Blogs

I’m ashamed to admit this but Undomondo is the first music blog I’ve ever perused and I’m only sorry I took so long: it’s wonderful! Every mp3 I’ve heard for the past half hour has been a keeper.

It’s one of those moments when my head spins, twirls, swirls, and whirls. I’ve been seriously reading JS, CSS, and UI, since yesterday but it was just a couple of hours that it all came together. Let’s begin this Bushean trail with Ashley Pond V’s mindblowing, free web-book Developing Featherweight Web Services with Javascript. Then hop on to Sergio Pereira’s excellent Developer Notes for prototype.js. (Prototype.js, if you must know, is the JS framework.) Glen Murphy (recent googler) has a lot of interesting JS projects up his sleeve (say, this clock), and if you want clarity in this muddleheaded webworld, read everything you can find from Douglas Crockford (recent Yahoo)—all he’s written on JS is gobble-up-worthy, specially recommended are Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript (it’s so short and yet it will change completely how you write JS) and Private Members in JavaScript (a wonderfully clear and short overview of JS object-orientedness). Did you know about JSON (Javascript Object Notation)? One last word on JS coding (and learning), please don’t do it without an HTML Real-Time Editor, a Javascript Shell, and a Javascript Development Environment—just don’t.

Yahoo! has a pretty nice UI blog going on (a couple of days ago, for instance, they did a nice post on the Patterns Behind the Yahoo! Home Page Beta) and they recently released an awesome Pattern Library (Yahoo! is becoming pretty cool lately… at least for developers). UI patterns seem to be all the rage these days and deservedly so. Jenifer Tidwell recent O’reilly, Designing Interfaces, looks set to become a classic (and some very worthwhile excerpts are available online). Out in the wild web, there’s even a pattern of how to build patterns, an interesting conversation on patterns here (intro, 1, 2, 3, 4), and Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications to which I wholeheartedly agree.

Doesn’t it just floor you how smart and fast things are becoming?

OK, back to work.

The famous polyfacetic wit and good friend of mind, Adolfo, has finally decided to keep the letters flowing in an unsurprisingly-Seinfield-inspired Spanish blog: The Timeless Art of Seduction.

Good news indeed.

He is my namesake and in many other ways my electronic soulmate but nothing that Eliezer Yudkowsky has written has left a deeper impression in me than his goodbye to his death brother I read this morning.

We shall, indeed, have to work faster (and smarter).

Siempre me ha gustado su estilo pero no suelo leer mucho a Germán Dehesa. Ayer que lo hice me sorprendi. La Gaceta del Charro, su columna en Mural, es tan evidentemente un blog! Es cierto que toda columna periodistica es, bien vista, nada mas que un blog atrapado en el papel pero la de Dehesa es cosa aparte. Irrepresiblemente personal y opinionated, plagada de in-jokes y referencias personales, es un filtro de temas muy diversos, como todo buen blog, pero el hilo conductor de todos ellos es siempre visible: Dehesa mismo.

No es mi estilo escribir diatribas (habiendo ya gente que ha llevado el genero a alturas insospechadas) y esta no lo sera, pero si estuviera muerto, me revolcaria en mi tumba por lo que Publico ha hecho de su portada. No es la pesima combinacion de colores. No es el nuevo tipo de fuente para los titulos, ralo y demasiado grande. No es el texto enorme de libro infantil ni la consecuente disminucion brutal de contenido real (Para hacerle espacio a una opinion? Son ya las opiniones noticias de primera plana?). No, lo que me mata son esas lineas —ridiculamente gruesas, dolorasamente innecesarias. Tufte habla de chart junk, propongo un nuevo concepto: newspaper junk. Ya mencione lo ridiculo que es poner un articulo de opinion en 1era plana, hace falta volver injuria el insulto con ese marco gris gruesisimo y esos cuadritos de colores?

Y ni siquiera hablemos de los ultrajes que le hicieron a la contraportada…

La primera impresion de mi primo al ver el nuevo diseño fue pensar que Publico se habia vuelto un periodico gratuito. Comparto su opinion. Publico se ha depreciado.

Have you ever chanced upon someone’s blog only to suddenly fall in love and realize here was someone so similar to yourself (only dazzingly more brilliant) with whom you’re bound to cross paths sooner or later? I have. Today. Twice. Here and here.

Sorry for the boosterism… blame that little techno-evangelist we all carry around inside.

Anyway, it’s interesting to put a face on those words I read so often. If you have a blog, leave a comment with a link to your pic and your blog’s address, and I’ll put it up here. Same for your favorite blog, leave a comment with a link to a pic of the author and the blog’s address, and I’ll put it up here.

I’m a fan of DHH (that’s David Heinemeier Hansson, but since no one, not me for sure, can type his name correctly, he’s usually called DHH). He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a very smart programmer, and an even smarter manager. How can you not like someone with this in his about page?

Anyway, out of a childish infatuation with his persona I’ve taken upon myself to read his blog, Loud Thinking, back to front, all 4 years of it. I’ve just read the first 24 posts from July 2001, and it has been a lot of fun.

For one thing, I feel like a scholar, tracing all the antecedents that lead to someone’s achievements, savoring the obscure details, going straight to the source, nosing around on the archives. It’s fascinating to see his development.

It also feels like if I were talking to his ghost of days gone by. Blogs are truly a new state of being (see the next post for more of that techno-boosterism). What’s surprising is how similar that ghost is to myself. How he also struggled with procrastination, also likes the same music that I like, also learned VIM, also loves to argue, also fears growing old, also has sleep disorders, also likes to pontificate once in a while.

Of course, there are also lots of differences. But I knew that already. What is amazing is how much you can have in common with someone apparently so different. One of the first bloggers I read—back in the day when reading a blog was something weird and shameful (”You read people’s diaries? What for?”)—put e.e.cummings’ Anyone lived in a pretty how town in her about page, and interpreted it as a love story between “anyone” and “noone” (here’s an interpretation in that vein). What she found tragic was how oblivious the townsfolk were to their love and grief:

So what she treasured in blogs (this is all from memory, I’ve never been able to find her blog again) was their ability to let you see behind “anyone” and “noone”. They put you in contact with people you’d probably never even meet, let alone talk to, and show you that, in the end, they’re not so different from yourself—they also struggle, love, fear, and fail, just like you do.

My favorite from those 24 first posts? Refusing to let an identity mask run my life, hands down.