Tags: edit

Joe Coleman

Joe’s site is very clever …but is it as clever as Jon’s?

Fullstopnewparagraph — Freelance copywriter | London

Jon’s site is very clever …but is it as clever as Joe’s?

Improve Your Billing Form’s UX In One Day – Smashing Magazine

A few straightforward steps for improving the usability of credit card forms. The later steps involve JavaScript but the first step uses nothing more than straight-up HTML.

CodePen Projects Is Here! - CodePen Blog

Incredibly impressive work from the CodePen team—you can now edit entire projects in your web browser …and then deploy them to a live site!

I swore I wouldn’t write another book - Web Designer Notebook

Thinking of writing a book? Here’s some excellent advice and insights from Yaili, who only went and wrote another one.

Let me say this first: writing a book is hard work. It eats up all of your free time and mental space. It makes you feel like you are forever procrastinating and producing very little. It makes you not enjoy any free time. It’s like having a dark cloud hanging over your head at all times. At. All. Times.

The ‘Credit Card Number’ Field Must Allow and Auto-Format Spaces (80% Don’t) - Articles - Baymard Institute

A deep dive into formatting credit card numbers with spaces in online forms.

Typora — a minimal markdown reading & writing app

This looks like an interesting little Markdown editor. I think I’ll take it for a spin.

Technical Credit by Chris Taylor

Riffing on an offhand comment I made about progressive enhancement being a form of “technical credit”, Chris dives deep into what exactly that means. There’s some really great thinking here.

With such a wide array of both expected and unexpected properties of the current technological revolution, building our systems in such a way to both be resilient to potential failures and benefit from unanticipated events surely is a no-brainer.

Thimble by Mozilla - An online code editor for learners & educators.

This is a really, really nice tool for creating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without needing a separate text editor. And then you can publish the results to a URL.

It’s a bit like CodePen but it shows the whole HTML document, which makes it particularly useful for teaching front-end development to beginners (ideal for Codebar!).

CodePen for snippets; Thimble for pages.

At An Event Apart in Boston, I had the pleasure of meeting Hannah Birch from Pro Publica. It turns out that she was a copy editor in a previous life. I began gushing about the pleasure of working with a great editor.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the best. Working with Mandy on HTML5 For Web Designers was wonderful. One of these days I hope to work with Owen Gregory.

When I think back on happy memories of working with world-class editors, I always a remember a Skype call about an article I was writing for The Manual. I talked with my editor for hours about the finer points of wordsmithery, completely losing track of time. It was a real joy. That editor was Carolyn Wood.

Carolyn is going through a bad time right now. A really bad time. A combination of awful medical problems combined with a Kafkaesque labyrinth of health insurance have combined to create a perfect shitstorm. I feel angry, sad, and helpless. At least I can do something about that last part. And you can too.

If you’d like to help, Karen has set up a page for contributing to help Carolyn. If you could throw a few bucks in there, I would appreciate it very much. Thank you.

I have a new role at Clearleft. It’s not a full-time role. It’s in addition to my existing role of …um …whatever it is I do at Clearleft.

Anyway, my new part-time role is that of being a content buddy. Sounds a little dismissive when I put it like that. Let me put in capitals…

My new part-time role is that of being a Content Buddy.

This is Ellen’s idea. She’s been recruiting Content Guardians and Content Buddies. The Guardians will be responsible for coaxing content out of people, encouraging to write that blog post, article, or case study. The role of the Content Buddy is to help shepherd those pieces into the world.

I have let it be known throughout the office that I am available—day or night, rain or shine—for proof-reading, editing, and general brain-storming and rubber-ducking.

On my first official day as a Content Buddy on Friday I helped Ben polish off a really good blog post (watch this space), listened to a first run-through of Charlotte’s upcoming talk at the Up Front conference in Manchester (which is shaping up to be most excellent), and got together with Paul for a mutual brainstorming session for future conference talks. The fact that Paul is no longer a full-time employee at Clearleft is a mere technicality—Content Buddies for life!

Paul is preparing a talk on design systems for Smashing Conference in Freiburg in September. I’m preparing a talk on the A element for the HTML Special part of CSS Day in Amsterdam in just one month’s time (gulp!). We had both already done a bit of mind-mapping to get a jumble of ideas down on paper. We learned that from Ellen’s excellent workshop.

Then we started throwing ideas back and forth, offering suggestions, and spotting patterns. Once we had lots of discrete chunks of stuff outlined (but no idea how to piece them together), we did some short intense spurts of writing using the fiendish TheMostDangerousWritingApp.com. I looked at Paul’s mind map, chose a topic from it for him, and he had to write on that non-stop for three to five minutes. Meanwhile he picked a topic from my mind map and I had to do the same. It was exhausting but also exhilarating. Very quickly we had chunks of content that we could experiment with, putting them in together in different ways to find different narrative threads. I might experiment with publishing them as short standalone blog posts.

The point was not to have polished, finished content but rather to get to the “shitty first draft” stage quickly. We were following Hemingway’s advice:

Write drunk, edit sober.

…but not literally. Mind you, I could certainly imagine combining beer o’clock on Fridays with Content Buddiness. That wasn’t an option on this particular Friday though, as I had to run off to band practice with Salter Cane. A very different, and altogether darker form of content creation.

Kite - Programming copilot

This looks like it could be a very nifty tool to have at your disposal while coding. I like that it’s editor-agnostic.

mortenjust/cleartext-mac: A text editor that only allows the top 1000 most common words in English

This could pair up nicely with the most dangerous writing app.

The App-ocalypse: Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete? | Ars Technica

I really, really want to like this article—it’s chock full of confirmation bias for me. But it’s so badly-written …I mean like, just the worst.

Here’s an actual sentence:

So with a capable, HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and just about anything else with one site.

So, yeah, I’m still linking to it, but instead of it being for the content, it’s because I want to lament the dreadful state of technology writing.

This is the penultimate post in my 100 days project.

I’ve had quite a few people tell me how much they’re enjoying reading my hundred word posts. I thank them. Then I check: “You know they’re exactly 100 words long, right?”

“Really?” they respond. “I didn’t realise!”

“But that’s the whole point!” I say. The clue is in the name. It’s not around 100 words—it’s exactly 100 words every day for 100 days.

That’s the real challenge: not just the writing, but the editing, rearranging, and condensing.

After all, it’s not as if I can just stop in the

Nicholas Lindley: 100 Words: Day 1

This is nifty—Nicholas is also going for the 100 words exercise that I’ve been doing.

I want to know how it feels to write every day. But it’s not really just about writing. It’s about writing within constraints.

Design requires constraints. It’s a tired old cliché, but there’s something to it. Without constraints, is design even possible? Or is it then art? (not there’s anything wrong with art; I’m just trying to differentiate it from design: notice I didn’t say “just” art.)

The 140 characters of a tweet. The column inches of a newspaper story. The width of a button on an interface. These are all constraints.

It’s not just about writing. It’s about editing.

Index cards | A Working Library

A truly wonderful piece by Mandy detailing why and how she writes, edits, and publishes on her own website:

No one owns this domain but me, and no one but me can take it down. I will not wake up one morning to discover that my service has been “sunsetted” and I have some days or weeks to export my data (if I have that at all). These URLs will never break.

Hemingway

A useful text editor that analyses your writing for excess verbiage and sloppy construction. It helps you process your words, as it were.

STET

From the lovely people behind Editorially comes STET:

A Writers’ Journal on Culture & Technology