Older blog entries for dmarti (starting at number 420)

24 Jul 2012 »

Web development links

(another batch of interesting links that have piled up.)

Eric Holscher: Why Read the Docs matters. "Having a shared platform for all documentation allows for innovation at the platform level, allowing work to be done once and benefit everyone. Having run the site for over a year now, I think there is a third thing that we should be striving for. That is to make the quality of documentation better."

Dan Newcome: The future of Web development isn’t MVC, it’s MVM. Model-View-Mapper, that is.

Jon Mitchell: 3 Reasons Why Everyone Needs to Learn Markdown. "It's amazingly useful just as a writing language. Even if you don't have to convert to HTML at all, it's still an appealing way to format plain text without having to deal with Microsoft Word or another goofy rich-text editor."

Mozilla is already home to some of the best web documentation. New initiative: Introducing “Mozilla Webmaker:” helping the world make the web Introducing Thimble: webmaking made easy Mark Surman has details: Making tools for webmakers.

Reinout van Rees takes good notes on a talk by Christophe Pettus: PostgreSQL when it is not your job. "It actually is pretty hard to seriously misconfigure postgres," but here are the key items to get right.

Everett Zufelt explains the fundamentals of Accessibility for Web developers.

Aaron Swartz: New: The Pokayoke Guide to Developing Software. Develop as a twelve-factor application, among other things.

Deployment advice: Prefer data migrations to initial data. And don't make a SnowflakeServer. Rainforest Blog explains hosting on AWS: A rough guide to keeping your website up through catastrophic events (aka. hosting in a single zone)

Slick-looking new project at Adobe: Brackets: The Open Source Code Editor for the Web

Ellen Bauer, for Smashing Magazine: Create A Responsive, Mobile-First WordPress Theme. "While working on your concept sketches, also think about which layout options to offer in the theme (such as header and sidebar options or multiple widget areas) and how they will adapt to different screen sizes as well."

Hector Garcia describes a skeleton setup for new Django projects: django-nbskel

Luke Plant: PHP, Python and Persuasion

Stephen Hay writes about "cold reading" a mobile user's intent. Great Works of Fiction Presents: The Mobile Context. "I bet the desktop site would be better if they just chucked it and used the “mobile” site for everything. Is the mobile view better because it’s better? Or is it simply better in contrast to a sucky desktop view with irrelevant content?"

Drupal works toward in-place editing. Spark update: WYSIWYG choice

Good series on cleaning up an existing site design for mobile: Adding Responsive Design Features to an Existing Webapp Part 1: Adapting Grid960, Adding Responsive Design Features to an Existing Webapp Part 2: Touchscreens and Tables, Developing a Web Application with a native feel for Tablets

Syndicated 2012-07-24 12:17:13 from Don Marti

20 Jul 2012 »

QoTD: Jason Pontin

"I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and print-like on something open, new, and digital."

— Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher, Technology Review

Syndicated 2012-07-20 00:44:11 from Don Marti

20 Jul 2012 »

Security links

Some recent thought-provoking articles on security.

Instead of annoying CAPTCHAs, try "Design, Limit and Trapdoor" to limit damage from problem users: DLT is better than CAPTCHA

Roll your own middlebox: Low power silent firewall (and maybe help fix the broken Internet).

DRM is not really security, but often mixed up with it. Must-read from Charles Stross: More on DRM and ebooks. Joe Brockmeier: Publishers Starting to Reject e-Book DRM

Mozilla Persona gains features: Streamlining Login with Privacy Policy and Terms of Service APIs

Pay attention to that Persona thing. Doing passwords right is hard. Everything you ever wanted to know about building a secure password reset feature, How Companies Can Beef Up Password Security

Steven M. Bellovin on government-backed malware: Flame On! Two from Brian Krebs: EU to Banks: Assume All PCs Are Infected and How to Break Into Security, Schneier Edition.

This looks like a lot of work to do within existing web frameworks: Database level security in webapps (so do we need better frameworks?)

Syndicated 2012-07-19 23:58:51 from Don Marti

18 Jul 2012 »

Advertising link frenzy

Some links that came up in a recent email thread on Internet advertising, and some more that should have.

Start with Charles Stross: The inadmissible assumptions. "All advertising tends towards the state of spam." (I would disagree with this as long as there are advertising media that can be made scarce and expensive. The challenge is how to make that possible. In my humble opinion, you can't de-spamify Internet advertising, and thereby make it valuable, without massive improvements in privacy tools. Quora thread: What is the percentage of Internet users that employ AdBlock Plus or similar ad blocking plugins?)

Good counterpoint from Terence Kawaja: The Golden Age of Advertising Technology. From the inside, it looks as if all is well. Local maxima or bust!

