Planet Chris

Posts from interesting people from today, yesterday, and the day before.

Today — Thu, 09 Sep 2010

Now that Apple has made it possible to create Safari Extensions I’ve been looking for some useful ones. After searching the Web a bit and browsing Apple’s Safari Extensions Gallery, these are the ones I have installed: AdBlock for Safari: Blocks ads (and prevents ad code from being downloaded) Type-To-Navigate: Lets you highlight and follow links without taking your hands off the keyboard. Type any text that occurs inside a link and then hit return to follow the link. BetterSource: ...

As California goes, so goes the nation?

O'Reilly Radar

How will the most populous state in the nation move forward with digital elections? When California secretary of state Debra Bowen endorsed open source voting systems at yesterday's Gov 2.0 Summit, the validation naturally struck many people in O'Reilly's community as significant, given the size and prominence of the Golden State in the world. "Open source election software saves us a ton of money, and can be re-used in other states," she said. Bowen's interview with Tim O'Reilly at Gov ...

Pages now exports to ePub

Jeffrey Zeldman

Listen up, desktop ePublishers! Apple’s iWork 9.0.4 update gives Pages the ability to export to ePub format, for use in Stanza, iBooks, or any standard ePub reader. The update is free. ...

Bear In Woods Or Prairie Dog Ecosystem

Robert Hansen

13 posts left… The post I did a few days ago apparently resonated with a lot of people. So I decided to do a quick follow up. If a true ecosystem is not like two guys being chased by a bear in the woods, what is it like? I think the closest real life analogy I can come up with is the humble prairie dog. This is not a hero most people want to liken themselves to, typically. It’s more vermin than role model. But one thing is undeniable - they are a tremendously successful spe...

Strata Week: Money, mayhem, and media

O'Reilly Radar

Welcome to the second weekly edition of our data blog! You may have noticed that we've decided to change our name to "Strata Week." This is in keeping with the name of our upcoming data conference as well as our ideas about where the world of data is headed (think myriad layers that can be mined, and large, cloud-filled heavens to explore). Thanks to those of you who have sent in suggestions so far; we hope you'll keep 'em coming. Mint goes on a data spree Intuit's Mint personal financ...

Upcoming Web Design and Development Conferences in 2010

Smashing Magazine

At the end of last year, we published a comprehensive list of web design and development conferences that might be of interest to Smashing Magazine’s diverse readership. Many readers commented and added links to other conferences and events that weren’t listed, some of which were added to the post. Using the contents of that list along with some other sources, we’ve compiled a list of web design and development-related conferences and events that will be taki...

Create a Sticky Note Effect in 5 Easy Steps with CSS3 and HTML5

Ajaxian

Our very own Christian Heilmann has posted a tutorial on creating a fancy sticky note effect using CSS3 and HTML5: He breaks it down in five easy steps to produce the final following demo: ...

Four short links: 9 September 2010

O'Reilly Radar

CloudUSB -- a USB key containing your operating environment and your data + a protected folder so nobody can access you data, even if you lost the key + a backup program which keeps a copy of your data on an online disk, with double password protection. (via ferrouswheel on Twitter) FCC APIs -- for spectrum licenses, consumer broadband tests, census block search, and more. (via rjweeks70 on Twitter) Sibyl: A system for large scale machine learning (PDF) -- paper from Google researchers on h...

OAuthypocrisy and the Passwordpocalypse

Jeremy Keith

The OAuthcalypse is upon us. Since August 31st, all third-party Twitter services must use OAuth to authenticate. This is a good thing; a very good thing. Before that date, services were allowed to use the password anti-pattern to log you in. Twitter has put its foot down and declared that the password anti-pattern will no longer be tolerated. Hurrah! What a shame then, that Twitter is being utterly hypocritical. On their Find Friends page, they encourage you to: Scan your email address...

Cookie Expiration

Robert Hansen

14 posts left… Day 1 at the OWASP conference in Irvine. Lots of good people here, and tons of good conversations. Talking with Jeremiah from Whitehat and Sid Stamm from Mozilla reminded me that I wanted to talk about cookie expiration. I’m only talking for myself here, and not the average user - but I really dislike the concept of persistent cookies. If I wanted something to persist, I wouldn’t use sandboxes, and violently and regularly clean my cookies by hand. Yet still ...

The saddest social software interface evar. [Flickr]

Chris Messina

factoryjoe posted a photo:

Yesterday — Wed, 08 Sep 2010

Five years of Authentic Jobs

Roger Johansson

This month Authentic Jobs turns five years old. I’ve been a member and listing partner (look in the sidebar for job listings from Authentic Jobs if you’re reading this on 456bereastreet.com) since early 2007, so I haven’t been along for the entire ride, but long enough to have seen this job board evolve and grow plenty. I have also seen how hard Cameron Moll works to keep Authentic Jobs current and fresh. Anyway, the fifth birthday is celebrated by a campaign to raise money – USD 20...

