Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend; we only have one face to maintain ownership of. Independence is the most productive, least invasive way forward.
I’m a little obsessed with web performance. I like being able to check a page’s core web vitals quickly and easily.
Four years ago, I made a Lighthouse bookmarklet. Whatever web page you were on, when you clicked on the bookmarklet you’d get the Lighthouse results for that page. Handy!
It doesn’t work anymore. This is probably because Google are in the loop. Four years is pretty good innings for anything involving that company.
I kid (mostly). Lighthouse itself is still going strong, despite being a Google product. But the bookmarklet needs updating.
Rather than just get Lighthouse results, I figured that the full PageSpeed Insights results would be even better. If your website is in the Chrome UX report, you get to see those CrUX details too.
So here’s the updated bookmarklet:
Drag that up to your desktop browser’s bookmarks toolbar. Press it whenever you want to test the page you’re on.
I’d be counting down the days until Google AMP shows up on https://killedbygoogle.com/ if it weren’t for the fact that I—like most people—routinely forget that AMP exists.
Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday night session 🎶🎻🎻🎻🎶 — with Jessica
Reading Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns.
Jen pointed me to this proposal, which should help smooth over some of the inconsistencies I documented in iOS when it comes to the Web Audio API.
I’ve preemptively add this bit of feature detection to The Session:
if ('audioSession' in navigator) {
navigator.audioSession.type = "playback";
}
This is a handy guideline to remember, even if there exceptions:
When a keyboard user follows a link, their focus should be taken to the new place; when a keyboard user presses a button, focus should remain on that button.
This is a great step-by-step guide to HTML by Estelle.
Oops! Here you go: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252746
Really? That’s so nice to hear! 😀
Oh. I just filed an issue on the WebKit Bugzilla like you initially said:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252746
Should I delete that?
This game is hard:
Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.
Video visions of aspirational futures made from the 1950s to the 2010s, mostly by white dudes with bullshit jobs.
Hmm …interesting. Maybe I should remove that bit until I confirm it.
I documented a weird bug with web audio on iOS a while back:
On some pages of The Session, as well as the audio player for tunes (using the Web Audio API) there are also embedded YouTube videos (using the
videoelement). Press play on the audio player; no sound. Press play on the YouTube video; you get sound. Now go back to the audio player and suddenly you do get sound!It’s almost like playing a
videooraudioelement “kicks” the browser into realising it should be playing the sound from the Web Audio API too.This was happening on iOS devices set to mute, but I was also getting reports of it happening on devices with the sound on. But it’s that annoyingly intermittent kind of bug that’s really hard to reproduce consistently. Sometimes the sound doesn’t play. Sometimes it does.
I found a workaround but it was really hacky. By playing a one-second long silent mp3 file using audio, you could “kick” the sound into behaving. Then you can use the Web Audio API and it would play consistently.
Well, that’s all changed with the latest release of Mobile Safari. Now what happens is that the Web Audio stuff plays …for one second. And then stops.
I removed the hacky workaround and the Web Audio API started behaving itself again …but your device can’t be set to silent.
The good news is that the Web Audio behaviour seems to be consistent now. It only plays if the device isn’t muted. This restriction doesn’t apply to video and audio elements; they will still play even if your device is set to silent.
This descrepancy between the two different ways of playing audio is kind of odd, but at least now the Web Audio behaviour is predictable.
You can hear the Web Audio API in action by going to any tune on The Session and pressing the “play audio” button.
I found this to be thoroughly engrossing. An articulate composition, you might say.
I couldn’t help thinking of J.G. Ballard’s short story, The Drowned Giant.
Browsers give you a ton of stuff for free, built right in, out-of-the-box. SPAs break all that, and force you to recreate it yourself with JavaScript. Most developers do it wrong, and for the ones who do it right, it results in a ton of extra code to recreate features the browser already gave you for free.
Yes!
Regular people, this morning: “Oh hey, today’s date is an interesting format!”
Me, eleven years ago: “Now if I time this just right…”
Reading About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney.
Eleven years ago, I made a prediction:
The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.
