Creating a place where I can talk about topics not related to programming. This link list is more my idle thoughts on a topic, whereas the main alanstorm.com articles will continue to be programming tutorials
Create a place where I can, and will, write everyday
Create a space where I can, and will, play around with the design on a regular, possibly daily basis. I’ve been out of the frontend game for a few years and need to see what’s changed. I’ll also be abandoning my general practice of keeping old site designs active after a redesign
Write some backend publishing software to figure out what’s really needed for small publishers in 2012 vs. what’s in most modern CMS publishing systems
For now I’m going to keep this link list separate from my main site until the kinks are worked out. Contents will shift during flight, don’t get too attached.
]]>Most day to web production centers around coding up a version of your site that works in a leading edge browser, and then making choices when it comes to browsers that aren’t that leading edge browser. Sometimes the choice is leaving a visual flourish on the table, other times it’s rewriting your solution to better accommodate the older browser, sometimes it’s patching things up with an IE specific style sheet. Those choices depends on a lot of the business, project, and individuals involved in the project.
The past five years, (marked by the introduction of the iphone), have seen that model turned upside down. The proliferation of devices, screen sizes, and resolutions has left day to day web producers with an uncomfortable choice — abandon the above model and take on insane production burdens, or leave some devices on the table. This increased balkanization has given “The Web” a less coherent sense of place, which (personally) makes it a much less interesting medium.
Regardless of whether you adopt a retina display, there’s going to be a lot of websites and companies that choose to skip it, and that’s going to lead to an ugly web experience for people using these retina devices. I find this depressing, especially when I imagine a meeting that had to happen at some point inside Apple Inc.
Engineer: OK, what can we do with safari and webkit to ensure our users have the best experience possible when viewing websites on a retina display
Decision Maker: …
It’s not so much that there’s a secret cabal of executive deep inside Apple who are plotting the demise of The Web — more that The Web itself no longer has a strong advocate, and it slowly atrophying into something unrecognizable and arguably inferior to what came before.
]]>Large organizations hate infrastructure projects like IPv6
Meaning blocks of IPv4 addresses will continue to grow in value
At some point all that “easy” money will become too tempting for the large shared hosts, and they’ll sell their IP blocks and close up shop
I know shared hosting isn’t cutting edge stuff, but the business and cultural echos of losing shared hosting are sure to felt far and wide.
]]>I believe that many Apple observers have been too invested in picking off the low hanging fruit of obviously out-of-touch commentators, columnists, and analysts. Apple is winning. It’s fun to pick on the idiots, and we do tune in for the affirmation that engenders, but that’s not insight. It’s a tag team wedgie patrol
Yup.
]]>script is a generic UNIX command. Seems like a nice crutch for those of us who still have troubling greping live text streams.
]]>If you’re a team leader and don’t have a document like ThinkUp’s, make one now. If you’re considering a job ask development team members what their procedure is. If you get that blank “brogrammer stare” back, procede with caution.
]]>Think Like (a) Git looks like it’s one of the few git tutorials out there that
Acknowledges git is hard
Attempts to explain it’s model to smart people who know nothing about git
This is also an interesting development in the world of software tools/IDEs. The pendulum is swinging away from strictly open-source tools and more towards commercial/open-source hybrids.
]]>I know disintermediation is the buzzword, but we’re not eliminating middle men, we’re just setting up a new generation of middle men with different agreements.
]]>Permanent Link to Hints of the Coming Agency Technology Crisis
]]>That said, the only distribution (outside of a contextless github account) is one of those weird “download and immediately execute this shell script” things, which is sort of squiky.
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