The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.
This really is a disgusting exlusionary state of affairs.
I hate to be judgy, but I honestly wonder how the people behind some of these decisions can call themselves web developers.
I’ll be speaking at this free early evening event with Arisa Fukusaki and Cassie in Brighton on Monday, February 27th. Grab a ticket and come along for some pizza and nerdiness.
A personal site, or a blog, is more than just a collection of writing. It’s a kind of place - something that feels like home among the streams. Home is a very strong mental model.
Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.
Ouch! Lesson learned:
My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like Tom does.
The format of a Wikipedia page is used as the chilling delivery mechanism for this piece of speculative fiction. The distancing effect heightens the horror.
This is a good round-up of APIs you can use to decide if and how much JavaScript to load. I might look into using storage.estimate() in service workers to figure out how much gets pre-cached.
There’s no browser support yet but that doesn’t mean we can’t start adding prefers-reduced-data to our media queries today. I like the idea of switching between web fonts and system fonts.
I’ve been using Duck Duck Go for ages so I didn’t realise quite how much of a walled garden Google search has become.
41% of the first page of Google search results is taken up by Google products.
This is some excellent reporting. The data and methodology are entirely falsifiable so feel free to grab the code and replicate the results.
Note the fear with which publishers talk about Google (anonymously). It’s the same fear that app developers exhibit when talking about Apple (anonymously).
Ain’t centralisation something?
On AMP:
Google could have approached the “be better on mobile” problem, search optimization and revenue sharing any number of ways, obviously, but the one they’ve chosen and built out is the one that guarantees that either you let them middleman all of your traffic or they cut off your oxygen.
There’s also this observation, which is spot-on:
Google has managed to structure this surveillance-and-value-extraction machine entirely out of people who are convinced that they, personally, are doing good for the world. The stuff they’re working on isn’t that bad – we’ve got such beautiful intentions!
I had the great pleasure of visiting the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp last October. Their vast collection of woodblocks are available to dowload in high resolution (and they’re in the public domain).
14,000 examples of true craftmanship, drawings masterly cut in wood. We are supplying this impressive collection of woodcuts in high resolution. Feel free to browse as long as you like, get inspired and use your creativity.
Some solid research here. Turns out that using input type=”text” inputmode=”numeric” pattern="[0-9]*" is probably a better bet than using input type="number".
I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.
99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic
A lovely little bit of urban cartography.
Books in the public domain, lovingly designed and typeset, available in multiple formats for free. Great works of fiction from Austen, Conrad, Stevenson, Wells, Hardy, Doyle, and Dickens, along with classics of non-fiction like Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Shackleton’s South!
I’m telling you this stuff is often too important and worthy to be owned by an algorithm and lost in the stream.
I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.
At the 14 minute mark I had to deal with an obstreperous member of the audience. He wasn’t heckling exactly …he just had a very bad experience with web components, and I think my talk was triggering for him.
I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Hui Jing when Mozilla invited me along to Singapore to speak at their developer roadshow. Hui Jing is speaking at each one of the events on the roadshow, and documenting the journey here.
She’s being very modest about her talk: it was superb! Entertaining and informative in equal measure, delivered with gusto. Seriously, frontend conference organisers, try to get Hui Jing to speak about CSS at your event—you won’t regret it.
I had the honour of being invited along to kick off the first leg of Mozilla’s Developer Roadshow in Singapore.
