2019 Firefox Flashback
Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!
Tags: data
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Sunday, December 8th, 2019
Monday, December 2nd, 2019
The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before - The New York Times
The design history of the New York subway map.
Just enough Internet | doteveryone
The carbon cost of collecting and storing data no one can use is already a moral issue.
So before you add another field, let alone make a new service, can you be sure it will make enough of a difference to legitimise its impact on the planet?
HEAD - A free guide to `head` elements
A one-stop shop for all the metacrap you can put in the head of your HTML documents.
Saturday, November 30th, 2019
The Size of Space
Celestial objects ordered by size, covering a scale from one astronaut to the observable universe.
Thursday, November 7th, 2019
Data Patterns Catalogue
I really like the work that IF are doing to document patterns around handling data:
- Signing in to a service
- Giving and removing consent
- Giving access to data
- Getting access to data
- Understanding automated decisions
- Doing security checks
Each pattern has a description, advantages, limitations, and examples.
Tuesday, October 29th, 2019
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]: More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search
Google’s pissing over HTML again, but for once, it’s not by making up rel values:
A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the “
data-nosnippet” HTML attribute onspan,div, andsectionelements.
This is a direct contradiction of how data-* attributes are intended to be used:
…these attributes are intended for use by the site’s own scripts, and are not a generic extension mechanism for publicly-usable metadata.
Tuesday, October 15th, 2019
Manton Reece - Saying goodbye to Facebook cross-posting
Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web.
Related: Aaron is playing whack-a-mole with Instagram because he provides a servie to let users export their own photographs to their own websites.
Tuesday, October 8th, 2019
Southern Mosaic
A beautiful audio and visual history of the Lomax’s journey across:
On March 31 1939, when John and Ruby Lomax left their vacation home on Port Aransas, Texas, they already had some idea of what they would encounter on their three-month, 6,502 mile journey through the southern United States collecting folk songs.
Friday, September 27th, 2019
To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution | Technology | The Guardian
Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.
Tuesday, September 10th, 2019
Request mapping
The Request Map Generator is a terrific tool. It’s made by Simon Hearne and uses the WebPageTest API.
You pop in a URL, it fetches the page and maps out all the subsequent requests in a nifty interactive diagram of circles, showing how many requests third-party scripts are themselves generating. I’ve found it to be a very effective way of showing the impact of third-party scripts to people who aren’t interested in looking at waterfall diagrams.
I was wondering… Wouldn’t it be great if this were built into browsers?
We already have a “Network” tab in our developer tools. The purpose of this tab is to show requests coming in. The browser already has all the information it needs to make a diagram of requests in the same that the request map generator does.
In Firefox, there’s a little clock icon in the bottom left corner of the “Network” tab. Clicking that shows a pie-chart view of requests. That’s useful, but I’d love it if there were the option to also see the connected circles that the request map generator shows.
Just a thought.
Friday, September 6th, 2019
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.
Saturday, August 31st, 2019
PWA asset generator based on Puppeteer.
Automatically generates icons and splash screens based on Web App Manifest specs and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Updates manifest.json and index.html files with the generated images.
A handy command line tool. Though be aware that it will generate the shit-ton of link elements for splash screens that Apple demands you provide for a multitude of different screen sizes.
Less Data Doesn’t Mean a Lesser Experience| TimKadlec.com
If you treat data as a constraint in your design and development process, you’ll likely be able to brainstorm a large number of different ways to keep data usage to a minimum while still providing an excellent experience. Doing less doesn’t mean it has to feel broken.
Saturday, August 10th, 2019
Server Timing
Harry wrote a really good article all about the performance measurement Time To First Byte. Time To First Byte: What It Is and Why It Matters:
While a good TTFB doesn’t necessarily mean you will have a fast website, a bad TTFB almost certainly guarantees a slow one.
Time To First Byte has been the chink in my armour over at thesession.org, especially on the home page. Every time I ran Lighthouse, or some other performance testing tool, I’d get a high score …with some points deducted for taking too long to get that first byte from the server.
Harry’s proposed solution is to set up some Server Timing headers:
With a little bit of extra work spent implementing the Server Timing API, we can begin to measure and surface intricate timings to the front-end, allowing web developers to identify and debug potential bottlenecks previously obscured from view.
I rememberd that Drew wrote an excellent article on Smashing Magazine last year called Measuring Performance With Server Timing:
The job of Server Timing is not to help you actually time activity on your server. You’ll need to do the timing yourself using whatever toolset your backend platform makes available to you. Rather, the purpose of Server Timing is to specify how those measurements can be communicated to the browser.
He even provides some PHP code, which I was able to take wholesale and drop into the codebase for thesession.org. Then I was able to put start/stop points in my code for measuring how long some operations were taking. Then I could output the results of these measurements into Server Timing headers that I could inspect in the “Network” tab of a browser’s dev tools (Chrome is particularly good for displaying Server Timing, so I used that while I was conducting this experiment).
I started with overall database requests. Sure enough, that was where most of the time in time-to-first-byte was being spent.
Then I got more granular. I put start/stop points around specific database calls. By doing this, I was able to zero in on which operations were particularly costly. Once I had done that, I had to figure out how to make the database calls go faster.
Spoiler: I did it by adding an extra index on one particular table. It’s almost always indexes, in my experience, that make the biggest difference to database performance.
I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to messing with Server Timing headers. It has paid off in spades. I wish I had done it sooner.
And now thesession.org is positively zipping along!
Monday, July 15th, 2019
Spurious Correlations
Correlation does not imply causation.
Monday, July 1st, 2019
The Decolonial Atlas
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Sunday, June 30th, 2019
Lights at sea
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
Wednesday, June 26th, 2019
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites
1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.
We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.
Friday, June 7th, 2019
mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes
Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.