“web”
142 posts under this tag.
Techcrunch—which I discovered a few days ago and am liking more and more everyday—had a recent good introduction to PornoTube, a new YouTubeWP porn clone (that as you’d expect, contains explicit sexual material).
The streaming-video website is quite something—intuitive, well-designed, web-2.0-buzz-compliant, massive, and free—and Techcrunch makes several good points throughout its review, chief among which is this one: “For more technically saavy users, bittorent has long been a source of free
pornography. But PornoTube, which is usable by anyone with a computer, could be disruptive.”
And disruptive it will be. Owing to support from its porn behemoth owner, the website appears to be staying atop of the expensive bandwith deluge it must be under. If it keeps doing so and survives prosecution and finds a way to be profitable, it would be yet another beacon of our media saturated future: a whole nother level of free, easy, abundant, instant gratification.
I’m not sure where I saw it first but I like it. When you want to link to Wikipedia, instead of underlining the word or phrase, place a superscripted WP right after it. Say, instead of tired old Internet Explorer, try FirefoxWP.
The advantage of course, is that you hint your reader to what the link is about, and that it could be combined with several other suplinks, as in: “I loved MunichAM, IMDB, WP, the movie.”
Today, just after finishing a slight redesign of my blog (inspired by caterina’s) and comparing it with other redesigns of other websites I’ve made along the past 2 years, I became aware of a small pattern to my madness: don’t enclose unless you must.
Before
Now
I’m not sure why—tenderfootness I guess—but my first website designs have always been unnecessarily enclosed, too many fences, too many cages. Only after much pruning and shuffling do I realize that much of it is extraneous, just clutter.
Much Much Before
Much Before
Before
Now
Most of the time you don’t need that box around that text, you almost certainly don’t need that big box to enclose your entire website, and you probably don’t need so many borders. Try erasing them and watch your website become more “flowing”, more open.
(For an example of what not to do, check my local newspaper’s hideous, caged redesign.)
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.
Get this: I love the net. There are few human inventions I treasure more; damn, there are few things I treasure more. Consciousness predated the net only by a slight margin in my life, and I can’t help but be a part of the translucent generation it has engendered, the first generation whose values have been shaped by the net.
Yet, I fail to understand what all the brouhaha regarding net neutrality is all about. Of course I’m moved by all the calls to action and won’t-somebody-please-think-of-the-children threats of impending netdoom, but I fail to see the real problem, the “great injustice”. And beneath the obvious good intentions, the rhetoric with which this argument is being fought by “my side”, the side of prominent netheads (Google’s Vint Cerf for instance), reeks of governmentism, stasism, and don’t-let-walmart-wreck-your-downtown anti-capitalistic sentiment—not my cup of tea.
Frankly, it all seems to me as articulate special-interest groups arguing for the right to impose their vision of the net on telcoms. This may well be the net’s first reactionary upheaval of nostalgia and status quo1, the first symptom of the sclerosis that plagues every human institution. An end-to-end internet is one of the greatest accomplishments of modernity, a vision I personally cherish, and the one that has successfully guided the web up ‘til now—granted. But that doesn’t mean I want it imposed on others, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t allow others to experiment with new visions. If we really cherish it so much, shouldn’t we be willing2 to pay for it its true economic price? If it is truly the one best way, shouldn’t it be able to survive competition on its own merits? It seems like a particularly devious contradiction to call net intervention net neutrality.
With this in mind, it was a blow of fresh air to find T. J. Rogers recent opinion on the issue:
What do you think of Net neutrality?
This is where basically the Net is not allowed to discriminate? I think it’s an obscenity. I think people that have paid for the wires and cables should be able to charge whatever they want for their product. And for other people to come in and force companies to run their businesses and set their prices is absurd. If some of those companies came into being by virtue of a government monopoly—the old AT&T comes to mind—then fine. But to go and tell companies what they can and cannot charge money for—that’s un-American. It’s against freedom. It’s just bad news.