One year later, Matt called me on it and the prediction officially became a bet:
We’re playing for $1000. If I win, that money goes to the Bletchley Park Trust. If Matt wins, it goes to The Internet Archive.
I’m very happy to lose this bet.
When I made the original prediction eleven years ago that a URL on the longbets.org site would no longer be available, I did so in a spirit of mischief—it was a deliberately meta move. But it was also informed by a genuine feeling of pessimism around the longevity of links on the web. While that pessimism was misplaced in this case, it was informed by data.
The lifetime of a URL on the web remains shockingly short. What I think has changed in the intervening years is that people may have become more accustomed to the situation. People used to say “once something is online it’s there forever!”, which infuriated me because the real problem is the exact opposite: if you put something online, you have to put in real effort to keep it online. After all, we don’t really buy domain names; we just rent them. And if you publish on somebody else’s domain, you’re at their mercy: Geocities, MySpace, Facebook, Medium, Twitter.
These days my view towards the longevity of online content has landed somewhere in the middle of the two dangers. There’s a kind of Murphy’s Law around data online: anything that you hope will stick around will probably disappear and anything that you hope will disappear will probably stick around.
One huge change in the last eleven years that I didn’t anticipate is the migration of websites to HTTPS. The original URL of the prediction used HTTP. I’m glad to see that original URL now redirects to a more secure protocol. Just like most of the World Wide Web. I think we can thank Let’s Encrypt for that. But I think we can also thank Edward Snowden. We are no longer as innocent as we were eleven years ago.
I think if I could tell my past self that most of the web would using HTTPS by 2022, my past self would be very surprised …’though not as surprised at discovering that time travel had also apparently been invented.
The Internet Archive has also been a game-changer for digital preservation. While it’s less than ideal that something isn’t reachable at its original URL, knowing that there’s probably a copy of the content at archive.org lessens the sting considerably. I couldn’t be happier that this fine institution is the recipient of the stakes of this bet.
The bet was been won (not by me, thankfully) and Jason has some thoughts.
Watched @GavRov’s film Archive and thoroughly enjoyed it!
Now I want @DaveAddey to dissect the typography for https://typesetinthefuture.com and @ChrisNoessel to examine the interfaces for https://scifiinterfaces.com
The Long Now Foundation is dedicated to long-term thinking. I’ve been a member for quite a few years now …which, in the grand scheme of things, is not very long at all.
One of their projects is Long Bets. It sets out to tackle the problem that “there’s no tax on bullshit.” Here’s how it works: you make a prediction about something that will (or won’t happen) by a particular date. So far, so typical thought leadery. But then someone else can challenge your prediction. And here’s the crucial bit: you’ve both got to place your monies where your mouths are.
Ten years ago, I made a prediction on the Long Bets website. It’s kind of meta:
The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.
I made the prediction on February 22nd, 2011 when my mind was preoccupied with digital preservation.
One year later I was on stage in Wellington, New Zealand, giving a talk called Of Time And The Network. I mentioned my prediction in the talk and said:
If anybody would like to take me up on that bet, you can put your money down.
Matt was also speaking at Webstock. When he gave his talk, he officially accepted my challenge.
So now it’s a bet. We both put $500 into the pot. If I win, the Bletchly Park Trust gets that money. If Matt wins, the money goes to The Internet Archive.
As I said in my original prediction:
I would love to be proven wrong.
That was ten years ago today. There’s just one more year to go until the pleasingly alliterative date of 2022-02-22 …or as the Long Now Foundation would write it, 02022-02-22 (gotta avoid that Y10K bug).
It is looking more and more likely that I will lose this bet. This pleases me.
Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Learning a tune — with Jessica
Checked in at Village. with Jessica
Hacker News is an echo chamber focusing on computer posturing and self-aggrandizement. It is run by Paul Graham’s investment fund and sociopath incubator, Y Combinator.
There’s never been any reason to visit Hacker News, but now you really don’t need to ever go there. This site posts a weekly roundup, complete with commentary that’s even more snarky than Hacker News.
