Posts from February 2023

4PM — HistoryMaps explains historic events using text, videos and maps. Incredibly informative and well-designed.

2PM — Rachel Binx on the sameness in today’s web design fuelled by UI frameworks:

Also, it’s BORING. It’s BORING AS HELL. Guh, bring back interesting websites, bring back the creativity that the web offers. Bring back frontend devs who aren’t afraid to get down with the mouse event handlers!!

There is so much room for creative expression on the web! Standardizing UIs makes sense for large software companies — but please, let’s hold the line with the WWW also being a space for you and me to make weird little sites.

Yes this. But there’s also a growing population of web developers who never built a website from scratch, that’s why even personal websites all look the same today.

1PM — Due to low rents, a mall in Portland has attracted independent shops, like a record store and a comic book shop. I’d love an indie shopping mall in Melbourne with bookshops where staff know books, record stores, and magazine shops, maybe even a decent bakery or butcher. It’s what many redevelopments of industrial complexes into shopping areas promise—some genuinely, most just for PR—but never quite pull off. What you get, at most, is shops selling overpriced label-less designer ware to the youth, feel-good shops selling trinkets and self-help books, and a burrito place that looks like it’s local, but in reality, it’s part of a nationwide chain.

5AM

Twitter’s recruiting page got a Marie Kondo treatment, now fully embracing minimalism.

4AM — “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a human.” With the rise of machine-generated content, the evergreen problem of online identity—are you human or a dog—now extends to bots.

5PM — “It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive”:

The internet was pretty fun, when it was just this thing that you used occasionally, before you carried it around in your pocket and it became the way that millions of shopped, socialized, researched, and looked for love. When it was a curio. I think I got my first email address when I was a senior and remembered to check it maybe once a month.

Yeah the 90s were great. Not the fashion, or the Eurodance music. But everything else was and we had the Internet before it was gentrified, and it was new and raw and exciting.

8PM — In 2007, Khoi Vinh wrote a beautiful love letter to Manhattan’s cinematography. I need to watch Manhattan again.

7PM — Ben Yakas, writing for the Gothamist, explores the history of the colour scheme in New York’s subway map. It explains why the map doesn’t always use unique colours to designate lines in the Subway network. Granted, New York’s Subway system has more individual lines than London’s Tube network, but I find London’s map easier to use. Unique colours mean I can trace a line on the map to see where it’s going, and wayfinding inside stations is easier, too; I can follow the right colour to find my platform. (via The Map Room)

9PM — Montaigne is an interesting low-tech approach to Web publishing: Save notes to a dedicated directory in Apple Notes and automatically publish to a website, including an RSS feed.

8AM — Elon Musk woke up engineers Sunday night after the Super Bowl to change Twitter’s ranking algorithm, so it favours his tweets over everyone else’s. It’s like watching a spoilt little child throwing a tantrum in the toy store because mom won’t buy them the new LEGO space station.

6AM — A little nugget by Nick Herr I enjoyed:

[…] newsletters and personal blogs — which are actually the same thing, but I do not think the investors backing Substack have noticed

It’s funny, ‘cause it’s true.

1AM — Ryan Broderick predicts how AI, now introduced to search engines, will change the never-ending quest to route internet traffic to websites:

On the brand side, companies will pay for greater visibility in the A.I. recommendations. For instance, a car company might pay to be among the options listed for “the best mid-size sedan” by the A.I. for a financial quarter. There’ll be all kinds of fights about what is and isn’t an ad.

Google adsense-like programs for A.I. citations will roll out for smaller publishers and the last remaining bloggers, like the food writers who make the recipes the A.I.s are spitting out. There will also probably be some convoluted way to reformat your site to better feed the A.I. And I imagine Google will probably also figure out a way to shoehorn YouTube in there somehow.

And, finally, all of these initiatives will lead to a further arms race between A.I. platforms and individuals using A.I. tools of their own to game the system, which will further atrophy the non-A.I.-driven parts of the web.

