Link tags: local

Prioritizing users in a crisis: Building the California COVID-19 response site

This is a great case study of the excellent California COVID-19 response site. Accessibility and performance are the watchwords here.

Want to know their secret weapon?

A $20 device running Android 9, with no contract commitment has been one of the most useful and effective tools in our effort to be accessible.

Leaner, faster sites benefit everybody, but making sure your applications run smoothly on low-end hardware makes a massive difference for those users.

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

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.

Brighton Quarantine Delivery

Fellow Brightonians, here’s a handy one-stop shop for all the places doing deliveries right now, generated from this spreadsheet by Chris Boakes.

Local First, Undo Redo, JS-Optional, Create Edit Publish - Tantek

Tantek documents the features he wants his posting interface to have.

Offline listings

This is brilliant technique by Remy!

If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!

This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.

4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design

1. Obey the Law of Locality
2. ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
3. Pass the Squint Test
4. Teach by example

Quick Note: Setting up a localhost on a Mac | scottohara.me

Okay, I knew about the Python shortcut—I mentioned it in Going Offline—but I had no idea it was so easy to do the same thing for PHP. This is a bit of a revelation for me!

Once in the desired directory, run:

php -S localhost:2222

Now you can go to “localhost:2222” in your browser, and if you have an index.html or .php file in your root directory, you’re in business.

Preserving mother tongues

Hui Jing describes her motivation for creating the lovely Penang Hokkien site:

People who grew up their whole lives in a community that spoke the same mother tongue as themselves would probably find this hard to relate to, but it really was something else to hear my mother tongue streaming out of the speakers of my computer.

She ends with an impassioned call for more local language websites:

If the Internet is meant to enhance the free flow of information and ideas across the world, then creation of content on the web should not largely be limited to English-speaking communities.

Offline-Friendly Forms by Max Böck

A clever use of localStorage to stop data from being lost when your visitors are offline.

Notes on `lang` by Taylor Hunt on CodePen

A really deep dive into the lang attribute, and the :lang() pseudo-class (hitherto unknown to me). This is all proving really useful for a little side project I’m working on.

Brighton Brains

A directory of the regular science, technology, and creative events happening in Brighton.

Brendan Dawes - Back your sh*t up!

My back-up strategy is similar to Brendan’s (using Super Duper and Backblaze):

In backup parlance there’s a thing called 3-2-1. That is, you should three copies of your files — two locally on different devices and one off site.

But I only do my local back-ups once a week (eek!)—I should do better.

Doctype Brighton

A new webby meet-up in Brighton organised by Davs Howard. It’ll be one the first Thursday of the month at The Joker. I often find myself in The Joker on Thursday nights anyway (for the wings) so I’ll be heading along to the inaugural event on February 1st.

Localisation and Translation on the Web

Practical advice from Ire on localising web pages.

eBay’s Font Loading Strategy | eBay Tech Blog

Here’s the flow that eBay use for the font-loading. They’ve decided that on the very first page view, seeing a system font is an acceptable trade-off. I think that makes sense for their situation.

Interestingly, they set a flag for subsequent visits using localStorage rather than a cookie. I wonder why that is? For me, the ability to read cookies on the server as well as the client make them quite handy for situations like this.

Chrome to force .dev domains to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS

Well, I guess it’s time to change all my locally-hosted sites from .dev domains to .test. Thanks, Google.

ngrok - secure introspectable tunnels to localhost

This looks like a useful tool, not just for testing locally-hosted sites (say, at a device lab), but also for making locally-hosted sites run on HTTPS so you can test service workers.

Brighton digital companies just did something brilliant… | Declan Cassidy

A write-up of the BrightSparks programme that Clearleft is taking part in.

Each company agreed to help support one local child from a low-income family, on free school meals or with a yearly household income of under £25k.

Brighton Astro

The website for Brighton’s astronomy meet up:

Every month we will have one or two talks aimed at beginners with an interest in learning more about astronomy, but assuming no prior knowledge.

Also, we will take our telescopes out to observe in and around Brighton on clear evenings - on the seafront, Hove and Preston Park, Devil’s Dyke and beyond.

localFont - A localStorage solution for web font loading

A quick drag’n’drop way to base 64 encode your web fonts so you can stick ‘em in local storage.