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People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.

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HeydonWorks

London Book Fair

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm fascinated by sea life - especially crabs. I keep two pet hermit crabs called Ian and Phillip and I have written and designed a picture book called Crabs Are Odd. You've probably seen the little ad spot for it floating around on HeydonWorks...

HeydonWorks

Using The Cascade

In this post, I am going to explain the benefit of exploiting the 'cascading' part of CSS to solve everyday styling problems more efficiently and effectively. The example problem I have chosen is that of clearing content after floats. For those not familiar with the problem ...

HeydonWorks

Dilapidated

For this experiment, I put my resonator through Gearbox's extraordinary 'Bronze Master' effect and bathed the resulting signal in expansive reverb.

Due to the Bronze Master's perculiar ability to help you create unusual harmonics and the resonator's sensitivity to soft plucking, a broad range of murky, eroded sounds can be achieved. At low velocities the sound is distant and muffled; at high velocities it's lively and sharp.

Dilapidated (mp3)

Notes tend to crackle and disintegrate prematurely, adding some atonal texture. Having opted for a mournful chord progression - cycled extremely slowly - I think the overall effect is reminiscent of an instrumental to be found on a (somewhat progressive) black metal record. Enjoy!

Note: The track is nearly seven minutes long so you may have to wait some time for it to load, depending on your connection speed.

HeydonWorks

A Minute Of Listening

I recently had the privilege of working on a project promoting listening skills amongst primary school children, conceived and curated by Sound & Music and called A Minute of Listening. The project required a desktop application (to be built by NeonTribe) that would be r...

HeydonWorks

Bobby Howitzer

Some time ago, my alter ego 'Bobby Howitzer' made a set of dirty rock 'n' roll mashups entitled New Rock and Roll is the New Rock and Roll. The original tunes were repurposed as the backing tracks for Bobby's high impact kareoke performances. The live collision of blues h...

HeydonWorks

Pseudo-class Deception

Those who are new to using pseudo-classes in their CSS may experience more than a little confusion, and I hope that I can relieve a few headaches. For those who use them frequently, I hope they find a few interesting observations ahead. I attribute much of the confusion surr...

Manton Reece

Awaiting The Two Towers

A couple of hours from now I should be firmly planted in my seat with popcorn and drink for The Two Towers. I didn’t get to finish re-reading the book this week as I had planned, but from what I’m hearing there are enough differences that maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. The...

Manton Reece

Apple's UI playground

Steven Johnson for Slate, “Is the Computer Desktop an Antique?" "Now that Microsoft has largely caught up to the Mac in terms of basic file manipulation tools -- thanks to Windows XP's elegant user interface -- the iApps have become a key differentiator for Apple. They are a...

Manton Reece

Metadata seven years later

Aaron Swartz talks at the Creative Commons launch party: "Right now you can only ask a search engine one question: 'What pages have these words in them?' When pages include RDF metadata, you will be able to ask more advanced questions like 'What's the current temperature in ...

Manton Reece

Reading and typography

The weather turned cold here yesterday, and that just contributes to my blogging apathy after the Thanksgiving weekend. I’m just too lazy to blog, and the backlog of unread items in NetNewsWire was over 150 this morning. Time to trim the subscriptions again. There’s too much...

Manton Reece

Being a generalist

John Lim of PHP Everywhere:

"I'm actually a generalist. I can code a bit in Javascript, I know some C++, PHP and a thousand other useless languages. A generalist is pretty good thing to be in technology, because computers and software changes so fast and if you spend too much time specializing you're already a dinosaur before you turn 40."

Manton Reece

Personalization vs. customization

Adrian Holovaty describes the BBC’s ‘intelligent’ design personalization. By keeping track of what links you follow, sections of the home page are given darker backgrounds to draw your attention to those you visit most often. Sounds like a great idea, but I wonder if it is t...

Manton Reece

Amazon usability

Odd that I had never heard of Good Experience, a newsletter by Mark Hurst. Just discovered it today via Tomalak’s Realm. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Maryam Mohit of Amazon:

"For example, quite awhile ago we developed the 'similarities' feature - the one that says 'people who bought this also bought that.' In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they'd say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had."

Manton Reece

Peter on IA

Peter Merholz, “Thoughts on AIfIA and Information Architecture”:

"As information architects know, explaining what they do, even to smart people in related fields, is difficult. Once given a clue as to what user experience is, folks can understand that improving the user experience of a product will be valuable. That will never be true of information architecture, which, by nature, is more abstract and subtle."

Manton Reece

Late night with user interface web sites

Best of chi-web and sigia-l: “Using the archives for each mailing list, I’ve compiled a list of the summary postings from useful threads, and a few personally selected favorite postings.” [via WebWord] Also on UIWEB, Reasons ease of use doesn’t happen on engineering projects...

Manton Reece

Morality for and against war

From the BBC: “The international community has a ‘moral responsibility’ to avoid war with Iraq, the Catholic Church has warned.”

Meanwhile, Bob Kerrey (former Democratic senator) makes the moral case for war in Iraq:

"We know what a terrible thing we did after the Gulf War to encourage Iraqis to rise up and then not follow through in helping them. But you can't take the worst America has done and then cite it as reason not to try and do anything good."

Manton Reece

Leaky Abstractions

Joel on Software, “The Law of Leaky Abstractions”:

"If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood Express doesn't even tell the movie directors in California what happened."

Manton Reece

Futurama, Oscars, and Ward Kimball

I haven’t seen Futurama since it first aired – the time slot doesn’t work for me, but I wonder why I haven’t been taping it. The fourth (and final) season started last night, so I finally made time to watch it again. What a great show. It was especially funny that the Al Gor...

Manton Reece

Election Day

Today is the big day, and you should vote. Even though you can’t stand all the negative ads. Even though it’s hard to tell who’s the Democrat and who’s the Republican because they all move to the center for their campaign. Even though they just give us the buzzwords we want ...