Last night I attended the always excellent JS Oxford, and as well as having my mind expanded by both Jo and Ruth’s talks (Lemmings make an excellent analogy for multi-threading, who knew!), I gave a brief talk on the Indieweb movement.

If you’ve not heard of Indieweb movement before, it’s a push to encourage people to claim their own bit of the web, for their identity and content, free from corporate platforms. It’s not about abandoning those platforms, but ensuring that you have control of your content if something goes wrong.

From the Indieweb site:

Your content is yours

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

I’ve been interested in the Indieweb for a while, after attending IndieWebCamp Brighton in 2016, and I’ve been slowly implementing Indieweb features on here ever since.

So far I’ve added rel="me" attributes to allow distributed verification, and to enable Indieauth support, h-card to establish identity, and h-entry for information discovery. Behind the scenes I’m looking at webmentions (Thanks to Perch’s first class support), and there’s the ever-eternal photo management thing I keep picking up and then running away from.

The great thing about the Indieweb is that you can implement as much or as little as you want, and it always gives you something to work on. It doesn’t matter where you start. The act of getting your own domain is the first step on a longer journey.

To that end I’m interested in organising an IndieWebCamp Oxford this year. If this sounds like something that interests you, then come find me in the Digital Oxford Slack, or on Twitter.

Frank Chimero really nails something I’ve been feeling for a while now but have been unable to put into words (emphasis mine).

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to have). And the best way to help someone write markup is to make sure they can read markup.

Learning to code through reading source was how I get started. The first site I ever built is still out there thanks to archive.org, and I delight in showing the ramshackle beginnings of my career to new students at Codebar and Code First:Girls.

Frank continues (again, emphasis mine).

As someone who has decades of experience on the web, I hate to compare myself to the tortoise, but hey, if it fits, it fits. Let’s be more like that tortoise: diligent, direct, and purposeful. The web needs pockets of slowness and thoughtfulness as its reach and power continues to increase. What we depend upon must be properly built and intelligently formed. We need to create space for complexity’s important sibling: nuance.

Yes!

As Jeremy has said in Resilient Web Design:

Here’s a three‐step approach I take to web design:

1. Identify core functionality.
2. Make that functionality available using the simplest possible technology.
3. Enhance!

I continually go back to these three rules. I want to build things that others can learn from.

Last night I watched SpaceX launch Falcon Heavy and put their test payload (Elon Musk’s Tesla) into orbit. There were many highlights, not least the “Don’t Panic” on the Tesla’s dashboard, and the shot of a car in orbit around the earth, but for me, the synchronised landing of the outboard boosters sent a shiver up my spine. This was like something from the cover of the 70s science fiction novels I grew up with. It was balletic.

You can watch the full launch, deployment, and landing here.

Suzanne LaBarre of Co.Design has come up with an update of Dieter Rams Ten Principles for Good Design list for 2018: 10 New Principles Of Good Design.

Good Design Is Honest

This is one of Rams’s tenets, but it bears repeating at a time when dark patterns abound and corporations treat UX like a weapon. Uber is the most flagrant example. The company built its business on a seamless front-end user experience (hail a ride, without ever pulling out your wallet!) while playing puppet master with both users and drivers. The company’s fall from grace–culminating in CEO Travis Kalanick’s ousting last year–underscores the shortsightedness of this approach.

Good design “does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is,” Rams writes. “It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.”

Lots to think about and absorb going into 2018.

(via kottke.org)

Around this time last year I foolishly said

Well, the less said about the state of 2016 in general, the better.

… little did I know.

Thankfully it was another cracking year for music and cinema. So here are my top ten albums and films of 2017. Film was especially difficult to narrow down to ten.

Albums

• The August List - Ramshackle Tabernacle
• The Black Angels - Death Song
• Cigarettes After Sex - Cigarettes After Sex
• EMA - Exile In The Outer Ring
• Hanni El Khatib - Savage Times
• Kelala - Take Me Apart
• Loyle Carner - Yesterday’s Gone
• Mogwai - Every Country’s Sun
• The National - Sleep Well Beast
• St. Vincent - Masseduction

Films

(my full stats for 2017 can be seen on Letterboxd)

• Blade Runner 2049
• Colossal
• Free Fire
• Hidden Figures
• Logan
• The Love Witch
• A Monster Calls
• Paddington 2
• War for the Planet of the Apes
• Wonder Woman

The web is like the ship of Theseus—so much of it has been changed and added to over time. That doesn’t mean its initial design was flawed—just the opposite. It means that its initial design wasn’t unnecessarily rigid. The simplicity of the early web wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.

Jeremy Keith on the origins of the web and the false idea that it was designed solely for sharing documents.

Your website’s only as strong as the weakest device you’ve tested it on.

Ethan Marcotte

Difference between engineering and management: If you deploy bad code, you break production. If you deploy bad decisions, you break people.

— Katie Womersley (@katie_womers) 27 July 2017

I’ve been on a bit of a soundtrack binge recently. They’re great to work to (and at the same time pretending you’re a spaceship/dinosaur/shark). While listening to Michael Giacchino’s soundtrack for The Incredibles, I spotted the title of the last track: “The Incredits”.

Heh, punny.

Then I looked at a couple of his other albums.

• Inside Out: “The Joy of Credits”.
• Ratatouille: “End Creditouilles”

Wait, is this a thing?

It is a thing. In fact if you search for “michael giacchino puns” you get over 62k results back. My favourite has to be the alternate titles for Rogue One.