Civic Commons code-sharing initiative bids to reduce government IT costs

O'Reilly Radar

Around the United States, city governments have created a multitude of software. Unfortunately, most of the time the code from those projects is not shared between municipalities, which results in duplication of effort and redundant, static software. Civic Commons, launched today at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, is aimed squarely at helping city governments share the software they've developed. Civic Commons is the product of the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technology Off...

Episode 19: Beyond Usability with Aarron Walter

Jeffrey Zeldman

Designer Aarron Walter guests on Thursday’s episode of The Big Web Show, co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and taped before a live internet audience. Aarron is the author of one of my favorite web design books, Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008). It’s the book that explains the connection between “search engine optimization” and good, accessible, semantic markup. (Buy your clients a copy.) He works as the lead user...

O'Reilly ebook bundles now include DAISY talking book format

O'Reilly Radar

For years we've supplied our digital files to Bookshare, a non-profit that provides accessible reading material to the print disabled. For qualifying readers, our books are made available worldwide, and we've really enjoyed working with Jim Fruchterman and the Bookshare team along the way (I'm also on their Advisory Board). Although the DRM-free EPUB files in our ebook bundles are compatible with many reading systems for print disabled customers, many readers prefer the DAISY format that Boo...

Better, faster, cheaper ... emergent

O'Reilly Radar

Carl Malamud gave the opening keynote at the Government 2.0 Summit yesterday and greatly magnified my disappointment at having missed the event. If you've seen Carl speak, you know he is one person on the agenda that won't give a "presentation" or a "talk." Carl is an orator from a different era. He gives speeches. Rousing, moving, elevating speeches that turn our shared history into a kind of sermon; that inform us and inspire our better angels in equal measure. This is the kind of spee...

dConstruct workshop

Simon Collison

Last week I ran a workshop for twenty-seven people at dConstruct, entitled Defining A Flexible Process. It was a real honour to be invited to put this together by my friends at Clearleft, and to once again visit that odd place they call Brighton.

Sensor networks and the future of forecasting

O'Reilly Radar

We can't control the climate, but are there ways to mitigate and avoid the negative effects extreme weather brings? I believe the starting point for potential solutions lies in data acquisition and environmental sensor networks (ESN). Current technologies and sensors, ranging from cell phones to satellites, allow a "global environmental cyberinfrastructure" to be more than a topic for discussion at academic conferences. Researchers have studied connections and system interactions for some ...

Designing and Producing Creative Business Cards: Techniques and Details

Smashing Magazine

Plenty of creative business card showcases are available out there. Many of these are beautifully done and well thought out, and they serve as inspiration for those who would like their business card to be more than the standard rectangular piece of paper. Yet little explanation accompanies these examples, and figuring out just how to bring your idea to life can be overwhelming, to say the least. This guide is meant to help you decide which technique is right for you, how to c...

Offline: What does it mean and why should I care?

Ajaxian

[CC-A by Anomalous4] Michael Mahemoff has posted an extremely in-depth tutorial on HTML5Rocks on the subject of offline web apps: Introduction: The Meaning of “Offline” Application Cache and Offline Storage Older Offline Storage Techniques Cookies Plugin Based Storage Browser-specific features Offline Storage in the Era of HTML5 Web Storage Web SQL Database IndexedDB File API How to Use the Offline Technologies Storing miscellaneous data Storing binary data Ensuring the ...

Four short links: 8 September 2010

O'Reilly Radar

Alpha Draft of Mozilla Public License v2 Out -- The highlight of this release is new patent language, modeled on Apache’s. We believe that this language should give better protection to MPL-using communities, make it possible for MPL-licensed projects to use Apache code, and be simpler to understand. (via webmink on Twitter) Challenge.gov -- contest-like environment for solving problems. Not all are glowing examples of government innovation: $12,000 for healthy recipes for kids--this...

On Exceptions

Rob Allen

I've been reading the Proposal for Exceptions in ZF2 and like it. One thing that caught my attention was that it suggests that you can catch an interface. I hadn't heard of that ability before, so I pulled out my trusty text editor to have a play. Consider this code: <?php namespace My; interface ExceptionInterface {} class SplExceptionClass extends InvalidArgumentException implements ExceptionInterface {} class...

.net awards 2010

Jon Hicks

This year, I again have the pleasure to play god and cast my judgement over 16 categories in the .net awards, celebrating the best in web design and development. Sadly, they haven’t added a ‘Best bowler hatter avatar’ category yet, otherwise I’d be SO in there. If you haven’t done so yet, go and vote! ...

