The sunrise is a bit yellow-er than normal. There’s also a strong smell of smoke in the air, I believe it’s from the fire over in Azusa right now.
Category: Social Stream
For a while I’ve been intending to make my website more sustainable, but I succumbed, as I often do, to the human trait of sloth. But this morning after reading Gerry McGovern’s post on webwaste, I thought I’d procrastinated long enough. So I ran a web page performance test and got some grim r...
Interesting piece about what one can do. It’s nice to advertise this sort of thing to bring awareness not only to this aspect, but to the larger problem. Be aware though that there are many more effective things one can do to help fix the problem than this particular approach.
Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)Today's links
- Grace is cleared: The homeschool-to-prison pipeline is closed…for now.
- Mexico's terrible copyright is in trouble: Hasta la victoria siempre.
- Failed State: Chris Brown's outstanding new ecopocalyptic cyberpunk legal thriller.
- Marvel's $0.10 mini-comics: Gashapon funnies from 1966.
- Sorting machines snatched from post offices: Administrative incompetence vs textualism?
- Payday lenders are CFPB's pandemic aid: When the watchdogs switch sides.
- Trump's Solicitor General says bribery is legal: Rule 48a applies even if the judge sees the prosecutor accept a bribe in the courtroom.
- RSS WTF: An explainer for the newly awakened.
- This day in history: 2015, 2019
- Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing projects, current reading
I didn’t know Cory had a separate linkblog like this, but should have suspected that he would have.
A new five-part series about building a better school system, and what gets in the way. New episodes of “Nice White Parents” are available here, brought to you by Serial, a New York Times Company.
Matt Webb (interconnected.org)Introducing About Feeds
aboutfeeds.com is a single page website, for linking wherever you keep your web feed.
I’m still a fan of Julien Genestoux‘s SubToMe.com for related functionality and ease of use with RSS. If only more people used it or it was built into browsers.
I think it’d also be cool if this sort of simple UI were also easier to use with some of the newer IndieWeb social readers that are making it easier to follow websites and interact with them.
There’s a better way to read websites and it’s called web feeds a.k.a RSS. But web feeds are hard to get into for new users, so I decided to do something about it.
I posted about suggested improvements to RSS the other day and top of my list was onboarding:
If you don’t know what RSS is, it’s really hard to start using it. This is because, unlike a social media platform, it doesn’t have a homepage. Nobody owns it. It’s nobody’s job to explain it. I’d like to see a website … which explains RSS, feeds, and readers for a general audience.So because it’s no-one’s job, and in the spirit of do-ocracy:
I built that website.
Or to slightly abuse a phrase, Be the change that you wish to see in the world wide web.
Getting Started guide to web feeds/RSS
Nathan DeGruchy (degruchy.org)The web is perilously close to complete vendor lock-in. Mozilla, having recently laid off another 250 workers after having (in the same year) laid off 70 workers, is teetering on the brink of death, with only Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome being the remaining contenders. One wonders where th...
As far as the IRS is concerned, there are only two types of workers in the world: employees and independent contractors ("ICs"). Independent contractors are people who are in business for themselves. Employees work for someone else’s business. Being classified as an independent contractor instead of an employee has enormous consequences. Because they are supposed to be in business for themselves, ICs don't get the same legal protections that employees do--for example, they don't qualify for unemployment insurance and are not protected under most labor laws. Moreover, hiring firms need not provide ICs with benefits ordinarily provided to employees such as health insurance or vacations.
Gatsby is a React-based open source framework with performance, scalability and security built-in. Collaborate, build and deploy 1000x faster with Gatsby Cloud.
Given the accusations and specifics that prompted this letter, it definitely comes off as disingenuous and fake corporate speak. I don’t want to touch the platform with a 10 foot pole… He addresses some of the controversy, but doesn’t actually indicate any actual plan for change.
Nat Alison (threadreaderapp.com)Oh hey, the new site is up, which means it's time for A Thread about Gatsby (1/??) https://t.co/ozvsEyHqHH
— Nat Alison (@tesseralis) August 12, 2020
Gassing up on the way back from the beach.
Why putting alpha in your project name does more harm than good
A true “dark mode”. Ha!
We humans are messy, illogical creatures who like to imagine we’re in control—but we blithely let our biases lead us astray. In Design for Cognitive Bias, David Dylan Thomas lays bare the irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions and, inevitably, inform the experiences we craft. Once we grasp the logic powering these forces, we stand a fighting chance of confronting them, tempering them, and even harnessing them for good. Come along on a whirlwind tour of the cognitive biases that encroach on our lives and our work, and learn to start designing more consciously.