December 2010
3 posts
Tim Bray on WikiLeaks. Worth the read.
Paul Robert Lloyd’s Styleguides for the Web–in my mind, the single most important part of designing for large projects yet so often overlooked & undefined. Linked to in the article and also worth the read, David McCreath on why Mule doesn’t deliver Photoshop comps.
Will Wilkinson in The Economist on Missing The Point of WikiLeaks. I’m in general agreement with Wilkinson’s initial post on principle so that likely explains why I’m linking to this.
November 2010
3 posts
A Book Apart has released Dan Cederholm’s CSS3 For Web Designers. From the pitch: From advanced selectors to generated content to the triumphant return of web fonts, and from gradients, shadows, and rounded corners to full-blown animations, CSS3 is a universe of creative possibilities Jason Santa Maria talks more about it here and there’s an excerpt on CSS3 transitions (which...
Amy Thibodeau at Contentini on What You Need to Know Before Hiring a Social Media Consultant. Likely a good first stop before you buy some of that snake oil.
Shazam!: The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal. Are you kidding me? Looks like Dec. 1, 2010 is the day I’m out forty odd dollars. Huge hat tip to Emmet Matheson.
October 2010
3 posts
Before Us–the Tumblr of Ian Day aka. @Chet_Friendly. Added to my feeds and should be added to yours because Ian is that kind of good guy and, you know, it’s good.
Charlotte Elise Sakundiak was born on October 8th, 2010 at 10:19 PM. She is about as beautiful and perfect as a little girl can get. And she’s got her moms lips.
Turns out, October is all about waiting. The Larry Sanders Show: The Complete Series will be available November 2nd.
September 2010
3 posts
Remember yesterday when I was upset at the Pope? Today it’s Bill Donohue: The pope did not go far enough. Radical atheists like the British Humanist Association should apologize for Hitler. But they should not stop there. They also need to issue an apology for the 67 million innocent men, women and children murdered under Stalin, and the 77 million innocent Chinese killed by Mao. Hitler, Stalin...
From Pope Benedict’s speech to England: Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the...
Bjorn Lomborg, asshat or the biggest asshat? Discuss.
August 2010
5 posts
The Blaze, a news site from Glenn Beck. From his introductory letter:
The Blaze will pursue truth. Of course we will make mistakes. Honest mistakes. And we’ll be quick with corrections. We intend to earn your trust and keep it day in and day out with hard work and a lot of transparency.
I look forward to the hard hitting conspiracy theories to come from The Blaze.
Island and Lake Combinations, including Largest Lake on an Island and Largest Island in a Lake on an Island. (Via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival.)
Mike Rundle posts his response to this Dribbble shot heard round the world. Worth the read.
Tim Bray on the reporting of the recent Android security scare & iOS security issue. One of these issues was nothing and Android got nailed for it, the other is/was a pretty substantial security risk and it got glazed over. Embarrassing.
What the fuck is my social media “strategy”?. As the site says: “Making it up so you don’t have to”, and seriously, let’s all just admit that you’re making it up. Social media “consultants” and “gurus” are the “SEO professionals” of the current wave. Regurgitated marketing babble peppered with common sense. Curious about the next wave of snake-oil on the web? Pay attention to Content Strategists*....
July 2010
4 posts
From the Glass House Conversations site: Each Monday, a host posts a provocation. People have only five days to respond. The boundaries of the conversation are set to just one week, ending on Friday evenings. After comments have closed a “Final Word” is chosen from the replies. Stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaging. Worth bookmarking.
Andy Hummel, bassist for Big Star has passed away at the age of 59. Shitty year.
ExpressionEngine 2.1 has been released, signalling the end of the 2.0 beta. This release clears up a bunch of bugs and reveals a whole new front end to the ExpressionEngine site. Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain again helms the redesign along with Simon Collison, Ryan Irelan, and Jason Morehead. I haven’t installed it yet (scared) but I like what I see in the changelog. Also worth mentioning, EllisLab is...
Or, alternately, dig them up and keep them in your house and garage. Yuck.
June 2010
14 posts
Anthony Kolber gives you the breakdown on cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures via optimizeLegibility. I had no clue. I am incredibly stoked.
Well it’s about time. The DC comics app for the iPad is now available. So, you know, I’m excited.
Apple allows you to opt out of data collection on the iAd platform. Good.
Via Coudal: Every Blue Note album cover aka go get a design education from Reid Miles (and then go get a jazz lesson from The Jazz Messengers.)
Chris Coyier on templates: If you are a professional designer (as in, a client came to you with web needs and you are going to build a custom site for them, and you are going to charge them more than a few hundred dollars) then using a template is, pardon me, bullshit. I think about this a lot and I agree with Chris. Templates are helpful tools for beginners. There’s a lot to learn when you’re...
The Village Voice celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with Andrew Sarris’ original review. I likely don’t have to tell anyone that Psycho is a favourite of mine. Hitchcock directs, Herrmann composes and Bass does the titles*. There’s nothing there not to love. *obviously, this trio is repeated and proceeded by other Hitchcock films but Herrmann and...
