Replied to a tweet by @Tania_UXDs (Twitter)
@BorisAnthony has some prior art: http://boris.libra.re/library/?i=color
Maybe this should be a session at the upcoming IndieWebCamp pop up on personal libraries
Bookmarked I Like Index Cards by Aegir Aegir (Aegir.org)
I've been meaning to do some kind of index card style template for the site for ages and never got round to it. Now I have. I’m quite pleased with it. CSS repeating gradient lines and all that. 
An absolutely beautiful design for short notes. This is the sort of theme that will appeal to zettelkasten users who are building digital gardens. A bit of the old mixed in with the new.

Pete Moor in // pimoore.ca ()

Bookmarked From My to Me: Another history of the WWW, 2020 by Olia Lialina (INTERFACE CRITIQUE)
This article is an elaboration on the statements about the WWW, web design and personal websites I made in my recent talks and articles, as well as those included in the volume. As the editor (and probably the readers as well) noticed, as soon as I look for counter examples to new media products made following the cruel and hypocritical UX paradigm, I come up with a website – or more precisely, with a website of a particular genre – “the 90s GeoCities”.
This article was mentioned by Jim Groom several times at Domains21
Read This used to be our playground (Simon Collison)
There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.
The nice part is that this applies even if you’re not a designer. Reminds me of the most important IndieWeb principle: have fun

Dynamic range in social media and shovels versus excavators

A developer at today’s Homebrew Website Club mentioned that they didn’t want to have a website built on a particular language because they weren’t familiar with the language and felt uncomfortable trusting their data to it. What if something goes wrong? What if it breaks? How easy will it be to export and move their data over?

Compare this with the average social media user who doesn’t know any code. In their world, they’re making a choice, likely predicated upon social pressures, to post their data, content, and identity on one or more corporately controlled silos. Because of the ease-of-use, the platform is abstracted away from them even further than from the developer’s perspective thus making it even less apparent the level of trust they’re putting into the platform. What is the platform doing with their data? How is what they’re seeing in their feed being manipulated and controlled?

The problems both people are facing are relatively equivalent, just different in their dynamic range. The non-programmer is at an even greater disadvantage however as the silos are moving faster and can do more to take advantage of and manipulate them more seamlessly than the programmer who at least has more potential to learn the unfamiliar language to dig themselves out. This difference is also one of dynamic range as the developer may only need a simple shovel to dig themselves out whereas the non-coder will need a massive excavator, which may be unavailable and still need an operator with knowledge of how to use it.

Featured image: excavator flickr photo by mbecher shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Read The Plain Text Project (plaintextproject.online)

Do you need big, feature-packed, and sometimes complex tool for your work, to stay organized, or keep track of your tasks?

Maybe not.

Maybe all you need is plain text. Yes, simple, old fashioned, unadorned, boring text. It sounds scary or alien, but it's not.

Plain text isn't just for the geek or the techie. Plain text isn't just for the academic or hardcore productivity hacker. Plain text is for anyone.

RSVPed Attending Design for Cognitive Bias Launch Party!

Come celebrate the launch of my new book, Design for Cognitive Bias. Each ticket includes the price of a copy of the book!

About this Event

Our users have biases and so do we. My new book, Design for Cognitive Bias, explores how design and content strategy can help keep them at bay (or use them for good). Let's celebrate the launch!

  • We'll start with a book reading
  • Then I'll chat with Tiny MBA author Alex Hillman about the book
  • Then we'll do audience Q&A
  • Then we'll do something called an idea exchange. (I'll explain later but I promise it'll be fun!)

Like I said, price of admission includes a digital copy of the book. YOU get a book! And YOU get a book! And YOU get a book! (You get the idea).

Special thanks to Indy Hall for virtually hosting this event!

I'm really looking forward to this. It's been a long road to get here and I hope you'll celebrate with me! :)

My remarkable friend David Dylan Thomas has a a new book entitled Design for Cognitive Bias coming out on August 25th from A Book Apart. Knowing his background and abilities, it will be a must-read for any web designer or developer.

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.

 If you’re free on Friday, August 28th there’s also a launch party for the book! The price of admission also includes a discounted copy of the e-book. RSVP now.

