Link tags: is

marcus.io · Making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page

Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a /feeds page?

Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.

Reading in the dark

I keep coming back to this remarkable piece of writing by Cassie. Honest, resonant, and open, centred around a perfect analogy.

Increment: Frontend

This month’s issue of Increment is all about front-end development. There are feaures from Lea Verou, Chris Coyier, Chris Lilley, Safia Abdalla, and more.

What’s Happening? Or: How to name a disaster - Elvia Wilk - Bookforum Magazine

It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:

On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.

Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:

Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.

Responsive web design turns ten. — Ethan Marcotte

2010 was quite a year:

And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.

Nothing’s been quite the same since.

I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.

Strangest of All: Anthology of Astrobiological Science Fiction [PDF]

Eight sci-fi stories gathered together by the European Astrobiology Institute. This free book is also available as .mobi and .epub.

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.

Why is this interesting? - The Transmission Edition

Looking at COVID-19 through the lens of pace layers.

…a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating.

New PDF Preview, Better Web Publishing, Improved Editing - iA Writer: The Focused Writing App

I think this one single feature is going to get me to switch to iA Writer:

For starters, we added Micropub support. This means you can publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools.

The History of the Future

It me:

Although some communities have listed journalists as “essential workers,” no one claims that status for the keynote speaker. The “work” of being a keynote speaker feels even more ridiculous than usual these days.

Designing for Progressive Disclosure by Steven Hoober

Progressive disclosure interface patterns categorised and evaluated:

• popups,
• drawers,
• mouseover popups (just say no!),
• accordions,
• tabs,
• new pages,
• scrolling,
• scrolling sideways.

I really like the hypertext history invoked in this article.

The piece finishes with a great note on the MacNamara fallacy:

Everyone thinks metrics let us measure results. But, actually, they don’t. They measure only what they are measuring. Engagement, for example, is not something that can be measured, so we use an analogue for it. Time on page. Or clicks.

We often end up measuring what is quick, cheap, and easy to measure. Therefore, few organizations regularly conduct usability testing or customer-satisfaction surveys, but lots use analytics.

Even today, organizations often use clicks as a measure of engagement. So, all too often, they design user interfaces to generate clicks, so the system can measure them.

The Fonts in Popular Things Identified Vol. 1 · Typewolf

I’d watch this game show:

Welcome to the first installment of a new series on Typewolf, where I’ll be identifying the fonts used in popular things. The focus here is on anything you might encounter in contemporary visual culture—movie posters, TV shows, book covers, etc.

ongoing by Tim Bray · Bye, Amazon

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.

Fair play, Tim Bray!

The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Mando | Luke Dorny

1. Which jig will be next?
2. What instrument?
3. What shirt will he wear next?
4. Will a shirt make a repeat appearance?
5. Will he shave his wiseman beard?
6. Possibly a haircut or trim?

Et In Silicon Valley Ego – Dr Beth Singler

The parallels between Alex Garland’s Devs and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

Web Typography News #43: Typesetting Moby-Dick, part 2

Great typography on the web should be designed in layers. The web is an imperfect medium, consumed by countless different devices over untold numbers of network connections—each with their own capabilities, limitations, and peculiarities. To think that you can create one solution that will look and work the same everywhere is a fantasy. To make this more than just one nice book website, the whole project and process needs to embrace this reality.

Principles and priorities | Hacker News

I see that someone dropped one of my grenades into the toilet bowl of Hacker News.

Late weeknotes 024 - Attitude of Ingratitude

This might be the most insightful thing that Dan has written since his seminal 2013 Medium article:

The problem with Scrappy Doo, isn’t that he’s annoying, which he is, but that the ghosts suddenly became real, which is an afront to science.

I know this hot-take is about 40 years old, but I’ve been bottling it up.

Looking at coronavirus.data.gov.uk - Matthew Somerville

I worry that more and more nowadays, people jump to JavaScript frameworks because that is what they know or have been taught, even though they are entirely inappropriate for a wide array of things and can often produce poor results.

Last week I wrote about the great work that Matthew did and now he’s written up his process:

The important thing is to have a resilient base layer of HTML and CSS, and then to enhance that with JavaScript.

The Stacks Reader | A Treasure Trove of Classic Journalism

Digital preservation of dead-tree media:

The Stacks Reader is an online collection of classic journalism and writing about the arts that would otherwise be lost to history. Motivated less by nostalgia than by preservation, The Stacks Reader is a living archive of memorable storytelling—a museum for stories.