Hypertexthero

Better websites, engaging print designs.

1 Jan 2009

World of Goo

Independent game built the old fashioned way: by two people and a whole lotta love.

26 Dec 2008

24 ways: 2008

24 ways to become a better web designer: 2008 Edition.

18 Dec 2008

Bending Spacetime in the Basement

Do-it yourself experiment demonstrating universal gravitation and a wealth of asides.

British Printed Images to 1700

A digital library of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain. Will be ready in March 2009. Look at the Print of the Month section for a preview.

17 Dec 2008

Gerd Arntz Web Archive

Archive of the work of graphic design master Gerd Arntz now online.

13 Dec 2008

Arcana

Zeldman:

“Indeed, the more you look into these subjects—and I work with Eric Meyer, who is always investigating such arcana—the deeper you fall into the Twilight Zone, and the more amazed you are that anything on the web actually works.”

8 Dec 2008

Hubble Advent Calendar

Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2008.

4 Dec 2008

Make Your DVD Drive Region Free

The idiots in the movie industry continue to encourage the piracy of their movies by locking them to a ‘DVD Region’, and by lobbying for the computer industry to cripple DVD drives and other devices so that your computer can only play DVDs purchased in a certain country. Pure greed and imaginary lines on maps. If you have a Mac with a region-locked DVD drive look here and here for information about unlocking your drive.

16 Nov 2008

Good enough, freely available, at the right time

James Bennett:

“Ask an old-school Smalltalk programmer about C++ and Java sometime. Ask a trained document specialist what she thinks of HTML. Or ask a relational geek about MySQL. All of these are second-rate, partial implementations of vastly more elegant and powerful ideas, but they all took off and left the purists in the dust.”

And, The Rise of Worse is Better, and, I can’t believe it’s not XML!.

13 Nov 2008

Screengrab!

Firefox extension to save a webpage as an image.

8 Nov 2008

Problem With Date-Based URLs

A URL is an address which indicates the location of something on a network. After initial appreciation, even obsession, my opinion regarding the use of dates in URLs has changed.

I now think that unless you are specifically working with date-sensitive pages such as news or weblog archives, there is no need to include the published date of an article in a URL. Doing so only serves to make the URL longer and limits its ability to help advanced users guess the location of related content.

As an example take someone is writing a tutorial on their website. The tutorial is divided into a series of articles. The following URL would frustrate a user navigating from the browser address bar because the published date (which is irrelevant to the user navigating the page) would make their guess of substituting the number 1 for 2 in the end a wrong guess:

http://example.com/tutorial/2008/11/08/part-1
http://example.com/tutorial/2008/11/08/part-2 = 404 Page not found 
(unless part 2 was published on the same date).

A much better URL would be:

http://example.com/tutorial/part-1
http://example.com/tutorial/part-2 = Success, the second part of the tutorial loads!

Well-designed URL schemes should allow advanced users to guess the location of content related to what they are browsing, and the published date of an article should be featured in the article itself, not in the browser address bar.

Django Hardcopy Book to Get

Python Web Development with Django.

4 Nov 2008

TV Be Gone Open Sourced

The universal remote control for switching off annoying televisions anywhere is now open sourced so it can be freely modified and improved upon.

31 Oct 2008

Making Money With Free Software

Sounds like spam, but the title is precise.

24 Oct 2008

Build For Yourself

Or, do what you love.

14 Oct 2008

Listen, Question, Dare, Simplify

Paul Krugman: How I Work.

7 Oct 2008

Nasa Images

New site making all of Nasa’s images accessible to the public. A service of the Internet Archive. I like looking at images of space—they give much needed perspective on our earthly problems.

6 Oct 2008

Winesburg, Ohio

Do not become a mere peddler of words,

2 Oct 2008

Google Mac Playground

Software tools for Macintoshes from Google.

11 Sep 2008

Use Your Computer, Be Happy

A few good rules of thumb for computing happiness.

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