This entire Alvin Greene thing has me absolutely captivated. To call this odd is really not doing the story justice. Collected for your notes, a few of Greene’s video interviews: The Big Picture - Keith Olbermann - ABC News - PubliuSC Something here is off. Way way off. The PubliuSC interview in particular borders on either the absurd or illness. At one point he is clearly reading from notes....
Isaac Pinnock from Made By Many on the 125 banners he saw while browsing and the number of clicks he made on those advertisements. Answer: none.
Jesse Matheson’s Son of a Gun. Having seen/known Jesse when he was just beginning, watching this makes me so incredibly happy.
Safari 5 has been released (download here) and with it comes a new feature called extensions. What are extensions? Apple says Safari Extensions are “a new way for developers to enhance and customize the browsing experience”. Yeah, so if you use Firefox Add-Ons, you already basically know. If you want to build your own, Apple has kindly posted the Safari Extensions Development Guide to get you up...
If you haven’t read Adam Lisagor’s excellent iPad TV post yet, you should. I think he’s on to something with this: If you look at QuickTime’s UI elements across the iPad and iPhone OS and compare them with QuickTime X’s UI on the Mac, it’s not hard to conclude that Apple is making efforts at a shared UI language which spans both platforms, for the sake of unity and singularity of purpose. When...
Emmet Matheson lists the residents of Leonard Cohen’s Tower Of Song and then follows up. Reading Emmet’s follow up, I’m reminded of all the great things that can happen when you follow a path.
Lodewijk Schutte’s PHP in Templates: Pain or Pleasure slides from his presentation at the ExpressionEngine/CodeIgniter conference. I found this presentation enlightening and the room was filled. Worth at least a once over.
MojoMotor a lightweight, online CMS from EllisLabs. Looks neat.
May 2010
14 posts
NBC and Time Warner say they’re going to stick with Flash for online video delivery. This seems especially out of character for NBC. I’ve never known them to make incredibly wrongheaded decisions.
Mule Design has an excellent post pointing out some of the failings in the GOP’s America Speaking Out site. Well stated. Also, add Mule to your feeds for heavens sake.
Jack Rebney, who you would remember from his delightfully expletive filled RV promo video, is soon to be immortalized again in Winnebago Man–a tribute the the man, his mouth and anything else you’d like to stick in your fern. Brilliant.
The NYT live-blogs Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook privacy announcement. I’m concerned about the privacy issues but I’ve also got to extend that concern to the Like button and Open Graph. While I’d like to believe this is altruistic, yeah, I don’t.
American politics fans rejoice! The House Republicans have created America Speaking Out – a site to foster debate and allow everyday citizens to influence policy. Sound like a vibrant community filled with thoughtful political debate? I won’t make up my mind until I’m certain that the reptilians aren’t involved and more people have gotten behind a repeal of the Civil Rights Act.
With all the hubub around Farmers Markets in our fair province, I would be remiss to not point out this lady’s thoughts on the subject.
The Washington Post runs a Mark Zuckerberg penned editorial on Facebook’s upcoming privacy measures. We’ll see.
SoundManager 2 now has HTML5 audio support. Flash free (with fallback) and Canvas & JS animations. Worth a look if you’ve planned to add some audio that you may or may not be legally within your rights to post but you figure, really, who could care? Plus nobody asked you if it was OK to put any into that Degrassi episode right? So screw ‘em.
Our Solar System is a totally nifty experiment using CSS border-radius, transforms & animations by Alex Giron. This one pretty much requires Safari so, you know, one more reason to update your browser.
Moved to a Media Temple DV, grabbed a hold of ExpressionEngine 2, wrapped it up in HTML5–The Markup Language, shit all over it with some -webkit garbage, went straight up @font-face on this mother and then set it out on its own into the world. Feed should still be the same, some links are missing but coming (for instance, an about page), and it really looks way more sharp in a WebKit browser...
Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain designed Steinway & Sons site. And, it’s built with ExpressionEngine. If you asked me to name my top 5 favourite web designers, Jesse would be at the very top of my list. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. If you need a crash course on how to set type on the web, any one of his sites will pretty much lay it out for you.
Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain designed Steinway & Sons site. And, it’s built with ExpressionEngine. If you asked me to name my top 5 favourite web designers, Jesse would be at the very top of my list. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. If you need a crash course on how to set type on the web, any one of his sites will pretty much lay it out for you.
Because you haven’t already seen it linked around 100 times today. From the New York Times–Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options. I know I’ve been really getting my hate on for Facebook lately but even they realize that they’ve got a problem on their hands. “Buy in” by obfuscation is just, you know, wrong. I don’t agree with it, I think it’s sketchy and I think that shit travels...
A List Apart’s new print publishing arm, A Book Apart, has just made Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers available for pre-order. if I didn’t already trust the folks at A List Apart to provide me with great, worthwhile content, I’d still buy the book because it’s beautiful and orange. Oh, and here’s Jason Santa Maria on just that subject!
April 2010
8 posts
The EFF on Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy. Related: why I’m not on Facebook anymore–I’d prefer to remain a moving target.
