onfocus

Deconstructing the new Gmail/G+ interface for design ideas.

ok, it's 2011. No site is perfect, but it probably is time to shame sites that store plain text passwords. Especially those sites from big companies with the means to change things.

Dear media, please give Andy Rutledge complete control over the design of your sites. Thanks.

"...there will always be the open web for the geeks, the misfits, the eccentrics, the control freaks, and any other term we can think of to proudly express our healthy skepticism of giving up too much control over what really should be ours."

Dave Winer is correct: "Have the courage to stake out your spot on the open web. Fill it with delicious treats, and connect it to others. That's creativity."

Oh boo! Google is going to change the name of Blogger to "Google Blogs". Sounds pretty bland to me, but I'm biased for obvious reasons.

Derek's original design for Blogger. I remember the code name: Blue Note. It'll be a shame to lose that personality, but corporations gonna corporate.

"...Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship." Excellent rant about the ephemeral nature of Facebook (among other things).

Looking for "picture of the day" at wikipedia is a good way to find potential desktop background pictures.

This is even better than the Chrome extension: "If you don't like a site that appears in your search results, you can block all the pages within that site. Then you won't see any of those pages when you're signed in and searching on Google."

"Wow, the new algorithm yielded far superior results." Great to see Google responding to complaints about content farms with substantive changes. Sounds like their latest tweaks have demoted sites that are simply copies of original sources.

Hooray, Alan Taylor's new photography / journalism weblog is live!

Nostalgia-drenched photorealist still life paintings.

Nice browser extension that embeds site previews on Twitter. (It works better than that sounds.)

"...none other than Corvallis stands out as the top city in the country for innovation — after you account for its size. New York is merely average." Some theoretical physicists are looking at new ways to measure the creative output of cities.

Awesome vintage terminal emulator with a hilarious incentive to purchase. [via waxy]

And apparently the Web is for complaining. [via seanyboy]

Some auto-generated ebooks based on top Stack Overflow questions in various categories.

"Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web?"

Fantastic engravings from an 18th century book on religious practice across the world.

Nice description of the terrifying uniform plague doctors wore in the Middle Ages.

Matt Cutts: "...we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content." Nice to see Google responding to the recent flood of criticism.

A jQuery port of Prototype's PerodicalUpdater method that includes a polling interval decay if updates aren't happening.

"...if after a few Ajax polls there’s no data, there probably won’t be for a while. Maybe the site is overloaded or the queue is backed up. In those circumstances the continued polling adds additional unwanted strain to the site." Another polling approach: increase the interval every time.

"And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world." Valid concerns about Flickr, advertising, and how we fund the Web.