On Transient Slash Pages • Robb Knight
This is a great idea that I’m going to file away for later:
I like the idea of redirecting
/nowto the latest post tagged asnowso one could see the latest version of what I’m doing now.
Link tags: pages
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The personality of a personal website – Manu
Personal sites—and, more broadly, our digital lives—are a mirror of who we are. Some of us will try to neatly organize everything under one hyper-curated digital roof while others will scatter things around on 12 different domains and 24 services. Some will design a site for themselves and not touch it again for a decade while others will feel the need to redesign every 6 months. Those are all right answers to a question that doesn’t have wrong answers.
Streams of Consciousness · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
Your website is a way for you to share your stream of consciousness, that temporary and subjective and highly biased snippet of the universe, with everyone else, including your future self.
home sweet homepage
I can’t remember the last time that a website made me smile like this.
🐠 Robin Sloan: describing the emotions of life online
Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.
But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.
404PageFound – Active Vintage Websites, Old Webpages, and Web 1.0
Well, this is rather lovely! A collection of websites from the early days of the web that are still online.
All the HTML pages still work today …and they work in your web browser which didn’t even exist when these websites were built.
A History of the Web in 100 Pages - Web Directions
I’m excited by this documentary project from John! The first video installment features three historic “pages”:
- As We May Think,
- Information Management: A Proposal, and
- the first web page.
Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet | MIT Technology Review
Some suggested that the digital garden was a backlash to the internet we’ve become grudgingly accustomed to, where things go viral, change is looked down upon, and sites are one-dimensional. Facebook and Twitter profiles have neat slots for photos and posts, but enthusiasts of digital gardens reject those fixed design elements. The sense of time and space to explore is key.
Is it time for a Web Performance rebrand? – Simon Hearne
I think Simon is onto something here. While the word “performance” means something amongst devs, it’s too vague to be useful when communicating with other disciplines. I like the idea of using the more descriptive “page speed” or “site speed” in those situations.
Web Performance and Web Performance Optimization are still valid and descriptive terms for our industry, but we might benefit from a change to our language when working with others. The language we use could be critical to the success of making the web a faster and more accessible place.
A love letter to my website - DESK Magazine
We choose whether our work stays alive on the internet. As long as we keep our hosting active, our site remains online. Compare that to social media platforms that go public one day and bankrupt the next, shutting down their app and your content along with it.
But the real truth is that as long as we’re putting our work in someone else’s hands, we forfeit our ownership over it. When we create our own website, we own it – at least to the extent that the internet, beautiful in its amorphous existence, can be owned.
Why I Have a Website and You Should Too · Jamie Tanna | Software (Quality) