development: it seems nice and fancy today, and most everyone is doing it, but in 30 years everyone will hate the idea. They’ll all need to be renovated or torn down. Meanwhile, the classical stuff that’s still standing from 100 years ago lives on but nobody seems to be building houses that way anymore for some reason. Similarly, the first website ever is still viewable in all modern web browsers. But many websites built last year on last year’s bleeding edge tech already won’t work in a browser.
A love letter to my website - DESK Magazine
We choose whether our work stays alive on the internet. As long as we keep our hosting active, our site remains online. Compare that to social media platforms that go public one day and bankrupt the next, shutting down their app and your content along with it.
But the real truth is that as long as we’re putting our work in someone else’s hands, we forfeit our ownership over it. When we create our own website, we own it – at least to the extent that the internet, beautiful in its amorphous existence, can be owned.
Why I Have a Website and You Should Too · Jamie Tanna | Software (Quality) Engineer
I know a number of people who blog as a way to express themselves, for expression’s sake, rather than for anyone else wanting to read it. It’s a great way to have a place to “scream into the void” and share your thoughts.
Why We All Need a Personal Website – Plus Practical Tips for How to Build One - Adobe 99U
The best time to make a personal website is 20 years ago. The second best time to make a personal website is now.
Chris offers some illustrated advice:
- Define the purpose of your site
- Organize your content
- Look for inspiration
- Own your own domain name
- Build your website
Simon Collison | Timeline
I’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.
Simon describes the process of curating the lovely timeline on his personal homepage.
My timeline is just like me, and just like my life: unfinished, and far from perfect.
Patterns for Promoting PWA Installation (mobile) | Web Fundamentals | Google Developers
Some ideas for interface elements that prompt progressive web app users to add the website to their home screen.
Home Page — Doug Block
There’s a new reissue of the twenty year old documentary on Justin Hall’s links.net and the early days of the web.
Benjamin Parry Home-brew
I love the way that Benjamin is documenting his activities at Homebrew Website Club Brighton each week:
Another highly productive 90 mins.
Homebrew website club is on every Thursday evening 6.00-7.30pm at Clearleft. You should come along!