September 25th, online:
We’ll discuss and brainstorm ideas related to wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, zettelkasten, and note taking on personal websites and how they might interoperate or communicate with each other. This can include IndieWeb building blocks, user interfaces, functionalities, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and let’s discuss and build.
Here’s the thing: we need politics in the workplace. Politics—that is, the act of negotiating our relationships and obligations to each other—is critical to the work of building and sustaining democracy. And the workplace isn’t separate from democracy—it is democracy. It is as much a part of the democratic system as a neighborhood association or a town council, as a library or youth center or food bank. By the very nature of the outsized role that work plays in our lives, it’s where most of us have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we—and our families and communities—live.
Mandy, as always, hits the nail on the head.
When we talk about politics belonging outside the workplace, we reduce democracy to an extracurricular instead of a core part of our lives. Democracy cannot be sustained by annual visits to the ballot box—it isn’t something we have, it’s something we practice. Like all things that require practice, if you don’t practice it often, you lose it.
This is a balm!
Choose a city, choose a radio station, choose a mode of transport (I like walking) and enjoy exploring.
Look, employers are always free to – and should! – evaluate the work product produced by employees. But they don’t have to surveil someone’s every move or screenshot their computer every five minutes to do so. That’s monitoring the inputs. Monitor the outputs instead, and you’ll have a much healthier, saner relationship.
If you hire smart, capable people and trust them to do good work – surprise-surprise – people will return the sentiment deliver just that! The irony of setting up these invasive surveillance regimes is that they end up causing the motivation to goof off to beat the very systems that were setup to catch such behavior.
PIctures of computers (of the human and machine varieties).
The hits keep on comin’ from Clearleft. This time, it’s Danielle with an absolutely brilliant and thoughtful piece on the perils of gaps and overlaps in pattern libraries, design systems and organisations.
This is such a revealing lens to view these things through! Once you’re introduced to it, it’s hard to “un-see” problems in terms of gaps and overlaps in categorisation. And even once the problems are visible, you still need to solve them in the right way:
Recognising the gaps and overlaps is only half the battle. If we apply tools to a people problem, we will only end up moving the problem somewhere else.
Some issues can be solved with better tools or better processes. In most of our workplaces, we tend to reach for tools and processes by default, because they feel easier to implement. But as often as not, it’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. And the solution actually involves communication skills, or effective dialogue.
That last part dovetails nicely with Jerlyn’s equally great piece.
A lot of the issues here are with abuses of the placeholder attribute—using it as a label, using it for additional information, etc.—whereas using it quite literally as a placeholder can be thought of as an enhancement (I almost always preface mine with “e.g.”).
Still, there’s no getting around that terrible colour contrast issue: if the contrast were greater, it would look too much like an actual pre-filled value, and that’s potentially worse.
The answers to these questions about forms are useful for just about any website:
- Is It OK To Place A Form In Two Columns?
- Where Should Labels Be Placed?
- Can We Use Placeholder Text Instead Of A Label?
- How To Lessen The Cognitive Load Of A Form?
- Are Buttons Considered Part Of A Form’s UX?
- Is It Possible To Ease The Process Of Filling A Form?
- Does The User’s Location Influence A Form’s UX?
Ballardian spaces.
This is a fascinating way to explore time and place—a spyglass view of hundred year old maps overlaid on the digital maps of today.
Here’s a clever to technique to improve the perceived performance of image loading with a polygonal SVG placeholder.
These icons-as-a-service could be really useful for making quick’n’dirty HTML prototypes.
A clever technique by Emil to implement the “float label” pattern using CSS. It all hinges on browsers supporting the :placeholder-shown pseudo-class which, alas, is not universal.
I was hoping that maybe @supports could come to the rescue (so that a better fallback could be crafted), but that tests for properties and values, not selectors. Damn!
We’ve got Space Ipsum for text. Now we have SpaceHolder for images.
A heartbreaking tale of companionship, memory and loss.
This looks like a nifty take on the ol’ using-labels-like-placeholders pattern for forms. I still prefer to have a label visible at all times, but this seems like a nice compromise.
Prepare to lose yourself for hours as you keep hitting “take me somewhere else” through these most bizarre and wonderful Google street view locations.
Strassenblickfernweh indeed.
A cute little service for mocking up pictures of your site being used on different devices. Just drag and drop a screenshot on to an image.
Note’s from Joanne’s presentation at Improving Reality.
A day devoted to exploring unusual places all over the world. I couldn’t find anything for Brighton but it looks like there will be some stuff happening in London.