I hope I’m wrong!

I hope he’s wrong too.

8PM

7PM — Clive Thompson advocates for us to use RSS to rewild our online attention—away from algorithmically curated timelines. Since I went back to RSS, first through a weekly summary via email, now with NetNewsWire, the material I read is more diverse and more thoughtful. There’s noticeably less repetition. Sharing a link on a blog requires more effort; there simply is no retweet button to drag a post into your timeline. And that’s a feature of blogs.

8AM — Shift Happens, a beautifully curated and designed, 1,216-page, two-volume book about the history of keyboards, is now available to support and pre-order on Kickstarter. It’s not cheap, but it looks like the US$150 are worth every penny. (Via: pretty much everyone)

5PM

A grand tribute at the Grammy awards marking 50 Years of Hip Hop. It perfectly recreates the time when Hip Hop took the final turn off the street into show business: Missy Elliot has her moment. After that, everything is less about words and mostly about choreographed dancing.

2PM — Connor Oliver still uses an old Macintosh Classic II:

This Mac has no form of notification system built in, it never begs for your attention and its applications never try to distract you from what you are doing, begging you to look at them instead. If I get distracted while using this Mac the fault lies squarely on me, not the computer and not the programs running on it.

I had an old MacBook that I used only for writing after replacing it with a newer machine for my daily work. The battery was dead, so I had to sit down near a power outlet when I wanted to use it. I hadn’t set up emails on this machine or installed any instant messaging applications, no code editors, and I didn’t transfer my audio files into iTunes. The only application I installed was iA Writer and some command-line tools so I could convert my writing from Markdown into other formats. The only thing I could do was to write and focus on words.

It was the most distraction-free computer I used in the past 20 years. I wish I had kept it.

(via Daring Fireball)

2PM — Alan Jacobs on note taking and reviewing:

No, the tools don’t really matter to me, and I have learned not to fuss about them. What’s essential is scheduling time — I set aside an hour each Monday morning and a whole morning on or near the first of every month — to go over all of those notes and do a kind of self-assessment. I sit down with my notebook and my computer and ask: Where am I in my current projects? What did I accomplish last week? What do I need to think about further? Is there any research or reading I need to be doing? What should be my priorities this week (or this month)? That kind of thing.

I could have the best note-taking system in the world and I’d still be lost if I didn’t have regular periods for review and reflection.

I prefer simple advice such as this, actually actionable advice, to any of the hustle porn you find on LinkedIn these days.

1PM — “One Day They’ll Say This Was the Best (and Worst) Thing I Ever Made.” Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker, reflects on its second death.

5PM — Gruber makes a great point about why design is important even if you can’t measure “good design” like you can count app downloads, active users or time spent in the app.

9AM — A couple of months ago, when NetNewsWire announced you can follow Twitter accounts through their app, I wrote:

Let’s hope all this work wasn’t for nothing.

Turns out it was. Twitter is shutting down free access to their APIs. The move kills every Twitter bot there is unless their maintainers pay, including those posting links to frequently updated sites, like kottke.org and Daring Fireball.

8AM — Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, founders of Instagram, are working on a new project:

The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter.

Sounds intriguing, but I’m not sure I want a TikTok for text. I joined the waitlist because you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover.

5PM — A Seinfeld-like AI-generated sitcom streams forever on Twitch. Skyler Hartle, one of its creators:

As generative media gets better, we have this notion that at any point, you’re gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want. You don’t just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it.

Dear god, no! Don’t give them any ideas. We don’t need shows that run for ten seasons with twenty episodes each, let alone shows that run forever.

9AM — Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design:

• Content is readable on all devices and screen sizes,
• Clickable elements must be either buttons or links and look like buttons or links,
• The browser’s back button works, or
• Keep the page weight small.

These sound like guidelines for building good websites in general.