Here’s a fairly typical summary of a fairly typical thread:
A programmer at a spamhouse is transported to a world where people are not judged by the color scheme of their Atom window, but by the character assessment and culture fit reports they write about potential new hires. Hackernews spends a lot of time discussing how to bullshit people like the author into hiring them. A few Hackernews struggle with the knowledge that there are people who contribute to business without involving Git. Furious debates about “title inflation” break out amongst people who type javascript into computers and straight-facedly refer to themselves as “engineers”.
Oh, and I love the “about” page.
- Have a dedicated page for login
- Expose all required fields
- Keep all fields on one page
- Don’t get fancy
Here’s the source code for the WorldWideWeb project we did at CERN.
As of today, there’s just four more years to go, @Mathowie.
We should start planning a @LongNow get-together at the @Interval or @InternetArchive or something.
Checked in at Second Draft. Nightcap — with Jessica
Kowloonin’ around.
Checked in at Kwan Yu Roasted Meat 君御燒味. Char-siu — with Jessica
Making dumplings.
Checked in at Café Corridor. with Jessica
Workshop team 4.
Workshop team 3.
Workshop team 2.
Workshop team 1.
Going to Pittsburgh. brb
Hey @Mathowie, we’re over halfway there: https://adactio.com/journal/11937
cc. @LongNow
It has been exactly six years to the day since I instantiated this prediction:
The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.
It is exactly five years to the day until the prediction condition resolves to a Boolean true or false.
If it resolves to true, The Bletchly Park Trust will receive $1000.
If it resolves to false, The Internet Archive will receive $1000.
Much as I would like Bletchley Park to get the cash, I’m hoping to lose this bet. I don’t want my pessimism about URL longevity to be rewarded.
So, to recap, the bet was placed on
02011-02-22
It is currently
02017-02-22
And the bet times out on
02022-02-22.
Big Issue.
Passing by the Olympic Park, which is looking very Ballardian today.
Lea wasn’t happy with the lack of styling and extensibility of the datalist element, so she rolled her own lightweight autocomplete/type-ahead widget, and she’s sharing it with the world.
Wargames gameplay scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byn5PIZ0q4Q
Top Gun gameplay scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmfd9etbXGE
Channel 5 is showing War Games and Top Gun. It’s like the nerds vs. the jocks. You must choose a side.
(I’m watching War Games.)
Loch trout.
I’m back home after a bit of a whirlwind visit to the US for An Event Apart in Atlanta (which was, as always, superb). I’m currently battling east-west jet lag. My usual technique is exactly what Charles Stross describes:
Simply put: go to bed immediately but set an alarm to wake you after no more than 3 hours. Then get up, and stay up, until 11pm. That’s around 3-5 hours. During this time, do nothing more intellectually challenging than running a hot bath. You haven’t caught up with your sleep deficit, you’ve just pushed it back a bit: you are as cognitively impaired as if you are medium-drunk. Now is a good time — if you have the energy — to load your dirty clothes into the washing machine, have a bath, watch something mindless on TV, and catch up on web comics. Don’t worry: you won’t remember anything tomorrow. Just refrain from answering urgent business email, driving, assembling delicate instruments, or discussing important matters — if you do any of these things, odds are high that you’ll get them horribly wrong due to the impairment caused by cumulative sleep deprivation.
He goes on to wish for the invention of teleportation (and to describe a jet-lag inspired RPG).
There’s another situation where we have to deal with sitting in one place through a long uncomfortable experience: dental surgery. In that situation, we rely on medication to get us through. A little bit of nitrous oxide and the whole thing is literally over before you know it.
Why don’t we do the same thing for transatlantic air travel? The equipment is already in place—those oxygen masks above every chair could easily be repurposed to pump out laughing gas.
If this is a stupid idea, you’ll have to forgive me: I blame the jet lag.
Pretty!
The slides from Chris’s presentation on the known unknowns of the web.
Richard gives the lowdown on the new translate attribute in HTML.
Bobbie’s new journalism project is up and running on Kickstarter. Get in there!
