Link archive: May, 2011

Chloe Weil

Chloe’s redesign/realign is a lovely bit of HTML5 and CSS3 all wrapped up in a responsive layout.

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.

susan jean robertson » Mobile Portland Notes

Susan’s comprehensive notes from the roundtable discussion about the mythical mobile user.

Annoying.js: How to be an asshole • Javascript • Kilian Valkhof

All of the most irritating uses of JavaScript gathered together into one library.

Fuck yeah Keming!

A celebration of horrendous kerning all over the internet.

Lightweight Computing – Stuntbox

The class of device formerly known as mobile.

The Story of the HTML5 Shiv « Paul Irish

This dovetails nicely with my recent post about the spirit of distributed collaboration. Here’s a great little bit of near-history spelunking from Paul, all about styling new HTML5 elements in pesky older versions of Internet Explorer.

Open science: a future shaped by shared experience | Education | The Observer

A nice summation of the open science movement, courtesy of Bobbie.

JoshEmerson.co.uk · Blog · Base64 and the tiling background

Josh explains the pros and cons of embedding background images in your CSS using base 64 encoding.

Out of this World events

There’s a whole series of sci-fi related events going on at the British Library.

LukeW | Mobile Context Revisited

Yes! Luke nails the fallacy of the mythical mobile user. Instead of trying to mind-read intent, play to the strengths of mobile devices instead.

Douché!  ¶  Personal Weblog of Joe Clark, Toronto

when you have to concede that someone has made a good counterargument, but they’re being a jerk about it.

I have to remember this one.

Mobilism Coverage

A comprehensive list of links to videos, blog posts and slides from the Mobilism conference.

susan jean robertson » We are the minority

Another great post from Susan. Not only are we making unwarranted assumptions about what the mythical mobile user wants, we’re basing those assumptions on the worst possible user base: ourselves.

Bagchecking in the Command Line | Bagcheck

This is a fascinating take on progressive enhancement from Luke: for a service-based site, the equivalent of Content First is API first …literally a command line interface as a baseline.

Kisko Labs - Making kiskolabs.com responsive

Another write-up of a responsive redesign.

David Bushell – Graphic

Once again the importance of a Content First approach to responsive design is made clear:

What responsive technique do we use? Whatever suits the content best.

Links Don’t Open Apps « Cloud Four

A timely reminder from Jason of the killer feature of the web: hyperlinks.

Layer Styles

A handy little GUI for generating CSS declarations for shadows, gradients, opacity and border radius.

Brighton Digital Festival

September in Brighton is going to be ker-razy! Here’s a nice responsive holding page listing just some of the events that will be going on …dConstruct, Maker Faire, Flash On The Beach and more.

timoni.org - The most important page on Flickr

It’s funny, I’ve just recently become acutely aware of exactly the problem that Timoni describes here: the inability to filter new uploads by a particular user.

It makes stalking someone that much harder.

Anton Peck — Adopt a Monster

What could be better than of Anton’s 100 robots? How about one of Anton’s (even bigger) 100 monsters! You can pre-order now.

The Goldilocks Approach to Responsive Web Design

A nice little demo of the “content out” approach to responsive design.

susan jean robertson » Assumptions

Susan pushes back on the notion of the mythical mobile user.

Lexadecimal

Hexadecimal colours and their corresponding dictionary definitions. Cute.

EU law change regarding use of cookies | Torchbox

A translation into plain English of the recent changes in the law regarding cookies in the UK. In short, keep calm and carry on.

Nanolaw with Daughter (Ftrain.com)

A superbly written piece of near-future legal-dystopian speculative fiction. Damn, that Paul Ford can write!

LukeW | Mobilism: Mobile Browser Panel

Luke’s notes from the browser panel I moderated at the Mobilism conference.

Unhosted - Imagine personal data freedom…

This looks like it might be worth investigating as one potential solution to the sharecropping problem: code for decentralising your data; you allow apps to access your data but you get to decide where that data lives. Intriguing.

The ‘Science’ of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea - Ben McAllister - Life - The Atlantic

The perils of “scientism” in design. Reading this reminded me of Google’s forty shades of blue.

Mobile Browser panel, fzijlstra on USTREAM. Conference

Here’s a video of the mobile browser panel I moderated at Mobilism in Amsterdam today. It gets fairly technical for a while but it was mostly a lot of fun.

The Ampersand Story | Clagnut § Brighton · Typography · Clearleft · Conferences

Getting the background on Ampersand from Richard is getting me very excited for the conference.

AEA Boston_2011 (by) Anton Peck (in) Journal

Anton’s personal account of An Event Apart in Boston. It really was a very special event.

Dribbble - My Secret for Color Schemes by Erica Schoonmaker

A very useful tip for creating cohesive colour palettes.

Fit To Scale | Trent Walton

More documentation of a responsive redesign, this time from Trent Walton. Be sure to check out the FitText jQuery plug-in that was created as a result.

Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement — Easy Readers

Buy. This. Book.

I mean it.

Design for the changing web: Our response :: Studio :: Headshift

Documenting the process of switching to a responsive design. I think there’s always insight to be gained from seeing how your peers are approaching these challenges.

Race to save digital art from the rapid pace of technological change | Technology | The Observer

Digital preservation in the art world.

Attack! | 100 robots

Electronic rock songs about anger, loss, frustration, love, the surveillance state, the Iranian election, uranium enrichment, Twitter, gene therapy cures for AIDS, the financial crisis and World of Warcraft.

The hgroup hokey cokey | HTML5 Doctor

A good round-up by Jack Osborne of where things currently stand with the hgroup group.

YouTube - Bachelor Kisses acoustic - The Go-Betweens

Two fine songwriters. Only one of them is still with us.

css Zen Garden: All-In-One

This is cute: using media queries to display multiple CSS Zen Garden submissions without refreshing the page — just adjust your browser window.

YouTube - neurowear vol.1 “necomimi” （脳波で動く猫耳）

Animatronic rabbit ears powered by brain waves …in Japan. Of course.

Google Analytics Blog: Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report

Great news! Google Analytics now tracks page load times.

In a Brooklyn Loft, Twitter Stars Find Common Ground - NYTimes.com

A profile of those whacky Brooklyn Studiomates.

Font sizing with rem - Snook.ca

Well, ya learn something new every day …or at least I did. I had no idea about the rem unit—relative em—for font-sizing in CSS.

The last post - Penmachine - Derek K. Miller

The final post in ten years of blogging. Derek is dead. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to write this.

LukeW | An Event Apart: All Our Yesterdays

Luke’s notes from my talk about long-term thinking and online preservation at An Event Apart in Boston.

Why I Don’t Self-Host Anymore | romkey.com

A comprehensive look at some of the problems with taking self-hosting to its logical conclusion: running your own web server.

FamilySearch Shares Plans to Digitize Billions of Records Stored at Granite Mountain Records Vault - LDS Newsroom

How the Mormon Church are storing and preserving genealogical data inside a mountain.

Digital legacy: The fate of your online soul - tech - 02 May 2011 - New Scientist

The editor of New Scientist writes about deletionists and preservationists while adding his own personal poignant perspective.