Writing over at No Segue:
I want to use Google+. I really do. The UI is far better than that of Facebook; there are a lot of advantages in the conversation model over either Facebook or Twitter; and the overall approach is just one I like better.
There’s just one hiccup—one I’ve written about before: I can’t get it into my workflow.
I’m now tumblr-ing at nosegue.tumblr.com. I may move that to chriskrycho.com/web/nosegue or nosegue.chriskrycho.com at some point; we’ll see. For the moment, I just want something quick and easy for lots of miscellaneous-ish things that don’t fit in any of these four major blogs. Also, to experiment with tumblr. (Also: to have an excuse to play with fonts for fifteen minutes when I should have been figuring out how to convert handwriting to SVG or PNG for a website I’m working on.)
I have had the pleasure of designing a site for my lovely wife, Jaimie Krycho, a really excellent writer in the midst of launching her career. The site is about 90% there: it needs a couple more graphics elements; it needs some responsive tweaks so it doesn’t look ridiculous on phones; it needs Retina graphics support. But it looks good and I’m glad to have it up.
The back end is a WordPress theme built from the ground up to support Jaimie’s particular needs. The front end uses fonts from Google Fonts, Typekit, and a free face using @font-face. The graphics are all by yours truly. Take a look! (And maybe enjoy her ongoing serial fiction while you’re at it!
My new favorite font for writing: Bitstream Vera Sans, discovered via Jesse Grosjean’s fantastic WriteRoom app – which all Mac-using writers should look into. The font is free for everyone; go get it!
A fascinating story from Forbes, on how one man has done the seemingly impossible – built a successful independent bookstore in the age of Amazon. (As a side note, I find I’m increasingly impressed by the reporting coming out of Forbes. Perhaps they just hadn’t been on my radar, but in the last three months I’ve read a number of outstandingly insightful pieces there on issues from this one on the Harvard Book Store to several on Mass Effect 3.)
A former technology executive with a passion for reading and books, Jeff saw – like everyone else – that the digitization of content was destroying the neighborhood bookstore.
Imagine for a moment what it would feel like if people walked into your company and used the lobby to call your competitors and buy their products. That’s standard consumer behavior in a bookstore. People browse, find a book they like, pull out their smart phone, and order online.
Making an intuitive leap, Jeff wondered if the opposite could be true?
Nobody reads other people’s code for fun. Hell, I don’t even like reading my own code. The idea that you’d settle down in a deep leather chair with your smoking jacket and a snifter of brandy for a fine evening of reading through someone else’s code is absurd.
But we need access to the source code. We must read other people’s code because we have to understand it to get things done. So don’t be afraid to read the source, Luke – and follow it wherever it takes you, no matter how scary looking that code is.
Turns out lots of people think vendor prefixes need to be used carefully if at all. A List Apart is one of the authorities on web design practices. Lea Verou writes:
In our eagerness to use the new bling, we often forget how many people fought in the past decade to enable us to write code without forks and hacks and expect it to work interoperably. If you have been in this field more than a few years, you surely remember that it wasn’t always like this. The reason we now have this convenience is web standards, hard won in the Browser Wars.
You might be surprised to hear that web standards did exist during the Browser Wars too.
Every Time You Call a Proprietary Feature “CSS3,” a Kitten Dies →