Tags: articles

Notes – David Bushell

David is on board. Who else?

I was having a discussion with some of my peers a little while back. We were collectively commenting on the state of education and documentation for front-end development.

A lot of the old stalwarts have fallen by the wayside of late. CSS Tricks hasn’t been the same since it got bought out by Digital Ocean. A List Apart goes through fallow periods. Even the Mozilla Developer Network is looking to squander its trust by adding inaccurate “content” generated by a large language model.

The most obvious solution is to start up a brand new resource for front-end developers. But there are two probems with that:

1. It’s really, really, really hard work, and
2. It feels a bit 927.

I actually think there are plenty of good articles and resources on front-end development being published. But they’re not being published in any one specific place. People are publishing them on their own websites.

Ahmed, Josh, Stephanie, Andy, Lea, Rachel, Robin, Michelle …I could go on, but you get the picture.

All this wonderful stuff is distributed across the web. If you have a well-stocked RSS reader, you’re all set. But if you’re new to front-end development, how do you know where to find this stuff? I don’t think you can rely on search, unless you have a taste for slop.

I think the solution lies not with some hand-wavey “AI” algorithm that burns a forest for every query. I think the solution lies with human curation.

I take inspiration from Phil’s fantastic project, ooh.directory. Imagine taking that idea of categorisation and applying it to front-end dev resources.

Whether it’s a post on web.dev, Smashing Magazine, or someone’s personal site, it could be included and categorised appropriately.

Now, there would still be a lot of work involved, especially in listing and categorising the articles that are already out there, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much work as trying to create those articles from scratch.

I don’t know what the categories should be. Does it make sense to have top-level categories for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with sub-directories within them? Or does it make more sense to categorise by topics like accessibility, animation, and so on?

And this being the web, there’s no reason why one article couldn’t be tagged to simultaneously live in multiple categories.

There’s plenty of meaty information architecture work to be done. And there’d be no shortage of ongoing work to handle new submissions.

A stretch goal could be the creation of “playlists” of hand-picked articles. “Want to get started with CSS grid layout? Read that article over there, watch this YouTube video, and study this page on MDN.”

What do you think? Does this one-stop shop of hyperlinks sound like it would be useful? Does it sound feasible?

I’m just throwing this out there. I’d love it if someone were to run with it.

Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational

A historical record of foundational web development blog posts.

Every one of these 42 articles are gold!

It warms my heart to see Resilient Web Design included in this list.

Accessibility for designer: where do I start? by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.

Stéphanie has gathered a goldmine of goodies:

Articles, resources, checklists, tools, plugins and books to design accessible products

12 Days of Web

All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.

The Proprietary Syndication Formats - Chris Coyier

Guess which format is going to outlast all these proprietary syndication formats. I’d say RSS, which I believe to be true, but really, it’s HTML.

Increment: Frontend

This month’s issue of Increment is all about front-end development. There are feaures from Lea Verou, Chris Coyier, Chris Lilley, Safia Abdalla, and more.

The Stacks Reader | A Treasure Trove of Classic Journalism

Digital preservation of dead-tree media:

The Stacks Reader is an online collection of classic journalism and writing about the arts that would otherwise be lost to history. Motivated less by nostalgia than by preservation, The Stacks Reader is a living archive of memorable storytelling—a museum for stories.

The Markup

A new online publication from Julia Angwin:

Big Tech Is Watching You. We’re Watching Big Tech.

…and they’re not going to track you.

In just over a week, I’ll be giving the opening talk at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I’ll be giving a workshop the day before too. There are still tickets available for both.

I have to admit, I’m kind of nervous about this talk. It’s been quite a while since the last New Adventures, but it’s always had quite the cachet. I think I went to most of them. It’s quite strange—and quite an honour—to shift gears from attendee to speaker.

The talk I’ll be giving is called Building. That might be a noun. That might be a verb. You decide:

Every new medium looks to what has come before for guidance. Web design has taken cues from centuries of typography and graphic design. Web development has borrowed metaphors and ideas from the world of architecture. Let’s take a tour of some of the most influential ideas from architecture that have crossed over into the web, from pattern languages to responsive design. Together we’ll uncover how to build resilient, performant, accessible and beautiful structures that work with the grain of the materials of the web.

