Jan
5
2009
links for 2009-01-05
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"Alone with his violin, his whistling and his thoughts, a singer-songwriter finds his sound."
Dec
31
2008
links for 2008-12-31
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John Gruber writes, "I'll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience."
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"In mid-December, when Yahoo laid off George Oates, one of the original employees of the photo-sharing website Flickr, Oates immediately feared for The Commons, Flickr's project to have its millions of members turn their distributed intelligence to the world's photo archives. Though less than a year old, The Commons hosts tens of thousands of copyright-free historical photos from 17 cultural institutions including the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library."
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"The public assumes that wireless carriers' costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain."
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Gorgeous animated origami promo film for ASICS sport shoes.
Dec
29
2008
going car-lite
The past two months have been crazy-busy and have brought some big changes. One the bigger ones: Last week, I sold my car.
The decision to sell the car came out of practical necessity: The total cost of needed repairs / maintenance wasn’t far off the car’s actual value. Still, I still felt a little like I was losing a friend of nine years.
My junior year of college, I bought the shiny new 1999 Saturn SL2 so I could get from campus to my new job as a Web designer at azcentral.com / The Arizona Republic. Since then, the car has been with me from coast to coast (San Diego to Massachusetts), as I made it through grad school and a few jobs, and as I met (and married) Rob.
Selling the car was remarkably easy. I took the car to CarMax in Dulles, walked up to a salesman and said, “I’d like to sell my car.” He ushered me to a side room, asked a few questions about the car and queued it up for an appraiser to evaluate. Fifteen minutes later, he came back with an offer. Half and hour and some paperwork later, I walked out with a check and a plastic sleeve with the car’s license plates.
For the time being, we’re going to see how we do with a car-lite lifestyle. We live near a Metro station and really have no excuse not to use it. And there’s certainly plenty of shops, restaurants and recreation opportunities close by in our neighborhood that we can just walk to. (Yay, exercise.)
And for when we do need to use a car for errands and such, we’ve enrolled in the Zipcar car-sharing service. How it works: Zipcar has a fleet of cars stationed near Metro stations and other popular places throughout the D.C. metro area. There are at least a dozen cars deployed in our neighborhood alone (including a couple Honda Civics, a Mini Cooper, a Toyota Tacoma, etc.). Zipcar members can then rent those cars by the hour via the service’s Web site (they also have a nice mobile site). The cost of the rental includes gas and car insurance. We’ve guesstimated that the hourly rental cost we’ll likely incur each month will about equate what we were spending for gas. (Not to mention what we’ll be saving in car maintenance / repairs and insurance.) And if we rent out our parking space in our building, we may even come out ahead, applying the savings to existing debts or setting it aside to save up for our next car.
So it’s all a little bittersweet, but we’ll see how it works for us.
links for 2008-12-29
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"IT'S BEEN A busy year for Stephen T. Colbert. He had a spider named after him, introduced Ben Franklin to the Roomba, and kicked the crap out of Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien. He's also cheated death, denounced the movies that are destroying America, appointed some Alpha Dogs, and wagged his finger tirelessly Monday through Thursday, all for the benefit of our great nation. Here's a look back at a few of the 2008 highlights of "The Colbert Report" (and check out all the rest in the show's excellent video archives at Colbert Nation)."
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Music / MP3 blog aggregator
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Jeffrey Zeldman writes, "Securing clients takes longer and requires more effort in a recession. If two emails used to land you a gig, it will now take four, plus an in-person meeting, plus a couple of follow-up calls. This level of salesmanship is painful to geeks and designers, who would rather spend four hours kerning type or debugging a style sheet than five minutes talking business on the telephone. I know. I’m the same way. But we must overcome our natural shyness and inwardness if we intend not to fish our next meal out of a neighbor’s garbage can."
Dec
25
2008
links for 2008-12-25
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"Any web designer subscribing to Screenalicious, CSS Mania, or Best Web Gallery can attest to the recent rise of hip, high-quality church web sites. A non-churchgoing designer might wonder how places of worship fit in amongst software startups and cutting-edge businesses; yet, these churches are branded as intensely as any business and supported by savvy church-marketing communities on the Web."
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"One company makes about 80 percent of the altar bread used by American churches."
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"A boom in sales of crafts and related supplies contrasts with poor results for traditional retailers, like electronics retailers and department stores."
Dec
20
2008
links for 2008-12-20
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Mark Glaser writes, "The models we profile range from those that newspapers have been experimenting with for a while, to those that are brand new, or recently borrowed from other types of media. Our goal is to help spread the word about some of the best ideas and experiments in the industry. Most likely, there won't be a "silver bullet," an idea that will catch on as the savior for the newspaper business. Instead, a successful online newspaper will need a mix of many different revenue streams to survive in the digital age."