Somehow, it looks as if Microsoft, of all companies, is starting to get the online advertising problem. All I can see from the outside is a promising combination of Tracking Protection and other privacy-enhancing measures on the browser side, and utter FAIL on the advertising side. Anybody any closer to making sense of this? Or are the browser and ad tech groups so separated that it's pointless to talk about "Microsoft" as a decision-making entity here?

Zeroing in on DNT:1

Do Not Track: It’s the user’s voice that matters

IAB’s Rothenberg: ‘Microsoft’s DNT Reversal Makes No Sense’

SOURCE: Microsoft May Abandon The Ad Business Over IE10 Fiasco (MSFT)

The Display Ad Market Is In Big Trouble

Enough about Redmond, Washington. No discussion of advertising on the Internet would be complete without some mention of the ad-infested Android platform.

Two useful pieces from Horace Dediu: Android Economics and The Android Income Statement

If you're not at the table, you're on the menu. Don Norman: Google doesn’t get people, it sells them.

Not all bad news, though: Android's Overblown Fragmentation Problem by Nick Bradbury makes a good point.

Get your head out of phone space anyway. Try The Phone Stack.

Some good discussion of that company your creepy ex-co-workers haven't killed yet. Michael Wolff: The Facebook Fallacy. "Facebook not only is on course to go bust but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it." Three follow-ups:

Doc Searls: After Facebook fails

Richard Stacy: Doc Searls, Michael Wolff and The Facebook Fairy

Benjamin Mako Hill: Why Facebook's Network Effects are Overrated

Robert Bruce says every company is a media company: Traditional Advertising is Truly Dead

Henry Blodget: Don't Mean To Be Alarmist, But The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse - Business Insider

Think Different: Orbitz Discriminates Against Mac Users ... Just Like It Should Be Doing

Jerry Neumann breaks down the money in targeting: Your personal data is not worth anywhere near what you think it's worth

This makes sense to somebody, I guess: A Framework For The $10B+ Native Advertising Market. "Native advertising is defined as ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way."

At least we have some promising news from the Journalism front. Frédéric Filloux: Lessons from ProPublica and How ProPublica changed investigative reporting. Just to show a good example of a ProPublica story: Inside the Investigation of Leading Republican Money Man Sheldon Adelson. Your winnings, sir.

Syndicated 2012-07-18 14:44:31 from Don Marti

15 Jul 2012 »

Original Alt-Tab behavior in GNOME 3

As we should all know by now, Alt-Tab should cycle among open windows, not applications. GNOME 3 by default does the Wrong Thing, Mac OS style.

How to fix?

I was working on a lengthy set of instructions here, old-school style, with "apt-get" and stuff, and it would have been pretty awesome as such things go, but it turns out that the answer is:

Go to this web page: AlternateTab
Flip the little switch thingy from "off" to on".
If you're curious about how or why this works, read this LWN article: Managing GNOME shell extensions.

To conclude, I would like to say: get off my lawn.

Syndicated 2012-07-15 14:55:37 from Don Marti

10 Jul 2012 »

Rise of the New American Hipstertarian Consensus

Everybody go subscribe to Timothy B. Lee's blog on forbes.com (full feed available). Tech policy, zoning laws, politics, good stuff. A few recent items...

Social Distance and the Patent System: "Successful software entrepreneurs are a small fraction of the population, and most likely no judges of the Federal Circuit have close relationships with one. In contrast, every judge on the Federal Circuit knows numerous patent attorneys."

Dense enough to make traffic a mess, but not dense enough to support frequently-running transit: Silicon Valley Is Stuck In An Uncanny Valley Of Density

How Strong Property Rights Promote Social Equality: "People get to veto their neighbors’ land use decisions, and they’ve used that power to effectively prohibit anyone poorer than themselves from living in their neighborhoods."

Common sense on network policy in Adam Thierer, Infrastructure Socialist . "I think there’s less difference than Adam would probably like to admit between policies that force Verizon to 'share' its lines with other utility companies and policies that force Adam to 'share' his front yard with utility companies."

Corporations are groups of people with meetings and politics, not individuals of species Homo economicus. (Why this has to be news is another story) Seeing Like a Cable Company

Free the apartment builders! Are Growth Boundaries Responsible For High Housing Costs?

Arrr! Me gold! The Myth Of The Free-Market Gold Standard

Syndicated 2012-07-10 13:52:06 from Don Marti

9 Jul 2012 »

d3wd will u teach me how 2 signal?

Russell Coker posts about advertising and signaling: Targeted Advertising.

User-targeted advertising is counterproductive because it fails to send a signal (More details: part 1 part 2).

The DNS Changer mess is an extreme example of low-value advertising—you can think of it as targeted to users of specific malware—but the same principle applies to all advertising that's tied to the user instead of the content. It's worth less and less as the targeting gets better.

So if targeting to users reduces signal, how can we increase signal?

Well, first of all we could increase the production values of the advertising itself. Advertising that clearly requires expense and skill makes a great signal.

