Link logging
CSS: From Zero to Hero
The crashiest crash course for all things CSS. Covers all the basics — you won’t be ready to tackle all the things, but you’ll be good to go for most things.
How Many .com Domain Names Are Unused?
Some key features:
There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered.1 Of these, roughly 1/3 are in use (businesses, personal websites, email, etc.), another 1/3 appear to be unused, and the last 1/3 are used for a variety of speculative purposes.
My take away, as always, is that the internet is REALLY big…but only a little itty bit of it sees a meaningful amount of traffic. Leading us to…
Why isn’t the internet more fun and weird?
Three things MySpace got right
- To make a page on MySpace, all it took was text in a textbox.
- The text could be words or code.
- Anyone could read the words and see the code.
Continuing, later:
The internet is the great equalizer (1996). People used to believe that. Today, it sounds sarcastic.
We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don’t deserve the right to code in everyday products. Users are too stupid. They’d break stuff. Coding is too complicated for ordinary people. Besides, we can just do the coding…so why does it matter?
I’m all for making the internet weird again. It is something I’m trying to get more cozy doing here, on my personal website.
And if you want to do that (make the internet weird again) we should preserve folks’ ability to get their feet wet, and their hands dirty on the web!
HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points
However, when it comes to frameworks and approaches which build complexity around writing HTML and CSS, there is something deeper and more worrying than a company having to throw away a couple of years of work and rebuild because they can’t support a poorly chosen framework.
When we talk about HTML and CSS these discussions impact the entry point into this profession. Whether front or backend, many of us without a computer science background are here because of the ease of starting to write HTML and CSS. The magic of seeing our code do stuff on a real live webpage! We have already lost many of the entry points that we had. We don’t have the forums of parents teaching each other HTML and CSS, in order to make a family album. Those people now use Facebook, or perhaps run a blog on wordpress.com or SquareSpace with a standard template. We don’t have people customising their MySpace profile, or learning HTML via Neopets. We don’t have the people, usually women, entering the industry because they needed to learn HTML during that period when an organisation’s website was deemed part of the duties of the administrator.
Neopets forever.
Also, read this thread, then read it again…and then maybe a 3rd time.
Decentralization is Not Enough
This (medium) post does a great job spelling out the pitfalls of a lot of the new wave of web tech that is purported to be “saving” the web, or whatever. It is groovy if you a nerd…but essentially this new tech is just helping to build a walled garden for nerds. Sure “anyone” can join…but very often you must be this nerd to enter. I think this is a very real issue for the IndieWeb community, too.
Leaving the web-punditry-zone now.
A few early marketing thoughts
I’ve been re-assessing my freelance work, and found this post from Julia Evans to be wicked timely.
I’m not really certain if I should be doing any marketing, to be honest, and if I should be doing any, I’m not sure what kind I ought to be doing.
The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight
On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures.
The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
I’m hooked. Also, are they gonna make a 3rd National Treasure movie? I’m ready for it.