You never forget your first DMCA takedown notice. In my case it was the Perfect Pitch incident, in which an incompetent business was sending out automatic takedown notices to Google for any website that contained a combination of the words Burge Pitch Torrent . That situation, which affected The Session , was resolved with an apology from the offending party. Now I’ve received my second DMCA takedown notice. Or rather, my hosting company has. … Read the rest here
Last Thursday, I had the rare honor and privilege of chatting with Jen Simmons as a guest on The Web Ahead . (I’ve also chatted with Jen in real life . That’s even awesomer!) As is my wont, I completely abused that privilege by chatting for two hours —making it the second-longest episode of The Web Ahead to date—about the history of the web and CSS, what’s coming up that jazzes me the most, and all kinds of stuff. I even revealed, toward the end of the conversation, the big-picture projects I dearly wish I had time to work on. … Read the rest here
So, yeah. I wrote an e-book . It has been an interesting experience and I thought I’d share a few random thoughts on how things have gone so far. Backwards When I first started down the path of writing the SMACSS e-book, I had intended it to be either an e-book or a printed book. … Read the rest here
Clearleft has been running dConstruct since 2005. You can still visit the site for each year: 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Right from the first event, we recorded and released a podcast of the talks—thanks to Drew ’s l33t audio skillz—and all of those audio files are still online. That’s quite a collection of aural goodies. So we decided to put them all together in one place. I give you… The dConstruct Audio Archive . … Read the rest here
At last November’s Build conference I gave a talk on digital preservation called All Our Yesterdays : Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss. The video is now on vimeo . The audio has been huffduffed … Read the rest here
Aral recently released the videos from last September’s Update conference . You can watch the video of my talk if you like or, if video isn’t your bag, I’ve published a transcription of the talk . It’s called One Web, Many Devices and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a short talk—just under 17 minutes—but I think I made my point well, without any um-ing and ah-ing. … Read the rest here
As ever, I had a lot of fun moderating the hot topics panel at this year’s Web Directions @media in London. Thanks to all of you who left questions on my blog post . I had a great line-up of panelists: Relly , Brian , Bruce and Doug . We discussed publishing, mobile, browsers, clients and much much more. … Read the rest here
This morning I tweeted about a lack of inspiration and having to trudge through it. In response, @brainhofj tweeted about the following: This handwritten letter is by Austin Madison, Pixar animator of Rex, the green dinosaur in the Toy Story series (among other characters he’s designed). Madison’s letter is a submission to the Animators Letters Project , and it so eloquently described what I was attempting to say in 140 characters. Here’s page one: I, like many of you artists out there, constantly shift between two states. … Read the rest here
Creating telephone answering systems can be fun as I discovered at History Hack Day when I put together the Huffduffer hotline using the Tropo API . There’s something thrilling about using the human voice as an interface on your loosely joined small pieces. Navigating by literally talking to a machine feels simultaneously retro and sci-fi. I think there’s a lot of potential for some fun services in this area. What a shame then that the technology has mostly been used for dreary customer service narratives : Horrific glimpse of a broken future. I sniffed while a voice activated phone menu was being read out and it started from the beginning again… Read the rest here
The Hobbit: Filming at 48 fps : I tweeted about this earlier, but it’s worth repeating here so I can excerpt a few highlights. On Facebook, director Peter Jackson describes why 24 fps (frames per second) — the standard frame rate used in nearly every major motion picture — is an antiquated practice: Originally, 24 fps was chosen based on the technical requirements of the early sound era. I suspect it was the minimum speed required to get some audio fidelity out of the first optical sound tracks. They would have settled on the minimum speed because of the cost of the film stock. 35mm film is expensive, and the cost per foot (to buy the negative stock, develop it and print it), has been a fairly significant part of any film budget. … Read the rest here
Don’t Touch the Screen : Billed as “a podcast for webnerds with kids,” Charlie Park explores a side of web development life that we rarely discuss: what those of us with families do the other 16 hours of the day. I’m fortunate to have been the inaugural guest, and you can listen to audio from the interview here . (Pardon my rambling the first 7 minutes, I won’t be offended if you need to skip ahead.) Charlie is also co-hosting a session at SXSW 2011 with Joshua Porter, “The Life of the Startup Parent,” on Friday, March 11th at 2:00 PM. … Read the rest here
