Links from 2010

Excellent presentation from Playful 2010.

I like this. "A quick note to say that I am really disappointed that you have still not paid me the [..] that I'm owed for the work I did for you. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot of money, but actually I think that this is more a matter of respect."

Syntax highlighting for self-hosted Wordpress.

Syntax highlighting using the 'SyntaxHighlighter Evolved' plug-in for self-hosted Wordpress installs.

This is probably where to begin.

Captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook [...] in a database you control, and makes it easy to search, sort, filter, export, and visualize in useful ways.

A small wrapper around LABjs to help use feature detection to load exactly the scripts that your user needs, not just all the scripts that you think they might need.

So here we're collecting all the shims, fallbacks, and polyfills in order to supplant html5 functionality in browsers that don't natively support them. The general idea is that: we, as developers, should be able to develop with the HTML5 apis, and scripts can create the methods and objects that should exist. Developing in this future-proof way means as users upgrade, your code doesn't have to change but users will move to the better, native experience cleanly.

Aside from choosing not to install tracking solutions that come with such a performance penalty (which is not always an option), your best option is to replace the default 500ms timeout in these scripts with something less obtrusive. 100ms is considered the threshold for what we perceive as instantaneous response.

Web UI for (batch) geocoding of UK postcodes with the (accurate!) Google Local Search API.

"This is a fork of the older iTerm project hosted on Sourceforge." Ooh, ooh.

Good stats. "If you’re using jQuery on a public-facing site, use the Google CDN to host it." But don't use latest version in production.

"If you want to make your websites ready for mobile, it’s best to combine <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> with width media queries. That will give your site the optimal width (as determined by the device vendor, who really ought to know), and your site will look the better for it."

Boo. True. Sad. Can't blame people for selling, mind.

Build your own multi-purpose mobile self-tracking application.

Very handy.

The choice is not between using media queries and creating a dedicated mobile site; the choice is between using media queries and doing nothing at all.

After reading this document, you should know what the PATH variable is, how to set it, and how to view the directories currently therein.

Souders' performance analysis of #newtwitter.

Basically, if your idea ends with “and then we drive traffic to it,” you’ve failed.

My plan for this project is to make my way down and back up Essex Road in Islington from number one to number 400-odd visiting every business along the way.

Raph Koster once said he became disillusioned with games because, after working to come up with a method to universally describe them, he realized that they're all basically math. And that's yet another reason why story games are so freaking cool - they aren't. (Well, technically they are, because the universe is math, but you know what I mean.) With D&D it's pretty easy to see through the story through to the underlying math. But with some of these story games, it's the story that matters - the math just pops up on occasion in service to the story, to resolve disagreements or escalate.

Last Wednesday, my life changed forever. I got an iPhone. I consider it the greatest thing to happen to the blind for a very long time, possibly ever. It offers unparalleled access to properly made applications, and changed my life in twenty-four hours. The iPhone only has one thing holding it back: iTunes. Nevertheless, I have fallen in love.

Fairly stunning cottage near Fowey, apparently hard to book (couple of years wait).

A graphical front-end for the distributed version control system Git and runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Coastal rings.

The secret to successful container planting.

UK independent record label people - please consider sending yr releases to the British Library Sound Archive -

Comparison table.

I'm not willing to accept that it's impossible to create a legitimately enjoyable game experience in the confines of the short attention span Facebook model, though. Scrabble, for example, lends itself perfectly to asynchronous, light, casual play (cf Scrabulous, Words with Friends). But it's legitimately fun at the same time. You're rewarded for imaginative approaches to solving problems. You can play with no skill or lots, but either way, you'll always find ways to get better. Most important: You're genuinely spending time with your friends. Sharing an experience that creates a memory. This is a big deal. This is missing from almost every other pseudo-social game.

Rather useful insights into browser usage.

A view-source and page info bookmarklet for mobile browsers

I'm game.

An A-Z Index of the Apple OS X command line

Tucked away near Angel.

Constructive criticism from the DjangoCon keynote (in the spirit of Cal's highly amusing "Why I Hate Django" from 2008).

Ooh, shortcut key! Worth trying just for that.

No longer open in Fowey. Bah.

One area where WPO needs more standardization is performance analysis. There are numerous performance analysis tools available, including Page Speed, YSlow, AOL Pagetest, MSFast, VRTA, and neXpert. There’s some commonality across these tools, but the differences are what’s noticeable. To get a thorough performance scrubbing, web developers have no choice but to run multiple tools and sift through the different results trying to find the most important recommendations. It would be better for developers to have a more standard way of analyzing performance across environments. The Page Speed SDK provides a path to achieve this.

"All of the 'heavy' agiles like Scrum have confused me: isn't agile about fundamentally less process and more flexibility? One can't serve two masters. Teams have to pick a point along the completely structured - completely flexible line. As far as I'm concerned, these flavors of agile are just wolves in sheep's clothing that allow existing waterfall autocrats to continue their reign under the guise of adopting 'agile.'" Amen to that. Use the parts that make sense, jettison the parts with large overheads and ideology. Be pragmatic.

Fangoria 2010 – Machine. Well done, gentlemen.