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"ESPN.com is counting on less clutter and more advertising options to bolster revenue at a time when its sister cable channels are battling rare weakness." Interesting, though I'm a little surprised that the Times would do a story about a Web site's redesign. Feels a little too much like a newsy press release.
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Goodbye ticker, hello "flipper" — "CNN is revamping its graphic look in an effort to makes its news updates easier for viewers to read and understand. The biggest change to CNN's previous graphic presentation, which has been in place since 2004, is to replace the narrow scrolling news ticker that runs along the bottom of the screen with a wider 'flipper' graphic that presents information one item at a time."
Dec
18
2008
Dec
17
2008
links for 2008-12-17
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Oh this will be fun. "Even if only half of the projected 2 million to 4 million people show up for next month's presidential inauguration, the Washington region's roadways and transit systems will be too pressed to handle the crush, planners say."
Dec
16
2008
links for 2008-12-16
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"Final figures from nearly every state and the District of Columbia showed that more than 131 million people voted. A little more than 122 million voted in the 2004 presidential election. This year's total amounts to 61.6 percent of eligible voters, the highest turnout rate since 1968, when Republican Richard M. Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, said Michael P. McDonald, a political science professor at GMU."
Dec
15
2008
links for 2008-12-15
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"The key insight behind these best practices is the realization that only 10-20% of the total end-user response time is spent getting the HTML document to the browser. You need to focus on the other 80-90% if you want to make your pages noticeably faster. These rules are best practices for optimizing the way servers and browsers handle that 80-90% of the user experience."
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A quick tool for creating HTML tables out of spreadsheet data — just copy/paste from Excel.
Dec
13
2008
links for 2008-12-13
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UK web developer Mark James offers a free, extensive set of mini icons for a variety of media and action types.
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Toby Somerville writes, "There you are happily surfing a web site; you click a link and suddenly find yourself at another site being asked to download a file. What happened there? Annoying, isn’t it? There has to be a better way to indicate to your visitors where a link is going and to what type of file. So, to help solve this little annoyance, I’ve written a bit of JavaScript and CSS that adds pretty little icons after the links—depending on the file extension and location—to indicate to the user the type of document they’re about to load." This is possible already with CSS3 attribute selectors, but unfortunately IE6 doesn't support it, hence this JS-based workaround.
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"WUSA, Channel 9, will become the first station in Washington to replace its crews with one-person 'multimedia journalists' who will shoot and edit news stories single-handedly … Reporters will soon be shooting and editing their own stories, and camera people will be doing the work of reporters, occasionally appearing on the air or on in video clips on Channel 9's Web site … [S]eparate from its new union agreement, WUSA — owned by McLean-based media giant Gannett — plans an across-the-board cut in reporters' salaries as it increases their responsibilities. Multimedia journalists will earn 30 to 50 percent less than what traditional reporters have been earning, with salaries topping out at around $90,000 annually, according to people at the station."
Dec
10
2008
Dec
9
2008
links for 2008-12-09
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"The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism, which honor the work of American newspapers appearing in print, have been expanded to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced today. The Board also has decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories."
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"Leonard Downie Jr., the longtime executive editor of The Washington Post who led his newspaper to more Pulitzer Prizes than any editor in American journalism history, is joining the faculty of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University."
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"Tribune owns eight major daily newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun, plus a string of local TV stations … Tribune's latest actions underscore the deepening distress enveloping Tribune and other newspaper publishers. Their businesses are being battered by dwindling advertising sales, and many are carrying debt loads that are unmanageable in current market conditions. Industry insiders expect some papers will need to fold in coming months or seek protection from creditors to reorganize."
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"Petit Collage is a line of modern wall decor and accessories with a vintage twist for children and grownups alike. Founder Lorena Siminovich, created the company in 2006 out of her love for illustration and design. Beginning with various styles of collages on wood, Petit Collage has now grown to include mobiles, posters, and licensed products."
Dec
8
2008
links for 2008-12-08
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Adorably cute. "Handmade and available in four different colors, the case reminds us of a fanged cousin of cookie monster."
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What's old is new again: "Crafting CSS layouts is tricky. In this article, Kevin Yank introduces CSS tables (which, once IE 8 is released, will be supported by all major browsers). They promise to make CSS layouts much easier for everyone."
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Jeffrey Zeldman writes, "Most clients are good clients, and some clients are great clients. But some jobs are just never going to work out well. Herewith, a few indicators that a project may be headed to the toilet. Guarantee: All incidents taken from life."
![[Photo]](http://photos.morethanthis.net/images/2008-09-13/thumbs/IMG_0272.jpg)