It was only later that I found out why Rodgers sounded so rational: he’s a libertarian. Also to treasure from that interview is this fragment:
Some claim they [CIGS, a type of non-silicon cell] are close to equal to silicon in terms of efficiency.
You go buy one. You know, that’s another problem we’ve got in the industry. There are a lot of con men in the solar industry who say a lot of things that are really, really, very wrong.
Every libertarian I’ve known of has had this respect for personal, boot-maker, contextual, decentralized knowledge, this hard social virtue of refraining from telling other people what to do (expressed even more clearly later in the interview: “I don’t want to second-guess the people that are trying—I’m not an expert—and they’ll surprise you when they do.”). They all recognize the world’s complexity and the great problems of our models of it. So yeah, I liked this guy. I googled him and I found out this most-interesting open letter from him and a book of his on Amazon, No-Excuses Management, that I promptly ordered.
Anyway, back on topic, what do you think on net neutrality? What am I failing to see from this tangle? Why do so many smart, visionary people oppose it?
Lalo—who taught me, with passion, Mexican history and economical development in high school—used to talk somewhat mockingly of some of his scientist friends who lived isolated from the world and, particularly, from politics; they thought themselves beyond it and preferred to live their lifes pondering deep thoughts back in their ebony towers; “they wouldn’t realize a political revolution had arrived until they were shot,” or something along those lines.
I agreed with it then and promptly forgot it with gusto when it was my turn to think deep thoughts in the ebony towers of CIMAT, where I studied Mathematics for some years. These days of alleged post-electoral unrest in Mexico, when most anyone in the country is fed up with politics, and politicians are having a hard time leaving their six-yearly limelight, I remember those words.
A few months ago, coming back to my old high-school and chancing on Lalo, it was interesting to discover his complete isolation from technology, and, particularly, from the web. He used his computer exclusively for email, never searched, had no idea what a blog was, didn’t know about Wikipedia, and in general didn’t think much of digital contraptions of any sort (!).
That may have had a lot to do with age but my point is that he was missing on one most important sphere (my preferred one, of course). “He wouldn’t know the singularity had arrived until he were absorbed into computronium”—or something alone those lines.
Of course I’m exaggerating, but I neither want to mock Lalo nor defend single-minded obsesiveness. It’s just that the preponderance argument could be made on many, many other spheres of life—economy, finance, culture, ecology, art, design, animal trainers… The world is far vaster and far more complex than we like to acknowledge, and we all suffer from interest myopia (the farther from our interests something is, the fainter and blurrier it is in our picture). Arguing for the preponderance of one sphere is usually self-interest lobbying.
Some weeks ago I was very interested in folksonomies because I was trying to build yet another one (though a political one at that). During my journeys I found out that Del.icio.us has a special kind of tag for filetypes—system:filetype:FILETYPE_HERE. Mixing it with the popular tag, I found many truly wonderful media shards for the filetypes that came to mind—mp3, jpg, jpeg, pdf, gif, png, mov.
Here they are, lest time forgets:
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.
I set out to serve me. Rails is a very selfish project in that respect. It gained a lot of its focus and appeal because I didn’t try to please people who didn’t share my problems. Differentiating between production and development was a very real problem for me, so I solved it the best way I knew how.
It’s hard enough to solve your own problems with eloquence. Trying to solve other people’s problems is damn near impossible—at least to do so to the level of satisfaction that would make me interested in the solution.
That’s why we hold the notion that ”frameworks are extractions” so very dear in the Rails community. Frameworks are not designed before the fact. They’re extracted when you’ve proved to yourself that an approach works. Whenever we get ahead of ourselves and try to leap over the extraction process, we come back sorely disappointed.
I believe that’s why Rails just feels right for so many people—because it’s been used by real people for real work before we dished it out for others to reuse.
I may be besotted with infatuation right now, but I believe there’s true wisdom—hard, distilled, endlessly applicable wisdom (well, what is wisdom if not particularly broad and useful patterns?)—up there.
And as a sidenote, I propose a new dictum based on the quote’s last paragraph: Use before you reuse.
If the Internet is anything, it’s a collection of minds and wills. If the evidence is there, the minds believe.
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