Links from 2013

<blockquote>A quick overview of [BBC News] strategy for delivering images into a responsive web page.</blockquote>

<blockquote>With some archival photography, a good eye for a camera angle and some solid Photoshopping, Redditor Drewsta1987 created these excellent then-and-now images of the Highbury and Newington Green area.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Web developers don’t have much control over connection speeds and browser optimizations, but they can control the size of their pages. Unfortunately, page weight continues to increase.</blockquote>

Ho hum.

<blockquote>The idea is our editor, tools etc will all live on a virtual machine, in which we’ll also setup our application environment - databases, services etc. We can then develop features using the precise environment we have in production, reusing the production scripts.</blockquote>

Another data point. Not sure I agree with editing in the VM, though.

<blockquote>The service line is the part that scares advertising agencies. It’s associated with building products, which potentially puts them in competition with their clients who, after all, are the ones who actually make things. Those services can create deeper, more meaningful experiences that solve different needs and produce a different kind of brand relationship. It’s also, because of that organisational drag, horrendously difficult.

[...]

Product people know this. Startup people know this. Most advertising people do not, as yet, know this.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A [work-in-progress] self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I have a new idea on how we might be able to define responsive image breakpoints that is based on a performance budget. Before I begin, I should note that a lot of this is a thought experiment. I don’t yet know how practical this approach would be.</blockquote>

Sob.

<blockquote>For a while I've been looking for a more fluid toolkit for rapidly developing and iterating static sites. I have three use cases in mind: client html mockups with rapid iterations or slight variations, maintaining the static client sites that I have in the stable, and hacking on my own site. In each of these cases, dealing with databases, CMSs, versioning, or directories of HTML files was either too heavy, too slow, or both. </blockquote>

<blockquote>A definitive list of tools for generating static websites.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Thatcherism left Britain politically, economically and regionally divided, a state that was meant to be proud that it stood for something in the world again, even as Thatcherism warned that the state was the enemy of freedom and not to be relied upon. No one could bring in change of the shape, speed and size that Thatcher did, and not expect any flaws or problems to emerge. To say that she's responsible for the country's recent triumphs, but not for any of its woes, defies all logic.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Ana­lyzes 150 bil­lion vis­its to 1,500+ web­sites to pro­vide an overview of how con­sumers are using mobile devices world­wide.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Online shoppers are three times more likely to make a purchase on a tablet compared with a smartphone, according to [Adobe's] The State of Mobile Benchmark-Q2 3013.</blockquote>

<blockquote>If I were running a $1B site, I could do it with IBM, Oracle, or hybris and my SEO team would be handing specs to developers to implement. The deciding factor between those 3 platforms [...] would be things like total cost of ownership, native mobile support, speed, search, content management, merchandising features, and the ability to hire subject mater experts. Frankly, the implementation team would be more important than the platform.

But if I were running a $20M site, I wouldn't want to do it on any of those platforms. Note: Most $20M/year sites, want to be $200M sites, so it's still very common to see IBM and Oracle used on small sites, but they often struggle.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Starts with the building blocks of TCP, UDP and TLS, and then dives into newer technologies such as HTTP 2.0, WebSockets, and WebRTC. This book explains how these technologies work under the hood, their benefits, and provides hands-on optimization tips and best practices for each.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A style sheet to help detect invalid or inaccessible markup.</blockquote>

A much less offensive version of something we used in 2005.

<blockquote>Disconnect, like similar software from Abine and Ghostery, aims to give consumers more control over the data they share. After the extension is installed, an icon in the browser lets users adjust which advertisers and tracking companies can access their data. Disconnect sorts the requests into categories like advertising, analytics, and social.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I met an old advertising friend the other day and he said, so what is GDS? So I thought I should try and explain.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Allows you to pregenerate typical Vagrant builds.</blockquote>

From Brett Terpstra (nvAlt developer) and contributors.

<blockquote>If it looks and feels like an app, and lives on your home screen, it’s an App. With a capital “A.”</blockquote>

Some handy Middleman tips

<blockquote>An architecture for frontend-only web apps.</blockquote>