Design Principles For The Web - Jeremy Keith - YouTube
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Web Dev Conf in Bristol recently. I think you can tell that I had fun—it was a good audience!
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Web Dev Conf in Bristol recently. I think you can tell that I had fun—it was a good audience!
I’ve had the opportunity to gather with my peers a few times over the past couple of months.
There was dConstruct, which I hosted. That was just lovely.
Then a few weeks ago, in spite of train strikes and travel snags, I went to Bristol to give a talk at Web Dev Conf, a really nice gathering.
This past weekend I was in London for State Of The Browser, this time as neither host nor speak, but as an attendee. It was really good!
I noticed something rather lovely. There was enough cross-over in the audiences for these events that I got to see some people more than once. That’s something that used to happen all the time but became very rare over the past two years because of The Situation.
None of the organisers of these events were pretending that Covid has gone away. Each event had different processes in place to mitigate risk. I wrote about the steps I took for dConstruct. For some people, those measures might seem to go too far. For other people, they don’t go far enough. This is a challenge that every in-person event is facing and from what I’ve seen, they’re all doing their level best.
None of these events were particularly large. Attendence was maybe somewhere between 100 and 200 people at each one. I know that there’s still a risk in any kind of indoor gathering but these events feel safer than the really big tech gatherings (like the one in Berlin where I got the ’rona—that was literally tens of thousands of people).
Anyway, all three events were thoroughly enjoyable. Partly that’s because the talks were good, but also because the socialising was really, really nice—all the nicer for being in relatively safe environments.
It’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation to point out that the social side of conferences is just as valuable as the content. But now that so many of us are working remotely, I feel like that aspect of in-person events has become even more important.
Or maybe I’m just appreciating that aspect of in-person events after spending such a long time with screen-mediated interactions only.
I guess this domain name is why our local developmemnt environments stopped working.
Anyway, it’s a web interface onto Lighthouse (note that it has the same bugs as the version of Lighthouse in Chrome). Kind of like webhint.io.
A great presentation by Andy on the use of progressive enhancement at Clearleft.
A nice resource (built in HTML5) to connect developers and designers who want to Make A Thing.
A lovely shout-out to Clearleft from the BBC: "Along with other awesome UK companies like ClearLeft, we hope the work we're doing influences more web companies to adopt more best practice, like following the principle of 'progressive enhancement'."
Rejoice! 24 Ways is back again. Prepare for 24 days of web development articles.
Here's a great project from Andrew Mager. He takes a little time out at lunch to post a small markup or CSS tip. Over time this builds up into a really valuable resource.
At last night’s £5 App gathering, after Glenn entertained us with the story of setting up Madgex, Paul and Simon unveiled a little thing they’ve been working on called WalRSS. In a nutshell, you point it at a URL and it makes a nice iPhone/iPod Touch version by styling the associated RSS feed.
Simon talked about all the headaches involved in such a seemingly simple concept. All the problems boiled down to the fact that the app needs to consume/parse/scrape third-party content. It turns out that consuming/parsing/scraping HTML and RSS is an order of magnitude hairier and scarier than pointing at a nice shiny RESTful API. In a textbook example of Postel’s Law, Simon needed to be ultra-paranoid about malicious users potentially taking down his server while being overly-generous in the kind of malformed, invalid RSS/Atom he accepted because, as it turns out, a helluva lot of feeds out there are bozo-compliant. With all sorts of clever server-side solutions at his disposal to handle polling, load balancing, caching and message queueing, he quickly came to realise that he was becoming more of a sysadmin than a web developer.
Ironically, just the day before the £5 App meetup, Google announced their App Engine. WalRSS is almost exactly the kind of app that the App Engine is designed for: it’s written in Django and it needs to do the kind of processing that Google’s infrastructure was made to handle.
I for one welcome our new App Engine overlords. I quite like to dabble in the occasional bit of backend coding but I have no desire to delve into the domain of systems administration.
There’s already an OpenID provider built on Google App Engine. This means that anybody with a Google account potentially has an OpenID URL. You’d have to log in through the app first but from then on, you could use http://openid-provider.appspot.com/[your username]
as your login.
Right now I’m using http://adactio.com/
as my OpenID URL, delegating to http://adactio.myopenid.com/
:
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://adactio.myopenid.com/" />
Should I ever tire of MyOpenID, I guess I potentially update my delegate link to use Google:
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid-provider.appspot.com/adactio" />
I’d still need to update my openid.server
link though.
Oh, you think this is geeky stuff? You should have heard Simon last night. Actually, you could have if you tuned into Ribot’s live broadcast on Qik.
Speaking from experience, I concur.
Videos ands slides from the recent Oxford Geek Night.
Great article from Brian ranging from introducing microformats right up to the current state of play.
Straight from the horse's mouth, advice for web developers on how the iPhone's browser renders pages. I'm very intrigued to find out how it handles liquid designs with no set min-width.
This looks like an interesting new piece of software from Panic. And the site's got some lovely JavaScript flourishes.
New kids on the block.