Links from 2012

Now that we’re seeing wide-scale adoption of front-end optimization best practices, misapplication of these best practices could be delivering “false positives” — sites that test well but look bad for real users.

We will deliver a bike to you wherever and whenever you want it, then come and collect it when you're finished.

Every development project, no matter how complex, should have a repeatable, predictable (preferably scripted) new developer project bootstrap.

Style guides (or pattern libraries) are the perfect place to start a website build and a modular base. They bridge the gap between design and development. They’re somewhat similar to a traditional brand guidelines but contain less fluff & nonsense and 100% practical code examples.

CSS has an underlying design and when you work with it, with the natural flow of how CSS is meant to be used, you will find you have a lot less bugs.

Impressive. Expensive.

We'll also be retiring some less popular labs over the next few days: [...] Hide Unread Counts [...]

*cries*

Co-working in Brixton.

"We are living in a world of accelerating addictiveness and increasingly I think the only way (likely lonely, squirming, and eccentric as Paul alludes) we'll "get things done" is the continuous directed practice and improvement of willpower, productivity, flow, and exercising thereof."

Loosely, the single responsibility principle states that every module or chunk of code (a function etc) should do one job well and one job only. The benefits of this are mainly in the way of maintainability and extensibility. If we don’t adhere to the SRP then we are likely to end up with code which does more than it should, this means that altering one part of that code could negatively impact a seemingly unrelated part of the same snippet.

In-law saver.

Sentiment building. "We're now at the stage where we should be getting the next wave of disruptive surprises. But – guess what? – they're nowhere to be seen. Instead, we're getting an endless stream of incremental changes and me-tooism. If I see one more proposal for a photo-sharing or location-based web service, anything with "app" in it, or anything that invites me to "rate" something, I'll scream."

Worth it. Overdue. Helps explain noticeable burn-out type feelings. "There are organizing principles for what is considered a "good" idea. These ideas are supposed to be the right size and shape. There is a default spreadsheet that we expect ideas to fit onto. But maybe it's time that changed."

Must remember. "Which is better: mylogo.1.2.gif or mylogo.gif?v=1.2? To gain the benefit of caching by popular proxies, avoid revving with a querystring and instead rev the filename itself."

Sigh.

Reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, get a digest with what everyone has done.

Unlimited storage, simple version control, team collaboration

@getify @smashingmag About pixels vs ems in media-queries: http://t.co/YqcC8tpw #fronttrends Spoiler: use ems!

"Manage your [JS] dependencies in a Library Agnostic way". Clever-looking localStorage stuff.

"Ditch media="print" if you have one! (Hey why isn't this a yslow/pagespeed rule?). Ditch it because in the best case scenario it will only block onload. In the worst case it will block initial paint, onload and DOMContentLoaded. Sitting in front of a white page with no feedback is the worst possible user experience."

"find lets you do anything from finding all your .jpg files to seeing "all of Michael's text documents that have the execute bit set and have been modified since yesterday." And when combined with exec or xargs, a properly constructed command can make quick work of some very heavy tasks."

"Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes." As recommended by Matthew Somerville.

Simple dynamic site generator with standardised templating tools: certainly looks nice for building those early-stage prototypes before you need a full backend.

Not revolutionary but solid. Some moderately contentious parts.

Now that we have a great choice of fonts that can be used on websites, it becomes clear that the translation of a design into pixels is not something that happens naturally or consistently. OS makers apply different strategies to render how typefaces are displayed, and these have evolved greatly over time (and still continue to do so). As we now look closer at fonts on screen more than ever before, we realize that the rendering of these glyphs can differ significantly between systems and font formats. What’s more, it has become clear that even well-designed fonts may not look right on Windows if they are missing one crucial added ingredient: hinting.

"Real-world connection simulator and bandwidth limiter." Very handy.

"The problem is that once you send HTTP headers for really aggressive caching (i.e. cache me for a week or a year or forever), these files aren't ever reliably loaded from the server any more and you can't make changes/fixes to them because things will break in people's browsers.

So, what companies have to do is stage these changes and actually change the URLs of all of these files to force people's browsers to reload them. Cycling through domains like "a.imwx.com", "b.imwx.com" etc. is how this gets done.

By using a nonsense domain name, the Javascript developers and their Javascript sysadmin/CDN liaison counterparts can have their own domain name/DNS that they're pushing these changes through, that they're accountable/autonomous for.

Then, if any sort of cookie-blocking or script-blocking starts happening on the TLD, they just change from one nonsense TLD to kyxmlek.com or whatever. They don't have to worry about accidentally doing something evil that has countermeasure side effects on all of *.google.com."

"You can see, in other words, the whole of London, until now an unencompassable splodge that could last have been captured in a single view perhaps 200 years ago, to its perimeter and beyond. Close to, familiar and not-small objects, such as the Gherkin and HMS Belfast, look like large toys. It is both implausible and real, something well-known seen from an unprecedented place. It's hard to know what to do except gawp." Open the public viewing galleries already!

The Exe Estuary in south Devon makes a perfect base for a car-free holiday. The train from London will get you to Exeter in just over two hours. From here it's a 25-minute journey on the Avocet Line – a handy local rail service which runs alongside the River Exe – to the pretty village of Lympstone, where there's a good choice of holiday houses for hire.

So what happens in those meetings? Are they brainstorming earth-shattering new ideas? Are they inventing new products? Why are they getting paid to join so many of them? [...] Let’s take a look at some of those meetings: Strategy reviews, deep dives, virtual coffee breaks, quarterly off-sites, monthly get-togethers, director summits, leadership meetings, etc.

"A free, open source solution for creating github repositories from the commandline avoid the usual copy and paste." Needs lots of work.