James’s talk from Tools Of Change. Great stuff!
The secret to a good war movie is not in the depiction of battle, but in the depiction of the preparation for battle. Whether the fight will be for Agincourt, Rourke’s Drift, Helm’s Deep or Hoth, it’s the build-up that draws you in and makes you care about the outcome of the upcoming struggle.
That’s what 2011 has felt like for me so far. I’m about to embark on a series of presentations and workshops in far-flung locations, and I’ve spent the first seven weeks of the year donning my armour and sharpening my rhetorical sword (so to speak). I’ll be talking about HTML5, responsive design, cultural preservation and one web; subjects that are firmly connected in my mind.
It all kicks off in Belgium. I’ll be taking a train that will go under the sea to get me to Ghent, location of the Phare conference. There I’ll be giving a talk called All Our Yesterdays.
This will be non-technical talk, and I’ve been given carte blanche to get as high-falutin’ and pretentious as I like …though I don’t think it’ll be on quite the same level as my magnum opus from dConstruct 2008, The System Of The World.
Having spent the past month researching and preparing this talk, I’m looking forward to delivering it to a captive audience. I submitted the talk for consideration to South by Southwest also, but it was rejected so the presentation in Ghent will be a one-off. The SXSW rejection may have been because I didn’t whore myself out on Twitter asking for votes, or it may have been because I didn’t title the talk All Our Yesterdays: Ten Ways to Market Your Social Media App Through Digital Preservation.
Talking about the digital memory hole and the fragility of URLs is a permanently-relevant topic, but it seems particularly pertinent given the recent moves by the BBC. But I don’t want to just focus on what’s happening right now—I want to offer a long-zoom perspective on the web’s potential as a long-term storage medium.
To that end, I’ve put my money where my mouth is—$50 worth so far—and placed the following prediction on the Long Bets website:
If you have faith in the Long Now foundation’s commitment to its URLs, you can challenge my prediction. We shall then agree the terms of the bet. Then, on February 22nd 2022, the charity nominated by the winner will receive the winnings. The minimum bet is $200.
If I win, it will be a pyrrhic victory, confirming my pessimistic assessment.
If I lose, my faith in the potential longevity of URLs will be somewhat restored.
Depending on whether you see the glass as half full or half empty, this means I’m either entering a win/win or lose/lose situation.
A platform game with a twist. Play it and see. Surprisingly intuitive and utterly addictive.
Busker Du (dial-up) is a recording service for buskers through the telephone (preferably public payphones hidden in subway stations).
An even more speculative version of The Long Bet. Given a supposition (e.g. "What will the world be like when custom satellites are as easy to design and launch as your own website is today?"), you can add to a list of positive and negative outcomes.
An approach to releasing community-driven books that is more like software than traditional book publishing. Think versions instead of editions.
A greasemonkey-driven hypertext game: get from a starting Wikipedia page to your target solely by following links in the articles.
I’m about to head off to Gatwick yet again for another overseas trip. For once I’m not going to a conference or other geeky gathering. This is a trip I’ve been I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while: I’m going to Thailand with Jessica for an honest-to-goodness holiday.
I aim to do two things:
In what promises to be the gathering in the Orient this season, Scott and Cheryl will be getting married on a beach… on an island… in Thailand. I’m honoured that they’ve invited me along. The added presence of my antipodean brothers in arms like Cam, Dan, Lachlan and Tim means that a good time is guaranteed.
I do plan on taking lots of pictures. I don’t plan on checking email at any stage. I believe I have discharged any duties that were incumbent upon me so if you still want to get hold of me, sorry; you’ll just have to wait ‘till I get back.
Now I just need to run through any last-minute checks in preparation for the culture shock that awaits me at the other end of this flight to Bangkok.
Remember when I was bitching and moaning about the way that search works on Upcoming? Well, it looks like my whining has paid off. As of today, search is fixed.
Thank you, relevant Yahoo employees.
The second part of John Allsopp's superb series on semantics, philosophy and markup. Don't miss it! And be sure to go back and read the first part, too.