I’m hoping I can talk him into doing a talk or presentation for my friends in the IndieWeb community. He’s a great and thoughtful person and speaker, so I expect to see him around the design and development talk circuit for a lot of the coming year. If you have a conference coming up, I recommend you book him now before he’s over-scheduled.

Bookmarked Please be patient - This Page is Under Construction! (textfiles.com)
This small collection was saved from the rapidly dying Geocities, which Archive Team is working desperately to save for a historical archive. Please consider visit our site and helping us with collecting, education, and writing.
Bookmarked A.N. Lucas's 88x31 button Collection (anlucas.neocities.org)
Here is a collection of more than 700 88x31 web buttons from the 1990's and 2000's, including the famous "Netscape NOW" and "Internet Explorer" buttons as well as various other buttons for websites of past and present. All were rescued from a now defunct http://harrypagerubbish.webs.com/buttons just before it disappeared without warning. These buttons are an historic example of advertising in the earlier days of the World Wide Web. Enjoy these buttons and use them to your liking.
Bookmarked a thread by Kicks CondorKicks Condor (Twitter)

Mountain Dew is now doing a tie-in to Nat Trez High School called Mountain Dew: Teen Series. We are hearing complaints that this has nothing to do with American History. Thread incoming. 1/
The team behind this is dedicated to getting this right. There are some big names orchestrating this. One player in this game is so big that we could drop the name and it would OBLITERATE this discussion. But we want to win this argument the old fashioned way: with words. 2/
The Teen Series strategy is not about teens! Nor is it merely about the Constitution or Benjamin Franklin's special decoder glasses. Instead the Teen Series strategy salutes the incredible history of search engine optimization in the modern United States. 3/
Search engines are like any engine - they need gas. The gas in this case is WORDS. Important words. On the Internet, we engage in a dramacratic process to agree upon the vital words of our era. 4/
Valuable words like "law", "eyeglasses" or "Sophia" each create billions of dollars of worth that wouldn't exist without those words. 5/
We learned early on that two of the most undervalued words on the Internet right now are "printable" and "mazes". Young parents everywhere scramble to type these two words every day. 6/
Homeschool blogs have captured this stream, while Hollywood producers attempt to milk forgotten words like "summer" and "Matthew". 7/
Now we didn't leave the typo "dramacratic" in there as an accident. Initially it was an accident - but it turned out to be sublime. When our team was in high school, we all took drama class together. We staged a production of Seinfeld, featuring our own original script. 8/
In that fateful episode, George Costanza has to take a hearing test for work. And what does he do? He lies on the test. 9/
He's wearing a headset and the testing lady asks him to raise his hand if he hears a beep in his ear. He decides not to raise his hand. They play the beep in his right ear and then in his left ear. He stays still. They even play the beep in both ears. He doesn't budge. 10/
After the test, they can't seem to remove him from the chair. It appears that he has turned to stone. It dawns on the testing staff that George has been sonically petrified by the headset. Indeed, the headset was set at maximum volume, which they had been warned about. 11/
They turn to the testing lady. Her name is Sarah Vibrant. She begins to sing a beautiful song about the turmoil she is feeling. The song is titled "Lock Me Up, Hold Me Down, I Ne'er Quite Knew the Power of Sound." Meanwhile, the actor playing George had to sit stock-still! 12/
Mountain Dew: Teen Series works in EXACTLY the same way. It is a generic teen canvas that PepsiCo can sublimate the viral desires of the moment onto. It acts as a lightning rod that is fastened to the entire Teen Project. 13/
In short, this is one of the biggest deals since the episode of Doc McStuffins where she first meets Starblazer Zero. That, too, was a confluence of all the trends we'd seen up to that point in history. And it forced all future trends to pass through it first.

I’ve said it  before; I’ll say it again: Kicks Condor is the Stan Brakhage of the internet.

Add this Website

Filed an Issue maxboeck/whimsical (GitHub)
A curated list of websites with an extra bit of fun.
URL: https://www.kickscondor.com/
Author’s Twitter Handle: (optional)@kickscondor

The fun feature I like most about this site is… the design aesthetic and the regular highlighting of quirky, fun, and off-the-beaten path content that it features. (It’s also very likely a great source for other whimsical and interesting websites and creators).