NotesWhen Pipes first appeared, it seemed as if the geeks were interested in building tools that increased opportunities to engage in programming the web, using the web.
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NotesEverything about apps feels like a win for users—they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.Unfurl
NotesIt's for all these reasons that I hope Twitter genuinely ceases to be. I want a product that enables me to build and participate in communities, that encourages discussions and expressing meaningful ideas. Not one that systemically encourages harassment, abuse, and shouting as loud as you can, and which on its best day, is a glorified link aggregator. And not a very good one.FeedUnfurl
NotesIt’s also worth pointing out that we do take certain technical measures to limit the data we collect. We’ve designed Persona so that the identity provider – including the fallback Identity Provider that we run – does not learn your browsing history. We consider that a good security practice, not specifically because of surveillance, but generally because collecting data without a user benefit just creates risk.Unfurl
NotesI’ve long privately thought that Firefox should treat feed reading as a first-class citizen of the open web, and integrate feed subscribing and reading more deeply into the browser (rather than the lame, useless live bookmarks.) The impending demise of Reader has finally forced me to spit out my thoughts on the issue. They’re less polished than I like when I blog these days, but here you go – may they inspire someone to resuscitate this important part of the open web.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe IPython Notebook is a web-based interactive computational environment where you can combine code execution, text, mathematics, plots and rich media into a single documentUnfurl
NotesIn the coming era both the opportunities and threats to the Web are just as big as they were 15 years ago. As the role of data grows and device capabilities expand, the Internet will become an even more central part of our lives. The need for individuals to have some control over how this works and what we experience is fundamental. Mozilla can — and must — play a key role again. We have the vision, the products and the technology to do this. We know how to enable people to participate, both by contributing to our specific activities and coming up with their own ideas that advance the bigger cause of enriching the Web.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes The missing APIs must be added to the web platform in order to enable the billions of new mobile users who will be coming online in the next few years to have affordable web-based phones, tablets, and apps. Emerging market consumers and developers generally cannot afford increasingly higher-end, native-app-advantaged smartphones from the two bigs.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notesin my heart I long for someone to come along with a true Web runtime that lets developers write to a standards-based multi-vendor platform that no one company owns. Democracy is messy, but the Open Web is worth it. Don’t read one article and think that it can’t be done.FeedUnfurl
NotesThe tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.Unfurl
NotesBrewBlogger 2.3.2 is a easy to set up, easy to use, browser-based homebrew logging and calculation suite. It is a PHP/MySQL-based system that provides today's brewer not only a fast and easy way to record their brewing activities, recipes, and awards, but also forum to share their zymurgistic efforts and expertise with the homebrewing community around the world.Unfurl
NotesFirst of all, we understand that this will be frustrating to extension developers, and our decision wasn't made lightly. We went to a lot of effort in the design of the extension system to make it possible for people to self-host. All of the formats and protocols involved in the extension system were made simple with the idea that developers could re-implement them. It makes us sad to take off-store install away.Unfurl
NotesThe WARC (Web ARChive) format specifies a method for combining multiple digital resources into an aggregate archival file together with related information. The WARC format is a revision of the Internet Archive's ARC File Format [ARC_IA] format that has traditionally been used to store "web crawls" as sequences of content blocks harvested from the World Wide Web. The WARC format generalizes the older format to better support the harvesting, access, and exchange needs of archiving organizations. Besides the primary content currently recorded, the revision accommodates related secondary content, such as assigned metadata, abbreviated duplicate detection events, and later-date transformations.Unfurl
NotesSo now I'm on the cusp of releasing a tool that allows you to write directly onto the web in an outliner. The distance between the content on your machine and it being on the web is one mouse-click. That's exactly how far you want it to be. My father is not alive to see this, but if he were, he'd probably die from excitement. This is something he and I shared, at a genetic level, in our DNA, is this idea that the human mind can reach outside of itself, onto a computer, to make even more powerful and useful intellectual structures. Honestly, I wish he were here to share this with me. permalinkFeedUnfurl
Notes Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we're redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we'll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we'll kill our apps, too. Unfurl
NotesBecause when I would spend my time flinging zingers at Matt Mullenweg about the merits of Movable Type vs. WordPress, you know who was winning? Mark Fucking Zuckerberg. Facebook won the blogging wars. The web became a more closed place than if either Movable Type or WordPress had evolved into the tool that powered social networking.Unfurl
NotesWhat we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.Unfurl
NotesWhile that fight is far from over, we’re now at a distinct point in the evolution of the web, and Mozilla has appropriately looked around, and broadened its reach. In particular, the browser isn’t the only strategic front in the struggle to promote and maintain people’s sovereignty over their online lives. There are now at least three other fronts where Mozilla is making significant investments of time, energy, passion, sweat & tears. They’re still in their infancy, but they’re important to understand if you want to understand Mozilla:Unfurl
NotesThese projects are all very different, but the dynamic is the same. Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.
Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of 'exit event' is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed. Unfurl
NotesBecause for now it’s insane. Presenting good articles in the hope of attracting readers, and then making the site do everything it can to shoo away those readers, is plumb nuts.FeedUnfurl
NotesBezos runs through the features that will soon set the tech world ablaze—the $199 price tag, the easy-to-hold size, the seamless access to Amazon’s rich and growing collection of digital media. When the Fire is introduced, analysts will declare it the strongest competitor yet to the iPad. Yet the Fire is not just a rival gadget, but something essentially different. The iPad is the flagship of the post-PC era—in which the desktop is replaced by lean, portable, gesture-driven tablets. As people will learn when Amazon ships it today, November 14, the Fire is an emblem of a post-web world, in which our devices are simply a means for us to directly connect with the goodies in someone’s data center.Unfurl
NotesJust as /Library is now hidden from an OS X Lion user, and just as the iOS platform is locked down and sandboxed, RSS is simply dropping off into the background. Content is being syndicated and aggregated just as before. Perhaps even more so than in the past. Virtually everyone with a Facebook, Google+, or Twitter account follows a news-providing entity. Those entities share content feeds. Those content feeds are generally derived from the XML and Atom feeds that comprise the RSS.EmbedUnfurl
NotesI found myself responding to a Google+ thread this morning wherein a respected technology leader said “copying and pasting from social networking sites is not journalism.” Apparently he’d been seeing random Tweets referenced on TV and thought it was lazy, pointless and a sign that journalism is going down the tubes.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"I see no reason why Chrome won't rise to above 20% in the short term. This means, of course, that the market share of Firefox and Internet Explorer will continue to drop. But as I noted some time back, this really isn't a huge problem for Firefox - although it is for Microsoft. The reason is quite simple: Firefox was never aiming at world domination, it was fighting to create an open Web where no browser held such a dominant position that it could ignore open standards and impose de facto ones instead. We pretty much have that now, with Internet Explorer increasingly standards-compliant - and proud of it, amazingly."Unfurl
Notes"However, one of the world's biggest hardware vendors - whose name every single reader will be familiar with, and whose hardware a good share of you will be using right now - apparently didn't do their homework. When Opera's sysadmin booted up the server to test its web-based administration interface, they came across a single JavaScript statement that managed to piss off everyone up to and including the CTO."Unfurl
Notes"I mean "hackable" in the sense that one can decide to experience it in ways that were not exactly what the author decided it would be. In short, the Web is not TV. It's not PDF either. Nor Flash."Unfurl
Notes"That’s because while I was watching the kids rolling down the grass slope on top of Parliament House, rev="canonical" started to gain some serious momentum, billing itself as a way to shorten URLs that “doesn’t hurt the Internet.” In my opinion, this is an interesting idea with an very unfortunate execution that’s bad for the Web, and I’m going to enumerate the reasons here. "FeedUnfurl
Notes"RevCanonical is url shortening with a twist. Instead of creating its own super short versions of links, it checks to see if the link owner has published a shortened version of the given page using HTML link element. If not, we just return the original URL. And you should bug the link owner about providing a better alternative."Unfurl
Notes"So there are clear benefits for both the service (low cost of entry, potentially easy profit) and the linker (the quick rush of popularity). But URL shorteners are bad for the rest of us.I feel that shorteners are bad for the ecosystem as a whole. But what can be done to improve the situation?"Unfurl
Notes"Stallman's dismissal of cloud computing and call for the categorical rejection of web services is puzzling in light of the potential opportunities created by web technologies and the innovative work that is being done by software freedom advocates to bring openness to the web. Stallman should be using his visibility to promote adoption of the principles embodied in the Franklin Street Statement. Instead he is undermining those efforts by disingenuously dismissing the entire concept of network computing."Unfurl
Notes"Chief executive of Mozilla Corp., maker of the Firefox Web browser, which broke Microsoft Corp.'s hold on the market so that it couldn't dominate the Internet the way it does computer operating systems. About 95% of Web surfers used Microsoft's Internet Explorer in 2004; now 20% use Firefox, and other companies are offering browsers that are smarter and faster than ever before. But don't call it a browser war. "We all want the Web to be good. I am glad for the innovation and all the big brands working on it.""Unfurl
Notes"office furniture and equipment piled on curb; landlord says “chronic non-payment of rent” caused eviction of web hosting company IAS; provides service for AATA; AATA website currently down;"FeedUnfurl
Notes"So. What happens in 10–20 years time to the now quite large number of professional web developers.Do we all just do the same thing we’re doing now. Just with higher version numbers? ... Do we all become managers? ... Is their another industry that will have us?"Unfurl
Reflections on the Closure of Yahoo Pipes | OUseful.Info, the blog...
database-antipattern - IndieWebCamp
quakejs.com
The Best About:Config Tweaks That Make Firefox Better
gif.js
The vanishing personal site – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
The IPython Notebook — IPython
Celebrating 15 Years of a Better Web | Mitchell's Blog
MWC 2013, Firefox OS, and More Web API Evolution | Brendan Eich
The rise and fall of webOS is an epic tale; webOS != Web OS on Dion Almaer's Blog
Inside the GIF-Industrial Complex | New Republic
How Mozilla Was Born
BrewBlogger Version 2.3.2 - The Browser-Based Homebrew Logging Solution
WARC, Web ARChive file format
Scripting News: Outlining and my father
mnot’s blog: JSON or XML: Just Decide
We, the Web Kids - Pastebin.com
The purported death of RSS
Why Stallman is wrong when he calls cloud computing stupid - Ars Technica
Mozilla chief John Lilly is fired up about making a better Web browser - Los Angeles Times
Ann Arbor-based Web hosting firm's eviction sends clients scrambling -
The Ann Arbor Chronicle » Jones Drive (near Broadway)