Tags: blue

23

sparkline

Thursday, July 13th, 2023

The syndicate

Social networks come and social networks go.

Right now, there’s a whole bunch of social networks coming (Blewski, Freds, Mastication) and one big one going, thanks to Elongate.

Me? I watch all of this unfold like Doctor Manhattan on Mars. I have no great connection to any of these places. They’re all just syndication endpoints to me.

I used to have a checkbox in my posting interface that said “Twitter”. If I wanted to add a copy of one of my notes to Twitter, I’d enable that toggle.

I have, of course, now removed that checkbox. Twitter is dead to me (and it should be dead to you too).

I used to have another checkbox next to that one that said “Flickr”. If I was adding a photo to one of my notes, I could toggle that to send a copy to my Flickr account.

Alas, that no longer works. Flickr only allows you to post 1000 photos before requiring a pro account. Fair enough. I’ve actually posted 20 times that amount since 2005, but I let my pro membership lapse a while back.

So now I’ve removed the “Flickr” checkbox too.

Instead I’ve now got a checkbox labelled “Mastodon” that sends a copy of a note to my Mastodon account.

When I publish a blog post like the one you’re reading now here on my journal, there’s yet another checkbox that says “Medium”. Toggling that checkbox sends a copy of my post to my page on Ev’s blog.

At least it used to. At some point that stopped working too. I was going to start debugging my code, but when I went to the documentation for the Medium API, I saw this:

This repository has been archived by the owner on Mar 2, 2023. It is now read-only.

I guessed I missed the memo. I guess Medium also missed the memo, because developers.medium.com is still live. It proudly proclaims:

Medium’s Publishing API makes it easy for you to plug into the Medium network, create your content on Medium from anywhere you write, and expand your audience and your influence.

Not a word of that is accurate.

That page also has a link to the Medium engineering blog. Surely the announcement of the API deprecation would be published there?

Crickets.

Moving on…

I have an account on Bluesky. I don’t know why.

I was idly wondering about sending copies of my notes there when I came across a straightforward solution: micro.blog.

That’s yet another place where I have an account. They make syndication very straightfoward. You can go to your account and point to a feed from your own website.

That’s it. Syndication enabled.

It gets better. Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes show up there too.

It’s like dominoes falling: I post something on my website which updates my RSS feed which gets picked up by micro.blog which passes it on to Bluesky.

I noticed that one of the other services that micro.blog can post to is Medium. Hmmm …would that still work given the abandonment of the API?

I gave permission to micro.blog to cross-post to Medium when my feed of blog posts is updated. It seems to have worked!

We’ll see how long it lasts. We’ll see how long any of them last. Today’s social media darlings are tomorrow’s Friendster and MySpace.

When the current crop of services wither and die, my own website will still remain in full bloom.

Tuesday, August 31st, 2021

Why are hyperlinks blue?

A wonderful bit of spelunking into the annals of software interfaces by Elise Blanchard.

Wednesday, January 6th, 2021

Should The Web Expose Hardware Capabilities? — Smashing Magazine

This is a very thoughtful and measured response to Alex’s post Platform Adjacency Theory.

Unlike Alex, the author doesn’t fire off cheap shots.

Also, I’m really intrigued by the idea of certificate authorities for hardware APIs.

Sunday, July 1st, 2018

Monday, October 9th, 2017

FriendChip Beacons - With support of Eddystone and Physical Web

I quite like the idea of broadcasting my URL from a friendchip bracelet.

Tuesday, September 13th, 2016

Thursday, July 21st, 2016

Exploring the Physical Web (Without Buying Beacons) — Medium

Well, this is interesting! It turns out you can turn your laptop into a beacon for broadcasting a URL to devices that support The Physical Web.

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014

Google’s ‘Nearby’ Lets Your Smartphone Talk to the Internet of Things | Motherboard

An early look at the just-in-time interactions that Scott has been working on:

Nearby works like this. An enabled object broadcasts a short description of itself and a URL to devices nearby listening. Those URLs are grabbed and listed by the app, and tapping on one brings you to the object’s webpage, where you can interact with it—say, tell it to perform a task.

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

Bluetooth gloves

I think this is kind of brilliant.

Thursday, January 31st, 2013

Stick-n-find

Spimify your household with these bluetooth location stickers. Now you can google your shoes.

