Q: Why can't you remember the music from Marvel movies? A: temp music!
(In music we might call this "demo-itis," a condition whereby you so fall in love with the sound of your demo, you dislike any attempt to record a "final" version. Or, maybe you just want to save a few bucks.)
Posted March 30, 2017
You don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes talking to a purveyor of content on the web to realize that the question keeping them up at night is how to improve the performance of their stories against some engagement metric. And it’s easy enough to see the logical consequence of this incentive: At the bottom of article pages on nearly every major content site is an “Around the Web” widget powered either by Outbrain or Taboola. These widgets are aggressively optimized for clicks. (People do, in fact, click on that stuff. I click on that stuff.) And you can see that it’s mostly sexy, sexist, and sensationalist garbage. The more you let engagement metrics drive editorial, the more your site will look like a Taboola widget. That’s the drain it all circles toward.
Posted March 28, 2017
From the Google Chrome team: a "simple API called Web Share that allows websites to invoke the native sharing capabilities of the host platform."
Posted March 27, 2017
Postlight engineer director Gina Trapani tries to make sense of the modern JavaScript landscape.
Posted March 24, 2017
(Amazon link) A collection of brain-melting short sci-fi stories from a polluted and impoverished future that is a lot less depressing than I just made it sound. This has been out since 2010 but I recently re-read the whole thing. RIYL Ted Chiang, et al.
Posted March 23, 2017
Adventures beneath the surface of Mars, by Der-shing Helmer, author of The Meek, another webcomic I haven't started in on yet. Helmer's biology background makes for some interesting Martian fauna. Backed by me on Patreon.
Posted March 22, 2017
An independent streaming channel featuring short science fiction films. Also on YouTube.
Posted March 21, 2017
Web-safe font stacks, complete with browser support. (Cue sound of designers weeping Helvetica support.)
Posted March 20, 2017
A post-mortem on the PewDiePie fiasco. The always-on, always-producing YouTuber culture sounds exhausting.
Posted March 17, 2017
A lightweight Unix CLI for automating tasks. Intended primarily for test automation but probably a useful replacement for the Linux-exclusive inotifywait. (Via)
Posted March 16, 2017