Here Come the Lionfish – James Bridle
A terrific article by James.
Link tags: rant
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The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist | jakelazaroff.com
If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.
The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website
It me:
Broadly, these are websites which are still web pages, not web applications; they’re pages of essentially static information, personal websites, blogs, and so on, but they are slightly dynamic. They might have a style selector at the top of each page, causing a cookie to be set, and the server to serve a different stylesheet on every subsequent page load.
This rings sadly true to me:
Suppose a company makes a webpage for looking up products by their model number. If this page were made in 2005, it would probably be a single PHP page. It doesn’t need a framework — it’s one SELECT query, that’s it. If this page were made in 2022, a conundrum will be faced: the company probably chose to use a statically generated website. The total number of products isn’t too large, so instead their developers stuff a gigantic JSON file of model numbers for every product made by the company on the website and add some client-side JavaScript to download and query it. This increases download sizes and makes things slower, but at least you didn’t have to spin up and maintain a new application server. This example is fictitious but I believe it to be representative.
Also, I never thought about “serverless” like this:
Recently we’ve seen the rise in popularity of AWS Lambda, a “functions as a service” provider. From my perspective this is literally a reinvention of CGI, except a) much more complicated for essentially the same functionality, b) with vendor lock-in, c) with a much more complex and bespoke deployment process which requires the use of special tools.
Robin Rendle › Newsletters
A rant from Robin. I share his frustration and agree with his observations.
I wonder how we can get the best of both worlds here: the ease of publishing newsletters, with all the beauty and archivability of websites.
2020: an isolation odyssey on Vimeo
What a brilliant homage! And what a spot-on pop-cultural reference for The Situation.
2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors.
Mando | Luke Dorny
- Which jig will be next?
- What instrument?
- What shirt will he wear next?
- Will a shirt make a repeat appearance?
- Will he shave his wiseman beard?
- Possibly a haircut or trim?
Late weeknotes 024 - Attitude of Ingratitude
This might be the most insightful thing that Dan has written since his seminal 2013 Medium article:
The problem with Scrappy Doo, isn’t that he’s annoying, which he is, but that the ghosts suddenly became real, which is an afront to science.
I know this hot-take is about 40 years old, but I’ve been bottling it up.
Indoor Voices 🤫🤫🤫
A group blog by a whole bunch of people who are staying at home.
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time where the internet was just full of casual websites posting random stuff. And you’d go to them maybe even multiple times a day to see if they had posted any new stories. It was something we all did when we were bored at our desks, at our jobs. Now there are no more desks. But there are still blogs.
Quarantine Book Club
Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!
A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.
Programming Sucks
There’s a theory that you can cure this by following standards, except there are more “standards” than there are things computers can actually do, and these standards are all variously improved and maligned by the personal preferences of the people coding them, so no collection of code has ever made it into the real world without doing a few dozen identical things a few dozen not even remotely similar ways. The first few weeks of any job are just figuring out how a program works even if you’re familiar with every single language, framework, and standard that’s involved, because standards are unicorns.
Jon Aizlewood | Is marketing being reborn as CX?
Aaaaand, once again, the Acheulean hand ax makes an appearance, this time in Jon’s rant about marketing.
A decade or more ago, digital marketing was more of a blunt instrument. It was like the first stone axe - crude, but it got the job done.
That’s three links in one day that reference the same prehistoric technology. What coincidental synchronicity!
What Happens to Grantland’s Archives? - The Atlantic
Had anyone from the archive been in touch with ESPN? Was there any hope that the treasured collection of Grantland stories might remain accessible?
“We don’t ‘get in touch,’” Jason Scott, a digital historian at the Internet Archive, told me in an email. “We act.”
An immigration lawyer reviews Paddington
Sounds like a cute idea, right?
In fact it’s the best thing you’re ever likely to read on Peruvian ursine immigration.
What’s on the Menu? Help transcribe The New York Public Library’s historical menu collection
This is like Zooniverse’s Old Weather project, but for restaurant menus: help transcribe thousands of restaurant menus going back to the 1940s.
Word has always done a great job of displaying the... · Ben Ward's Scattered Mind
Ben calls bullshit on Microsoft's defence of Outlook's rendering. Ben, as usual, is correct.
The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites
"In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one's ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital."
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
Danah Boyd's essay is required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in social networks.
Photo Matt » The Most Frustrating Thing
Matt points out that we can get sidetracked by taking what matters most to us and assuming that it matters most for success.
gastronaut
A food blog based in Brighton. This is a woman after my own heart.
Powazek: Just a Thought: Death to User-Generated Content
Derek hits the nail on the head. User-generated content is such a cold, cold term.