Saturday, September 24th, 2011

Mobile Apps Must Die | Blog | design mind

Scott writes up some of the things he talked about at the Breaking Development conference: the just-in-time interactions that are inevitable in a heavily-instrumented world.

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Letters of Note: I think I no how to make people or animals alive

This is why, when a child posits something ridiculous-sounding, you should encourage them.

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

The Man in Blue > There are no social networks

Cameron's plea for social network transparency and portability is one of the most lucid and succinct yet.

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

Wireframework

There’s been a lot of buzz lately around a new CSS framework called Blueprint. It’s basically a collection of resources pulled together from other sources: Khoi’s grids, Richard’s vertical rhythm, Eric’s reset and more.

Some people—including contributors to the CSS—have expressed their reservations about the non-semantic class names used in the framework. That’s a valid concern but, as Simon pointed out in the comments to Mark’s post, you don’t have to restrict yourself to those class names: you can always add your own semantics to the markup.

I don’t see myself using Blueprint. It just seems too restrictive for use in a real-world project. Maybe if I’m building a grid-based layout that’s precisely 960 pixels wide it could save me some time, but I’m mostly reminded of the quote apocryphally attributed to Henry Ford about the Model T:

The customer can have any color he wants so long as it’s black.

Unless I’m creating cookie-cutter sites, I don’t think a CSS framework can help me. That said, I think a framework like Blueprint has its place.

At Clearleft, a lot of our work involves wireframing. Every Information Architect has their own preference for tools and formats for creating wireframes and prototypes: some use Visio, others Omnigraffle. James and Richard usually start with paper and then move on to HTML, CSS and even a dab of JavaScript.

This results in quick wireframes that illustrate hierarchy, are addressable and allow for a good level of interaction. Creating HTML wireframes requires a different mindset to creating documents intended for the Web. You don’t have to worry about cross-browser CSS, bulletproof markup or unobtrusive JavaScript. With those concerns out of the equation, the benefits of using cookie-cutter code really come to the fore.

So while I might have reservations about using a JavaScript library on a production site, I’d have no such qualms when it comes to generating a quick prototype. The same goes for Blueprint. I think it could be ideally suited to HTML wireframes.

I may be a bit of a control freak, but I’d no sooner use a CSS framework for a live site than I’d use clip art for images. I firmly believe that creating good markup is a craft that, like good design, takes time. It may seem unrealistic to some, but I don’t want to compromise that quality without a very good reason.

That’s my hard-nosed attitude when it comes to creating documents for the World Wide Web. If the documents are intended purely as wireframes for internal use, then my attitude softens considerably. Then I think a framework like Blueprint could really shine.

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

Blueprint: A CSS Framework

Pulling together a bunch of CSS tricks from a range of sources: reseting, baseline typography and grids (fixed width, unfortunately).

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

Microformats 1:01—Exporting microformats via bluetooth

On the last day of XTech 2007 I abducted Ian and forced him to shoot a quick video of a microformats demo that I didn’t have a chance to include in my presentation.

The video is one minute and one second long. It’s a quick demo of John McKerrell’s bluetooth version of the Tails plugin.

YouTube

Here’s a transcript of the 1:01 minutes of video:

This is my website. This is my mobile phone. My website has microformats. This is a version of the Tails plugin for Firefox. It exposes all the microformats I have on my website. I can convert and export those microformats as vcard, iCal, whatever I want. With this version of the plugin I can also export to bluetooth. So let’s take an event for example. I click on bluetooth. My computer asks me which device to export to. I have previously paired up my phone. So now I’m going to send the event to that device. And there we go. I have now exported from the World Wide Web onto my mobile phone. Easy!

The video is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. You are free to share, remix, caption and translate this video (as long as you provide attribution).

Monday, March 26th, 2007

mezzoblue § Chalkwork Basic Royalty-free Icons

Dave has made some icons — very nice ones.

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

The Man in Blue > Experiments > Web Coolness Calculator

Calculate your Web Coolness, courtesy of Cameron. Of course he couldn't resist one more jibe at me in there.

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

mezzoblue § About Mezzoblue

Dave redesigns. And before I could bash him for his wide fixed width layout, he went and added a Jeremy Keith Button® on his about page that toggles between liquid and fixed. Cheeky bugger.