Link archive: May, 2012

Monday 31 May 1669 (Pepys’ Diary)

Nine years and five months after he began publishing every entry in Samuel Pepys’ diary, Phil Gyford posts the last entry.

Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers - YouTube

A satirical parody of post-singularity existence by Tom Scott inspired by Jim Munroe’s Everyone in Silico and Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular.

CONSUME CONSUME

I’m sure there’s a theme connecting all of these pictures. I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.

Home - fieldpapers.org

Stamen have extended Walking Papers into Field Papers: a virtuous cycle of mapping in the real world and online.

Twitter Engineering: Improving performance on twitter.com

Well, well, well. It turns out that building your entire application, content’n’all, in JavaScript isn’t so good for performance.

How to Make Progress Bars Feel Faster to Users - UX Movement

A fascinating insight into the psychological implications of animated progress indicators.

Pictures and vision

Robin Sloan compares Facebook and Google in an interesting way:

Really, Facebook is the world’s largest photo sharing site—that also happens to be a social network and a login system.

Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing.

Andy Budd on dConstruct 2012 | Interview | .net magazine

Andy gives his thoughts on this year’s dConstruct. He does a good job of explaining what to expect, and—more importantly—what not to expect.

Sweep the Sleaze | Information Architects

Some sensible advice from Oliver Reichenstein. Cluttering your social media icons isn’t helping and may actively be hindering your audience.

Responsive workflow

One developer shares how his workflow has changed thanks to responsive design. It’s insightful.

Fictional magazine covers from Blade Runner - a set on Flickr

Magazine covers created by Tom Southwell for background scenes in Blade Runner.

A City Like Ours - Street Photography – St. John’s, Newfoundland

I’m in St. John’s right now. Once you start perusing this excellent photoblog, you’re going to feel like you’re there too.

Shopping Cart example

A nifty example of responsive tables. View source to see how it’s done.

The Publication Standards Project

Like the Web Standards Project but for ePub. I approve of this message.

Twitter / adactio: Good news.

Looks like the scourge of hashbangs is finally being cleansed from Twitter.

The Great Discontent: Dan Cederholm

The lovely (and responsive) Great Discontent site has a lovely interview with Dan, who is lovely.

The responsive images problem

A run-down of the various approaches to the responsive images problem, concluding that this is something that needs to be solved in the image format.

» The real conflict behind picture and @srcset (Cloud Four Blog)

Jason outlines the real challenge to every proposed solution for responsive images: they just don’t jibe with the way that browsers (quite rightly) pre-fetch images.

Readlists

This looks like a really handy service from Readability: gather together a number of related articles from ‘round the web and then you can export them to a reading device of your choice. It’s like Huffduffer for text.

Kiwibank: Standing Up for Something New — Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul interviews the team behind Kiwibank’s responsive homepage. There are some great insights into their process here, like the way that copywriters worked side by side with developers.

LukeW | Data Monday: E-commerce Performance

Time is money …especially when it comes to performance on the web.

Microjs: Fantastic Micro-Frameworks and Micro-Libraries for Fun and Profit!

I really like this trend of small standalone scripts rather than plug-ins that require the presence of a library.

Digital archivists: technological custodians of human history | Ars Technica

An introduction to the important work of digital archivists:

Much like the family member that collects, organizes, and identifies old family photos to preserve one’s heritage, digital archivists seek to do the same for all mankind.

Like A Rounded Corner (Bruce and The Standardettes) - YouTube

Bravo, Bruce, bravo.

I heard Glen Campbell’s “Like A Rhinestone Cowboy” on the radio and began absent-mindedly singing “Like a rounded corner” to it.

Every Mobile Social App Site, Ever · Visual Idiot

This is kinda funny (because it’s kinda true).

A New Take on Responsive Tables by ZURB

An interesting approach to squishing down large data tables for small-screen viewing …though I wonder if there isn’t a “Mobile First” approach that could scale up, say, lists to become tables on large screens.

Shallow Thoughts » srcset vs. picture

A well thought-out evaluation on responsive images from Bridget.

JS Hotline: (877) 300-2187

I love this! A volunteer-run hotline for answering JavaScript questions (set up by the awesome Garann Means, who literally wrote the book on Node.js).

I think I might volunteer my services.

Context-Free Patent Art

This is wonderfully random: illustrations used to illustrate patent applications but without the context.

inspiring toilets

Inspired by the recent .net magazine article on “20 leading web designers’ desks for your inspiration”, here’s a blog dedicated to the place where the real web design magic happens: the designer’s poostation.

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

A heartbreaking article about just how badly Yahoo fucked up with Flickr. It’s particularly sad coming out right as the Flickr devs roll out an improved uploader and a more liquid photo page …but it seems like band-aid development at this point.

The Blind Shooting The Blind ∵ Stephen van Egmond’s weblog

If you make inaccessible iOS apps, you really only have yourself to blame.

There are also some handy tips here for getting to know VoiceOver.

Dmitry Baranovskiy’s Web Log: Mermaids & Fishermen

I am a mermaid.