The most recent guardian technology podcast opened with these headlines… “On this week’s podcast, we’re looking closely at why a 32×32 pixel digital icon designed for the UK Government’s Information Commissioner’s Office cost £585 of public funds!” To discuss this topic of national importance, Margaret Manning, the Director of the design agency responsible was bought in and grilled as to why the creation of an icon could have cost so much. Margaret stated that the actual design and production work would have taken a couple of hours, and the bulk of the cost was actually administrative. At this point Margaret was interrupted by the interviewer, Charles Arthur, who exclaimed with incredulity, how he’d heard that icons could be done in a matter of minutes. Hearing this I was genuinely gobsmacked. I’ve long been a fan of both the Guardian newspaper and the tech podcast. However It was as if they had somehow been hijacked by the Daily Mail on a slow news week… Read the rest here
The Shepard Tone, a “Sonic Barber’s Pole” : Wikipedia: The auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. It has been described as a ‘sonic barber’s pole’. Click the embedded audio sample. It’s a pretty wild acoustic trick that I’d not heard of until today. /via @ H_FJ … Read the rest here
The Shepard Tone, a “Sonic Barber’s Pole” : Wikipedia: The auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. It has been described as a ‘sonic barber’s pole’. Click the embedded audio sample. It’s a pretty wild acoustic trick that I’d not heard of until today. /via @ H_FJ … Read the rest here
A few changes for beta 2 of the updated reset, presented here: /* http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ v2.0b2 | 201101 NOTE: THIS IS A BETA VERSION (see previous line) USE WITH CAUTION AND TEST WITH ABANDON */ html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, b, u, i, center, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td, article, aside, canvas, details, embed, figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary, time, mark, audio, video { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; font-size: 100%; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; } /* HTML5 display-role reset for older browsers */ article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section { display: block; } body { line-height: 1; } ol, ul { list-style: none; } blockquote, q { quotes: none; } blockquote:before, blockquote:after, q:before, q:after { content: ”; content: none; } table { border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; } First, the small changes: adding embed , output , and ruby to the first rule. I went back and forth on these quite a bit, which is why they weren’t in the first cut. However, none of them seem to be replaced so they’re in. Others, such as command , are replaced and so stay out for the same reason that form inputs are left out. ( img is a special case.) The HTML5 element I’m still stuck on is datalist , which seems sort of replaced but then again maybe not. I’m really close to including it on the same grounds that I include canvas , but it’s hard to know if that’s a good idea… Read the rest here
It was close to four years ago now that I first floated (ha!), publicly refined , and then published at its own home what’s become known as the “Eric Meyer Reset”. At the time, I expected it would be of interest to a small portion of the standards community, provoke some thought among fellow craftspeople, and get used occasionally when it seemed handy. Instead, it’s ended up almost everywhere. (This occasionally backfires on me when people use it in the CSS of e-mail campaigns, it’s exposed by older mail clients, and people then mail me to demand that I unsubscribe them from the mailing list. But that’s not the worst backfire—I’ll get to that in just a minute.) Four years is long enough for a revisit, I’d say… Read the rest here
One of the mailing lists I subscribe to is the Brighton Speculative Fiction group. If I rightly recall, I signed up whilst drunk at a party I had gatecrashed in Kemptown. What? Like it’s never happened to you. I suppose you’ve never woken up the morning after the night before, clutching your aching head and moaning “Oh man, I hope I didn’t edit any wikis last night!” Anyway. The Brighton Speculative Fiction group meets regularly in the excellent Basketmaker’s Arms to talk sci-fi and swap books… Read the rest here
I had planned to spend yesterday goofing off, as is my tradition for the day after I return from a conference and don’t have anything immediately pressing on my plate. Instead I watched and documented, as best I could, a case of memetic epidemiology happen in realtime. The meme was the Cooks Source story, which I stumbled across relatively early in the day. I won’t recap the story here, as the original LiveJournal post by Monica Gaudio and Edward Champion’s very well-researched article do a much better job of that. The latter piece is particularly commendable if you’re new to the story, as it not only explains the genesis of the incident but also lays bare a number of other things that were discovered as the story went ballistic. I’m not sure exactly where I first came across the story—probably a retweet of Adam Banks by a friend of mine —but at the time the meme was really just getting started. … Read the rest here
The Big Web Show #22 : I had the pleasure of being a live guest on The Big Web Show with Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin yesterday. Had a great time talking about Dribbble , Cork