The second way to signal, which is to attach the advertising to a resource that's difficult to produce, is probably generally the most useful. Russell suggests "sponsoring people who produce free things." This is what TV advertisers do. The resource doesn't even have to be free of charge. Readers pay for magazines that have a majority of ad pages. Because print ads are difficult to target by user, they're great signal, and people will pay money to get them. (Try that with online ads.)

Finally, we can send a signal by putting the advertising in front of a large audience. Buy a static billboard, TV commercial, or other medium that isn't easily targeted to individual users, and you're sending an difficult to fake, costly signal.

Any more?

Syndicated 2012-07-09 14:58:37 from Don Marti

8 Jul 2012 »

Sunday morning good reads

Aaron Bialick: SF: Transbay Transit Center to Fill Downtown With People, Not Cars "The new Transbay Transit Center is expected to transform San Francisco’s downtown core by focusing new development around a massive regional transit hub in eastern SoMa."

Headline Snapshots: Supreme Court Health Care Decision How headline writers and web designers saw it.

Raw deal: Maine residents’ fight for unregulated food draws crackdown by David Gumpert at Grist. Eight Maine towns have "passed ordinances that explicitly allow local farmers and ranchers to sell their food — meat, eggs, unpasteurized milk, honey, veggies — directly to consumers within town borders, without state or federal licenses, permits, or regulations.

Scott Adams on an idea for an online system for organizing facts to debate about: Fact Bubbler

Mike Doughty on the economics of tour support for bands: Radiohead wouldn't exist without early major-label funding. The future won't bring new Radioheads. All I want to say here, truly, is: let's get used to it.

How environmentalists win by Bill Scher for Grist: "throughout American history, liberal advancements have been mainly achieved with corporate support, and not without."

How software-defined radio could revolutionize wireless by Timothy B. Lee. "Software-defined radio will make it possible to use the electromagnetic spectrum in fundamentally new ways" and here's a company that's working on it.

Office Buildings Add Cash Crops To Their Balance Sheet by Michael J. Coren at Co.EXIST. Rooftop gardening startup reports breaking even.

Syndicated 2012-07-08 14:19:13 from Don Marti

6 Jul 2012 »

Hosting for non-PHP web applications

Did you know, that on the Internet, people who write like this: "saw yr pic!!! yr cute!!!" think I'm cute?

And, on the Internet, as Jeff Atwood points out, "If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option." No, wait, the cuteness one is bogus, and the PHP one is true.

Luke Plant writes, "It is perhaps the essential problem of PHP that a language that was designed to be a simple template language for non-programmers has turned into the work-horse of the web, and the network effects caused by adoption amongst amateurs have made it a language for professionals."

Want to code in something else? You can probably find Django-friendly hosts for not too much more than a decent PHP-only plan, but if you enjoy Go or another niche language, you'll probably need at least a virtual private server, which will cost you more, even from a low-priced source such as the new Google Compute Engine. No cheap hosting in this category.

After working through the installs for PHP and non-PHP applications, is PHP just easier to get set up? How much of PHP's popularity is from the network effect and how much is from the "FTP it into your DocumentRoot and change permissions until it works" deployment model? Heroku is teh awesome, but it's still harder than the screenshot-by-screenshot instructions on "Joe's $0.99 Web Hosting" for installing PHP applications.

Just for comparison, here are some good introductory non-PHP articles.

Introduction to Django

Python for the Web

On a repeatable dev project setup

Django Requirements for a project

Django Chuck: your powerful project punch button - Bastian Ballmann and Lukas Bünger

Static website generators

Schemaless Postgres in Django

Eleven Django blog engines you should know

I don't know. Is it network effect, or ease of deployment?

Bonus link: cgi-php: Well, that just about wraps it up for open-source

Syndicated 2012-07-06 14:38:38 from Don Marti

30 Jun 2012 »

Here, Googlebot, have some links

(A bunch of articles that deserve a link, to feed the machines that help us find good stuff to read. Doing my part for semi-automated link propagation.)

Frequently Asked Questions About Filing for Temporal Bankruptcy by Curtis Edmonds

FBI: Smart Meter Hacks Likely to Spread

Open source is interoperable with smarter government at the CFPB

We Are Winning: How Pirate Parties Are Changing The World

Where's the Viewport Size Data?

Two Cheers for the JOBS Act

An Event Apart: Big Type Little Type

Simon Wardley on open source product strategy: Be Wary of Geeks Bearing Gifts

Mobile first frenzy: Why Jakob Nielsen Is Wrong About Mobile Websites Mobile Isn't the Lite Version Why We Shouldn’t Make Separate Mobile Websites

Save the Cato Institute, Save the World? - By Justin Logan

Collective Idea acquires Harmony from GitHub

Our take on Derby vs. Meteor