DP Review/Connect: 500px redesigns online photo portfolios.
Some good moves … but take note of this in particular: “Users will see a price increase along with the new offerings: Plus accounts jump slightly to $25 per year (up from $19.95) while Awesome accounts will be priced at $75 per year (up from $49.95). However, you can avoid the increase now by purchasing or renewing your account membership before May 1, 2013.”
99U: Own What You Write.
“What you say matters …” Is this like ‘every vote counts’?
Baghdad Burning (Riverbendblog) is back.
If you hadn’t seen it elsewhere.
Elezea: Responsive design vs. Separate mobile sites.
Hmmph. I perform actions on mobile phones. Simple actions. I don’t read on them. If something requires a read, I clip to Pocket and check it out on a desktop later. A tablet? Depends on the layout of the interface. Just as for social media, I believe the desktop/blog is the necessary discursive resource. At least until tablet app design takes a chill pill. YMMV.
Github: helium-css.
Finds unused CSS selectors.
Inspired Magazine: Beating RSS Overload.
Ghost in the Machine: Don’t Sleep on Second Sleep.
TimeJump: Deep linking for Podcasts.
You podcasters (and musicians?) should like this.
kahunaburger: Bye, Bye Adobe – Hello Aquacue.
Best of luck with your new gig, Tobias!
Thanks to Craig and Erin, my archives are a bit better today.
Two missing posts from my archives are restored thanks to some good ETP and Weblogger.com pals.
My original emails to Craig Jensen of Booknotes about the start of 2000’s devastating Cerro Grande fire are back in my archives. May 10, and May 11. Both Craig and Erin Clerico (of Weblogger.com) worked to restore these, after I needed to reference them for a friend who specializes in social media + emergency management. Thank you both, from the bottom of my blog-heart. I also restored the original links to the new Booknotes WP install as well. Can’t hurt to have multiple sources.
I believe this was the first time a solo on-the-spot blogger tried to deal with a huge natural emergency. I can’t say I did well, compared to what’s being done nowadays. I was more concerned with conveying the feeling, rather than a list of resources and services. [And I was scared spitless, too, worried about the nuclear materials at Los Alamos and the dense clouds of choking smoke, planning how to escape if the time came to evacuate.] I knew my audience was national and not local, New Mexico being a blog ghost-town at the time, so I tailored the message to my audience.
Anyway, they’re back, for anyone who wanted to reference them. Cerro Grande and 9/11 tend to be the only sections of my archives that get used these days, so it’s great to have them back in place.
NationalJournal: The New House Republican Web Strategy—Just Add BuzzFeed.
Putting a new skin on the Same Old Platform. Again.
Gizmodo: The World’s First Webcam Was Created to Check a Coffee Pot.
Everything old is new again. Perhaps I should just start reposting out of my archives. How many times has this resurfaced in the last fourteen years?
Stats.
A link from Greenland. Holy crap.
Of interest, WP and Tumblr folks.
Writers, in specific. Draftin.com.
Continuing blog redesign thoughts.
You know, rather than a continuous flow (see the bottom of this page, over 1,000 ‘pages’ of info), I’d rather dig through my blog by days. All posts for a specific day on one page. What do you think? Damned lazy to do it otherwise. Searching takes care of the specifics, but I want the date-context.
Likely Service Disruption - Tumblr status.
Down. At the moment. Just FYI.
7:45PM, back up.
Peachpit: Troubleshooting iCloud, Part 1.
Tom Negrino’s got a good article up about iCloud (two parts).
Daniël van der Winden: Decreasing the time I spend online.
A different philosophy for dealing with RSS and Google Reader’s demise: “The posts that are definitely worth reading will reach us anyway.”
Goodreads/Amazon.
I suspect we’re nearing the breaking point of putting tons of personal effort into free web services. Did you really intend for all your hard work on Goodreads to end up in the hands of Amazon? I’ll bet not. Export it out as a CSV and stuff it someplace on your website. If you use Expression Engine, there’s a nifty plugin called DataGrab that would allow you to shove it directly into the database. Set up your template pages, channel and channel fields … do the import … and you’re good to go. And you can keep on keepin’ on, while controlling your own content.
I’d been feeling bad that I hadn’t used Goodreads enough. Now I’m glad I didn’t.
Life Advice from Machines.
Inspirational images and quotes from … wait for it … instruction manuals.
Shift - Episode 005.
Good. Not quite applicable to the size of my clientele, but some beneficial ideas were spurred. Primarily, develop and interate faster. It’s hard to keep up with the tech world. For my bigger projects, oftentimes I have to slap my own hands not to alter elements just before rollout because some tech has changed. I’ve already been rethinking workflow — this just adds impetus.
Usabilla: Interview with Jesse James Garrett, Author Of The Elements of User Experience.
Salesmanship, indeed. Telling a rich and compelling story. Good points, and ones I’ve only recently come to appreciate. Cameron Barrett brought up storytelling a few months ago, and I’ve begun to incorporate it more. A great, thoughtful interview. JJG, I applaud that you pause to think before answering. I am tired of rapid-fire answers that give no enlightenment.
My personal observation, as a person who bridges design and programming, is to subtly ‘vet’ an audience. In casual conversation, prior to getting down to the nitty-gritty, one can be skillful in picking up the cues necessary (listen for familiar phrases and metaphors) to communicate important information in a way the other party understands and accepts. A techno-empathetic response, I suppose … to get all Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner for a moment. You’ve got to do it frequently to do it well, and when folks work on only a few projects a year, many don’t get that needed experience to build the reflexes required. That’s why I liked the ‘salesmanship’ comment. I dislike salespeople as a species, but the concept of staying light and positive over a deep subject to a non-technical audience resonates. A team can practice that even over a coffee break.
And watch out for the dreaded swamp of over-educating; one of my great downfalls. You can imagine the look on a client’s face as I unnecessarily delve into LESS vs Sass. I ask myself before meetings now — “What do they really need to know to make a good decision here?” — and try to not step a toe beyond. Oftentimes, a simple “these are your options, this is what I recommend” is enough. I leave links and documentation so the client can dig deeper in their own way, in their own time.
The other problem is the non-technical person all too often thinks recommendations are guarantees. That’s a whole ‘nother conversation, for another time.
AdobeTV: The History (and Future) of Rotoscoping in After Effects.
Synchronicity. I was, just the other day, reminiscing about CoSA and AE vs. 1 with Splorp in a larger conversation about dongles.
RSS feedwhacking.
Went through my feeds last night, for about an hour. Ashamed to say I had defunct feeds that stopped posting as far back as ‘07. Nice and clean, all shiny now. Any new feed readers should generate a monthly report on which feeds have been inactive. Perhaps flag them in the list with color-coding, yellow for 3 months inactive, red for six months inactive, etc.
What, no sunset in the background?
I’m going to rejig the place a bit. Just wanted to see how it affected my load times if I dumped that huge image file. This is by no means a final color or anything else. Thinking about RWD, rather than JQuery Mobile. Patience, my people, will be rewarded.