This talk builds upon the talk I gave at last year’s An Event Apart called The Way Of The Web. It also reflects many of the ideas in Resilient Web Design. When I gave a run-through of the talk at Clearleft last week, Andy called it a “greatest hits.” For a while there, I was feeling guilty about retreading some ground I’ve covered in previous talks and writings. Then I realised it was pretty arrogant of me to think that anyone in the audience would be familiar with any of it.

Besides, I’ve got a whole new avenue of exploration in this talk. It’s about language and metaphor—how we talk about what we do on the web. I’ve just finished giving another run-through at the Clearleft studio and I’m feeling pretty good about it. That’s good, because I find that giving a talk in a small room to a handful of colleagues is way more stressful than giving a talk to hundreds of people at a conference.

Just as I put together links related to last year’s talk, I figured I’d provide some hyperlinks for anyone interested in the topics raised in this new talk…

Books

• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
• Creating Killer Websites by David Siegel
• Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockman
• 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick
• Architectural Intelligence by Molly Wright Steenson
• A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein with Ingrid King, Shlomo Angel and Max Jacobsen
• How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
• The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand

Articles

• A Dao Of Web Design by John Allsopp
• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
• Device Agnostic by Trent Walton
• The Work I Like by Ethan Marcotte

Audio

• Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language on Studio 360
• Molly Wright Steenson on Design Notes
• Quebec Bridge Collapse on the Brady Heywood Podcast

Your Interactive Makes Me Sick - Features - Source: An OpenNews project

Browsers have had consistent scrolling behavior for years, even across vendors and platforms. There’s an established set of physics, and if you muck with the physics, you can assume you’re making some people sick.

Guidelines to consider before adding swooshy parallax effects:

1. Respect the Physics
2. Remember that We Call Them “Readers”
3. Ask for Consent

Given all the work that goes into a powerful piece of journalism—research, interviews, writing, fact-checking, editing, design, coding, testing—is it really in our best interests to end up with a finished product that some people literally can’t bear to scroll through?

Voice Guidelines | Clearleft

I love what Ben is doing with this single-serving site (similar to my design principles collection)—it’s a collection of handy links and resources around voice UI:

Designing a voice interface? Here’s a useful list of lists: as many guiding principles as we could find, all in one place. List compiled and edited by Ben Sauer @bensauer.

BONUS ITEM: Have him run a voice workshop for you!

The Nature of Code

A web book with interactive code examples.

How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? This book focuses on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems using Processing.

When the news goes sideways – James Donohue – Medium

The BBC has been experimenting with some alternative layouts for some articles on mobile devices. Read on for the details, but especially for the philosophical musings towards the end—this is gold dust:

Even the subtext of Google’s marketing push around Progressive Web Apps is that mobile websites must aspire to be more like native apps. While I’m as excited about getting access to previously native-only features such as offline support and push notifications as the next web dev, I’m not sure that the mobile web should only try to imitate the kind of user interfaces that we see on native.

Do mobile websites really dream of being native apps, any more than they dreamt of being magazines?

I was idly thinking about the different ways I can post to adactio.com. I decided to count the ways.

Admin interface

This is the classic CMS approach. In my case the CMS is a crufty hand-rolled affair using PHP and MySQL that I wrote years ago. I log in to an admin interface and fill in a form, putting the text of my posts into a textarea. In truth, I usually write in a desktop text editor first, and then paste that into the textarea. That’s what I’m doing now—copying and pasting Markdown from the Typed app.

Directly from my site

If I’m logged in, I get a stripped down posting interface in the notes section of my site.

Bookmarklet

This is how I post links. When I’m at a URL I want to bookmark, I hit the “Bookmark it” bookmarklet in my browser’s bookmarks bar. That pops open a version of the admin interface tailored specifically for links. I really, really like bookmarklets. The one big downside is that they don’t work on mobile.

Text message

This is something I knocked together at Indie Web Camp Brighton 2015 using the Twilio API. It’s handy for posting notes if I’m travelling somewhere and data is at a premium. But I don’t use it that often.

Instagram

Thanks to Aaron’s OwnYourGram service—and the fact that my site has a micropub endpoint—I can post images from Instagram to my site. This used to happen instantaneously but Instagram changed their API rules for the worse. Between that and their shitty “algorithmic” timeline, I find myself using the service less and less. At this point I’m only on their for the doggos.

