Link tags: rest

The word for web is forest | New_ Public Magazine

The wood wide web has been a powerhouse metaphor for popularizing the mutualistic relationships of healthy forests. But like a struggling forest, the web is no longer healthy. It has been wounded and depleted in the pursuit of profit. Going online today is not an invigorating walk through a green woodland—it’s rush-hour traffic alongside a freeway median of diseased trees, littered with the detritus of late capitalism. If we want to repair this damage, we must look to the wisdom of the forest and listen to ecologists like Simard when they tell us just how sustainable, interdependent, life-giving systems work.

A beautiful piece by the brilliant Claire L. Evans.

The project of decentralizing the web is vast, and only just beginning. It means finding a way to uproot our expression and communication from the walled gardens of tech platforms, and finding novel ways to distribute the responsibilities of infrastructure across a collective network. But we needn’t start from nothing.

Earth Restored — Toby Ord

Beautifully restored high-resolution photographs of the Earth taken by Apollo astronauts.

Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters: Advances in Derp Learning

A genuinely interesting (and droll) deep dive into derp learning …for typography!

Monotype restored the font Walbaum, a 200-year-old serif typeface — Quartzy

The history and restoratin of a neglected typeface, complete with this great explanation of optical sizing:

Nix illustrated the point with an analogy: “Imagine if we all decided that 10-year-old boys would be the optimal human form,” he says. “Rather than having babies, we just shrunk 10-year-old boys to baby size, and enlarge them to the size of a full grown man. That’s kind of what we’re combatting.”

Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future

It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.” But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories (Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparent walls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anything but can view what has been posted on the open Web; others (Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque. But they all exercise the same disciplinary control over those who create or share content on their domain.

Professor Alan Jacobs makes the case for the indie web:

We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.

What do I mean by “the open Web”? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders. The open Web is effectively a set of protocols that allows the creating, sharing, and experiencing of text, sounds, and images on any computer that is connected to the Internet and has installed on it a browser that can interpret information encoded in conformity with these protocols.

This resonated strongly with me:

To teach children how to own their own domains and make their own websites might seem a small thing. In many cases it will be a small thing. Yet it serves as a reminder that the online world does not merely exist, but is built, and built to meet the desires of certain very powerful people—but could be built differently.

The three Rs of web performance

1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Restructure

The slides from Matthew’s talk on the performance overhauls he did on FixMyStreet.com and TrainTimes.org.uk.

Social Decay on Behance

If only our digital social networks were to exhibit this kind of faded grandeur when they no longer exist.

Trees of deep time are a portal to the past – and the future | Aeon Essays

From the library of Alexandria to the imagined canals of mars to the spots on the sun, this is a beautifully written examination of the chronology contained within the bristlecone pine.

The oldest of the living bristlecones were just saplings when the pyramids were raised. The most ancient, called Methuselah, is estimated to be more than 4,800 years old; with luck, it will soon enter its sixth millennium as a living, reproducing organism. Because we conceive of time in terms of experience, a life spanning millennia can seem alien or even eternal to the human mind. It is hard to grasp what it would be like to see hundreds of generations flow out from under you in the stream of time, hard to imagine how rich and varied the mind might become if seasoned by five thousand years of experience and culture.

There is only the briefest passing mention of the sad story of Don Currey.

How a Couple of Guys Built the Most Ambitious Alien Outreach Project Ever | Science | Smithsonian

One might think sending messages to other stars would be a massive, expensive job. No. It isn’t. The Cosmic Call was essentially a crowdfunded hobby project.

EnhanceConf - Stefan Tilkov - How to embrace the browser - YouTube

The videos from EnhanceConf are started to go up already. Stefan’s talk really struck me—all the talks were great but this one had the most unexpected insight for me. It really clarifies a lot of ideas that I’ve been trying to articulate, but which Stefan crystalises by taking the long-zoom view.

The lie of the API by Ruben Verborgh

I agree completely with the sentiment of this article (although the title is perhaps a bit overblown): you shouldn’t need a separate API—that’s what you’re existing URL structure should be.

I’m not entirely sure that content negotiation is the best way to go when it comes to serving up different representations: there’s a real value in being able to paste a URL into a browser window to get back a JSON or XML representation of a resource.

But this is spot-on about the ludicrous over-engineered complexity of most APIs. It’s ridiculous that I can enter a URL into a browser window to get an HTML representation of my latest tweets, but I have to sign up for an API key and jump through OAuth hoops, and agree to display the results in a specific way if I want to get a JSON representation of the same content. Ludicrous!

Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API by Vinay Sahni

Design principles for APIs.

An API is a user interface for developers. Put the effort in to ensure it’s not just functional but pleasant to use.

ROCA: Resource-oriented Client Architecture

I like these design principles for server-side and client-side frameworks. I would say that they’re common sense but looking at many popular frameworks, this sense isn’t as common as it should be.

Interstellar Hard Drive - The Morning News

Investigating the options for off-world backups.

Data is only as safe as the planet it sits on. It only takes one rock, not too big, not moving that fast, to hit the Earth at a certain angle and: WHAM! Most living species are done for.

How the hell is your Twitter archive supposed to survive that?

Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog

A fascinating blog documenting the secrecy around nuclear weaponry, past and present, by Alex Wellerstein of the American Institue of Physics.

The Restart Page - Free unlimited rebooting experience from vintage operating systems

Wallow in nerd nostalgia and experience the Proustian rush of rebooting old operating systems.

What’s on the Menu? Help transcribe The New York Public Library’s historical menu collection

This is like Zooniverse’s Old Weather project, but for restaurant menus: help transcribe thousands of restaurant menus going back to the 1940s.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: GET, POST, and safely surfacing more of the web

This move by Google to start executing some POST requests makes me very uneasy: the web is agreement and part of that agreement is that POST requests are initiated by the user.

danwebb.net - It’s About The Hashbangs

A superb post by Dan on the bigger picture of what’s wrong with hashbang URLs. Well written and well reasoned.

Tom Armitage on Vimeo

Tom talks about “Things Rules Do.”