Links

My favorite design tool. — Ethan Marcotte

“What if someone doesn’t browse the web like I do?”

Picular

A search engine for colours.

How to Build a Low-tech Website?

This is fascinating! A website that’s fast and nimble, not for performance reasons, but to reduce energy consumption. It’s using static files, system fonts and dithered images. And no third-party scripts.

Thanks to a low-tech web design, we managed to decrease the average page size of the blog by a factor of five compared to the old design – all while making the website visually more attractive (and mobile-friendly). Secondly, our new website runs 100% on solar power, not just in words, but in reality: it has its own energy storage and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather.

Ping! That’s the sound of my brain going “service worker!”

I’ve sent them an email offering my help.

ColorBox by Lyft Design

I don’t really understand what this colour tool is doing or what it’s for, but I like it.

The State of Fieldset Interoperability - Bocoup

The long-standing difficulties of styling fieldset and legend are finally getting addressed …although I’m a little shocked that the solution involves extending -webkit-appearance. I think that, at this point, we should be trying to get rid of vendor prefixes from the web once and for all, not adding to them. Still, needs must, I suppose.

Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited

Art, geometry, and code. Sol LeWitt started it. Rob saw it through.

Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou

Procedurally generated medieval town plans. Pick a size and then have some fun with the “warp” option.

Salty JavaScript analogy - HankChizlJaw

JavaScript is like salt. If you add just enough salt to a dish, it’ll help make the flavour awesome. Add too much though, and you’ll completely ruin it.

How To Kill Your Tech Industry

I’m currently making my way through Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks. In that book and in this article, she describes how Britain squandered its lead in the field of computing through indemic sexism. There’s also the remarkable story of Dame Stephanie Shirley.

Hyperlight

Another great sci-fi short film from Dust.

Good Tech Conf | Using technology for social good

This looks like a really interesting two-day event here in Brighton in November. Like Indie Web Camp, it features one day of talks followed by one day of making.

After a day of tech talks from project teams using their skills for social good, you’ll have the chance to take part in workshops and hackathons to use your own talents for a worthy cause.

And you get to go up the i360.

The costs and benefits of tracking scripts – business vs. user // Sebastian Greger

I am having a hard time seeing the business benefits weighing in more than the user cost (at least for those many organisations out there who rarely ever put that data to proper use). After all, keeping the costs low for the user should be in the core interest of the business as well.

HTML elements, unite! The Voltron-like powers of combining elements. | CSS-Tricks

This great post by Mandy ticks all my boxes! It’s a look at the combinatorial possibilities of some of the lesser-known HTML elements: abbr, cite, code, dfn, figure, figcaption, kbd, samp, and var.

RevAMP. — Ethan Marcotte

I’m heartened to see that Google’s moving to make the AMP format more open. But this new governance model doesn’t change the underlying, more fundamental issues: specifically, Google’s use of its market dominance to broaden AMP’s adoption, and to influence the direction of a more decentralized and open web.

Winston Hearn | What’s best for users

The incentives that Google technology created were very important in the evolution of this current stage of the web. I think we should be skeptical of AMP because once again a single company’s technology – the same single company – is creating the incentives for where we go next.

A thorough examination of the incentives that led to AMP, and the dangers of what could happen next:

I’m not sure I am yet willing to cede the web to a single monopolized company.

Your Public Library Is Where It’s At + Subtraction.com

Fuck yeah, libraries!

Even more radically, your time at the library comes with absolutely no expectation that you buy anything. Or even that you transact at all. And there’s certainly no implication that your data or your rights are being surrendered in return for the services you partake in.

This rare openness and neutrality imbues libraries with a distinct sense of community, of us, of everyone having come together to fund and build and participate in this collective sharing of knowledge and space. All of that seems exceedingly rare in this increasingly commercial, exposed world of ours. In a way it’s quite amazing that the concept continues to persist at all.

And when we look at it this way, as a startlingly, almost defiantly civilized institution, it seems even more urgent that we make sure it not only continues to survive, but that it should also thrive, too.

Color Leap - History’s Palettes

Colour palettes throughout the ages that you can copy and use.

CSS dismissal is about exclusion, not technology

As a community, we love to talk about meritocracy while perpetuating privilege.

This is playing out in full force in the front-end development community today.

Front-end development is a part of the field that has historically been at least slightly more accessible to women.

Shockingly, (not!) this also led to a salary and prestige gap, with back-end developers making on average almost $30,000 more than front-end.

(Don’t read the comments.)

Breaking the Deadlock Between User Experience and Developer Experience · An A List Apart Article

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Our efforts to measure and improve UX are packed with tragically ironic attempts to love our users: we try to find ways to improve our app experiences by bloating them with analytics, split testing, behavioral analysis, and Net Promoter Score popovers. We stack plugins on top of third-party libraries on top of frameworks in the name of making websites “better”—whether it’s something misguided, like adding a carousel to appease some executive’s burning desire to get everything “above the fold,” or something truly intended to help people, like a support chat overlay. Often the net result is a slower page load, a frustrating experience, and/or (usually “and”) a ton of extra code and assets transferred to the browser.

Even tools that are supposed to help measure performance in order to make improvements—like, say, Real User Monitoring—require you to add a script to your web pages …thereby increasing the file size and degrading performance! It’s ironic, in that Alanis Morissette sense of not understanding what irony is.

Stacking tools upon tools may solve our problems, but it’s creating a Jenga tower of problems for our users.

This is a great article about evaluating technology.

On using tracking scripts | justmarkup

Weighing up the pros and cons of adding tracking scripts to a website, from a business perspective and from a user perspective.

When looking at the costs versus the benefits it is hard to believe that almost every website is using tracking scripts.

The next time, you implement a tracking script it would be great if you could rethink it and ask yourself if it is really worth it.