Jordan Moore: Source Shuffling—Responsive Images Based On Media Queries

Combine the lowsrc-like image technique I blogged about with the conditional CSS technique I blogged about and this is the result.

The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen | Epicenter | Wired.com

Chris Anderson interviews Mark Andreessen.

The origin of the blink tag

Have you thought “There must be a good reason for the blink element.” Well, read on.

The Tink Tank » Jeremy Keith’s Pork chop recipe

Léonie is collecting some recipes from web geeks. Here’s my contribution via Valentine Warner.

API Panel

The video of the panel I moderated on device and network APIs on the second day of Mobilism in Amsterdam. It’s not quite as snappy as the browser panel (which, given the subject matter, is unsurprising) but it was still good fun.

Mobile Browser Panel 2012, Mobile Browser Panel at Mobilism 2012 Moderated by Jeremy Keith, this panel features Andrea Trasatti (Nokia), Andreas Bovens (O…

Here’s the video of the mobile browser panel I moderated at Mobilism in Amsterdam. These guys were really good sports to put up with my wisecracking shots for cheap laughs at their expense.

It’s Not Working For Me: #crit | Mark Boulton

Mark talks about design criticism. This makes a great companion piece to the Jon Kolko article on design criticism that I linked to last week.

We are Colorblind

A really nice site dedicated entirely to making the web a better place for the colourblind.

Tomorrow’s web type today: The fine flourish of the ligature » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks

An informative post on ligatures in web type from Elliot. And, oh yeah, he redesigned his site again (it’s unsurprisingly lovely).

Brighton Mini Maker Faire is Back – and We Need YOU! | Brighton Mini Maker Faire

Brighton’s Mini Maker Faire (which was fantastic last year) will take place the day after dConstruct and this time, they’ve got a lot more space. Want to get involved? Get involved!

HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS

This amuses me. I am amused.

mariobatalivoice

I am very disappointed that the internet didn’t tell me sooner that Steve Albini has a food blog.

So just in case you didn’t already know: Steve Albini has a food blog.

Springload: OnMediaQuery - Responsive Javascript

This is nice: the solution I blogged about for conditional CSS (reading media queries from JavaScript) all wrapped up in a nice small reusable bundle.

In Flux | Trent Walton

Trent offers some excellent advice for dealing with the effects of the iPad’s retina display on your websites. That advice is: don’t panic.

A separate mobile website: no forking way | Opinion | .net magazine

A great article by Karen pointing to the real problem with the mobile strategies of so many companies: they are locked in by their CMS.

The Farmer & Farmer Review. Modern Medicine by Jonathan Harris

This is very, very good. It gets a little unhinged towards the end but Jonathan Harris’s initial comparisons of software with medicine are spot-on.

Setting up a mobile testing suite | words from Cole Henley, @cole007

If you’re based anywhere near Frome in Somerset, get in touch with Cole—he’s putting together a communal device testing lab.

Proposition to change the prefixing policy from Florian Rivoal on 2012-05-04 ([email protected] from May 2012)

This seems like a sensible way for browsers to approach implementing vendor-prefixed CSS properties.

paulrobertlloyd/barebones

Paul has open-sourced his front-end style guide and put it up on Github. It’s a very handy starting point for making your own.

We don’t support Internet Explorer, and we’re calling that a feature | Tips for Freelancers on Time Tracking and Invoicing | Paydirt Blog

This is the absolutely worst way to think about browser support: because the design doesn’t render “pixel perfect” (whatever that means) in a browser, that browser is blocked from accessing content. This is completely unnecessary and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the web’s greatest feature: progressive enhancement.

Responsive image format - blog

An idea for handling responsive images not with a new format, but with an existing one: progressive JPGs.

Avería – The Average Font

An algorithmically-generated font sounds like a terrible idea but I actually quite like the end result.

Movie Mimic

Recreations of movie stills at filming locations around the world (like I did in Sydney for The Matrix). There’s something quite addictive about looking through these.

Jordan Moore | Building With Content Choreography

Using flexbox to creata a narrow-column stacking order that’s unrelated to the source order.

notcoming.com | Not Coming to a Theater Near You

A terrific site dedicated to the love of film, all wrapped up in a wonderful responsive design.

HTTP Compression use by Alexa Top 1000 | Zoompf

An in-depth analysis (graphs! data!) of how popular sites are using—or not using—compression.

Highly optimized images for the web in 3 steps | pasz.nl/blog

Some practical advice for optimising your images on the web.

Internet! - Imgur

The Old Aesthetic.

Do you want critique, or a hug? | Austin Center for Design

Jon Kolko shares his advice on accepting design criticism.

Design Staff – Change aversion: why users hate what you launched (and what to do about it)

There’s some good advice here about launching a new design without pissing off your users (too much).

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Responsive design – harnessing the power of media queries

Advice on creating responsive designs from Google. It’s not exactly the best tutorial out there (confusing breakpoints with device widths) but it’s great to see the big guns getting involved.

Deutsch Doodles

These lovely doodles from Carla give me Fernweh for Germany.