Swarm

Like OwnYourGram, Aaron’s OwnYourSwarm allows me to post check-ins and photos from the Swarm app to my site. Again, micropub makes it all possible.

OwnYourGram and OwnYourSwarm are very similar and could probably be abstracted into a generic service for posting from third-party apps to micropub endpoints. I’d quite like to post my check-ins on Untappd to my site.

Other people’s admin interfaces

Thanks to rel="me" and IndieAuth, I can log into other people’s posting interfaces using my own website as the log-in, and post to my micropub endpoint, like this. Quill is a good example of this. I don’t use it that much, but I really should—the editor interface is quite Medium-like in its design.

Anyway, those are the different ways I can update my website that I can think of right now.

Syndication

In terms of output, I’ve got a few different ways of syndicating what I post here:

• RSS feeds for my journal, links, articles, and notes.
• JSON feeds for my journal, links, articles, and notes.
• Twitter accounts for my journal, links, articles, and notes (that one is my main Twitter account).
• I syndicate most of my my photos to my Flickr account.
• I syndicate most of my journal posts and articles to my Medium account.
• I used to syndicate my links to my Delicious account but at some point that became fairly pointless.
• Whenever I post a link, The Internet Archive gets pinged and makes a copy for the wayback machine. Here’s an example of a recent link.
• I syndicate just about everything to my Facebook account using If This, Then That recipes (RSS to Facebook posts). Facebook is a roach motel. I never post any original content there—everything starts here on my site.

Just so you know, if you comment on one of my posts on Facebook, I probably won’t see it. But if you reply to a copy of one of posts on Twitter or Instagram, it will show up over here on adactio.com thanks to the magic of Brid.gy and webmention.

Article Performance Leaderboard

Oh, I like this! A leaderboard of news sites, ranked by performance.

I’d love to see something like this for just about every sector …including agency websites.

Mercury by Postlight

Readability is back, but now it’s called Mercury.

From WordPress to Apple News, Instant Articles, and AMP - The Media Temple Blog

Chris runs through the process and pitfalls of POSSEing a site (like CSS Tricks) to Apple’s News app, Facebook’s Instant Articles, and Google’s AMP.

Hey, whatever you want. As long as…

1. It’s not very much work
2. The content’s canonical home is my website.

I just want people to read and like CSS-Tricks.

Scroll Magazine, Edition 1

I wrote the foreword to this inaugural edition of Scroll Magazine which was published for the Respond conference down under. You can get your digital edition here, featuring interviews with Karen, Ethan, and Sara.

Journal of Design and Science

A new publication from MIT. It deliberately avoids the jargon that’s often part and parcel of peer-reviewed papers, and all of the articles are published under a Creative Commons attribution licence.

The first issue is dedicated to Marvin Minsky and features these superb articles, all of which are independently excellent but together form an even greater whole…

Design and Science by Joi Ito:

When the cybernetics movement began, the focus of science and engineering was on things like guiding a ballistic missile or controlling the temperature in an office. These problems were squarely in the man-made domain and were simple enough to apply the traditional divide-and-conquer method of scientific inquiry.

Science and engineering today, however, is focused on things like synthetic biology or artificial intelligence, where the problems are massively complex. These problems exceed our ability to stay within the domain of the artificial, and make it nearly impossible for us to divide them into existing disciplines.

Age of Entanglement by Neri Oxman:

This essay proposes a map for four domains of creative exploration—Science, Engineering, Design and Art—in an attempt to represent the antidisciplinary hypothesis: that knowledge can no longer be ascribed to, or produced within, disciplinary boundaries, but is entirely entangled.

Design as Participation by Kevin Slavin:

The designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated systems. These are designers that do not understand themselves to be in the center of the system. Rather, they understand themselves to be participants, shaping the systems that interact with other forces, ideas, events and other designers. This essay is an exploration of what it means to participate.

The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement by Danny Hillis:

As our technological and institutional creations have become more complex, our relationship to them has changed. We now relate to them as we once related to nature. Instead of being masters of our creations, we have learned to bargain with them, cajoling and guiding them in the general direction of our goals. We have built our own jungle, and it has a life of its own.