The Day Before — Tue, 07 Sep 2010

How is your Time Porfolio? Staying Healthy and Sane in Tech

Dion Almaer

I really enjoyed reading Alex discuss staying healthy at a startup and his quest for balance. I am going through a similar journey myself, and it isn’t easy! I seem to be going through a cycle (often recursively) of: Measure Plan Execute. I don’t have a lot to offer the space. There are a ton of books on the subject, and I am far from a master, but here are thoughts that I have been having as I watch my own progress: Measure I have a tendency to jump into things and want to fi...

WebPagetest and PageSpeed join up via PageSpeed SDK

Ajaxian

Steve Souders just pointed me to the great news that two great open source performance projects are working well together: Pat Meenan just blogged about Page Speed results now available in Webpagetest. This is a great step toward greater consistency in the world of web performance, something that benefits developers and ultimately benefits web users. The Page Speed SDK gives a path for folks to unify behind standard performance metrics and results. Great work! ...

Perpetual IRC – The Multiplexer Edition

Joël Perras

As is the case with most people involved in Open Source, I’m on IRC all day long. I can help people from around the world use some of the projects I’ve helped create, as well as some of the software that I use on a daily basis. Additionally, IRC is also the preferred form of group communication for the company I work for. One of the major advantages that IRC has over your ‘traditional’ instant messenger clients is that, with a minimum amount of effort and hardware, you can cr...

Showcase of Interesting Navigation Designs

Smashing Magazine

Everyone is always looking for interesting and effective ways to organize their website and allow users to move about and find things. But there’s a fine line between unexpected and unusable. Three points to consider in any navigation scheme are consistency, user expectations and contextual clues.If page is long and provides different levels of navigation, will users be able to find their way through the site and use proper navigation quickly? Forcing visitors to use certain...

The state of mapping APIs

O'Reilly Radar

Guest blogger Adam DuVander is the author of "Map Scripting 101," an example-driven guide to building interactive maps on multiple platforms. He also serves as executive editor of ProgrammableWeb. Maps took over the web in mid-2005, shortly after the first Where 2.0 conference. They quickly moved from fancy feature to necessary element of any site that contained even a trace of geographic content. Today we're amidst another location and mapping revolution, with mobile making its impact on...

ALA 313: CS, CMS, H&J, OK!

Jeffrey Zeldman

In Issue No. 313 of A List Apart for people who make websites: Better content management systems start with content strategy; typographically beauteous web pages may benefit from hyphenation and justification. Strategic Content Management by JONATHAN KAHN Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the proj...

TinySrc: Free Easy Way to Reformat Graphics for Mobile Devices

Ajaxian

If you're working with mobile browsers tinySrc will dynamically scale your images down to the right size on the server side: PLAIN TEXT HTML: http://i.tinysrc.mobi/http://mysite.com/myimage.png To use, you simply prefix the URL to your image with a pointer to tinysrc: PLAIN TEXT HTML: <img src='http://i.tinysrc.mobi/http://mysite.com/myimage.png' alt='My image' /> tinySrc will then do the magic for you: Unless you tell it otherwise, tinySrc will resize the image to...

dConstruct 2010

Jeremy Keith

Well, what a week that was! The start of September is dConstruct time here in Brighton—one of the focal points of Clearleft’s calendar. Things get hectic in the office in the days and weeks beforehand. Then Brighton becomes the centre of web geekdom for a few days. Things got rolling with a few workshops, one of which this year was my HTML5 For Web Designers workshop. I think it went pretty well. A funny thing happened after the workshop… I was walking from the workshop venue (Light...

Four short links: 7 September 2010

O'Reilly Radar

GalaxyZoo for Climate Science? -- GalaxyZoo is the crowdsourced physics research. A group of climate scientists want the same, to help predict "weather events". See also the Guardian article. (via adw_tweets on Twitter) Crispian's Science Map -- gorgeous Underground-style map showing scientists and their contributions. (via arjenlentz on Twitter) Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (Ted Dziuba) -- opinionated piece, but boils down to "keep it simple until you can't", and "the more yo...

The Look That Says Book

A List Apart

Hyphenation and justification: It’s not just for print any more. Armed with good taste, a special unicode font character called the soft hyphen, and a bit o’ JavaScript jiggery, you can justify and hyphenate web pages with the best of them. Master the zero width space. Use the Hyphenator.js library to bottle fame, brew glory, and put a stopper in death. Create web pages that hyphenate and justify on the fly, even when the layout reflows in response to changes in viewport size.

Strategic Content Management

A List Apart

Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after w...

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