Jason Kottke has given up his day job. He is now attempting to make a living from personal publishing.
I, for one, welcome our new A-list blogger overlords.
Seriously, I think this is very brave and very cool. He explains his reasons for doing this and I find myself nodding my head in total agreement:
“The real problem was the tension between my web design career and my self-publishing efforts; that friction was unbalancing everything else. One of them had to go, and so I decided to switch careers and pursue the editing/writing of this site as a full-time job.”
Other people make their living from their blogs. Scrivs and John Gruber spring to mind. But this is a bit different. Whereas Scrivs and John Gruber write very focused blogs about very specific topics, Jason isn’t interested in that:
“I’m interested in too many things to settle on design or programming or writing or a particular topic.”
Also, the advertising model has been rejected as the revenue stream:
“In my experience, the third wheel of advertising often works to unbalance the relationship in favor of either the author or the readers (usually in favor of the author). If ads were involved, I might feel the need to change what or how I write to appease advertisers. I might write to increase pageviews and earn more revenue.”
Instead, he introduces the idea of micropatrons. Basically, if you enjoy the content, you can contribute money to support the site. Or not. It’s entirely up to you.
Personally, I find this model very intriguing. Neal Stephenson has spoken of Beowulf authors and Dante authors. What Jason is proposing combines the best of both worlds: the artistic freedom of the Beowulf author combined with the patronage of the Dante author.
Most of all, I’m excited by the hints of a return to more 0sil8 style content. Without the limitations of a nine to five job, I’m pretty certain that the constraints of the blog format will have Jason chaffing at the bit in no time. Like Heather, I’m beginning to have a canary-in-the-coal-mine reaction to everything being in a blog format.
I wish Jason all the best with his endeavour. I try put myself in his shoes and I don’t think I’d enjoy the pressure of having to publish to earn a crust but I can certainly fantasise about running a site like The Session as a full-time job. In fact, I just recently introduced a PayPal donation option to that site. I’ll be happy if it can cover the hosting costs.
I admire what Jason is doing. I admire it a lot. I really like that advertising doesn’t even enter into the equation. I’m starting to feel some of the old-school excitement I used to get from sites like 0sil8 and The Fray: personal publishing for its own sake.
I have the sneaking suspicion that the begrudgers at MetaFilter don’t recall a time before blogs. They appear to be fixated on the quality of links provided at Kottke.org. Trapped in a prison of their own making, they are incapable of looking past the walls of blogs to see the possibilities dawning on the horizon of personal publishing.
I took a trip on Friday to see the good folks over at Motionpath.
Their new office is in deepest, darkest Kemptown. That entailed a pleasant walk, taking in the sights of that end of town: delis, music shops, members of Supergrass.
Anyway, I had nice little tour of the new Motionpath office. They’ve got the place fitted with all the mod cons, most importantly Wi-Fi. Just about everyone there has a nice desk, an ergonomic chair and dual monitors.
Looking at the Matix-like increase in productivity that comes with having dual monitors, I was wishing there was some way I could use my iBook screen together with my iMac.
Well, wish no more. Todd Dominey points to an incredible little OS X app called Teleport.
Technically, it’s not the same as dual monitors. Instead, it allows you to contol two computers from the same input devices. So, you move the cursor to the edge of one screen and, voila!, it appears over on the other.
It’s like magic. Free beta magic.
I guess it’s not for everybody but if, like me, you have a desktop machine and a laptop, this is perfect.
Seems like I’m not the only one who has had trouble trying to get hold of an iMac for a test-drive.
According to this list, one of the things to be avoided in any blog is "your Mac fetish".
Tough.
I finally got to see/touch/feel the new iMac today. The local Mac dealership has been ridiculously slow off the mark getting an in-store model.
It really is quite amazing. From a sheer ergonomic point of view, it’s a breakthrough. Having the freedom to move the screen around at will is very liberating.
Like most groundbreaking ideas, it seems so obvious in hindsight: allow the user to control the viewing experience. Let’s hope we see that credo filter through to web design.
Now America has a faith-based war.
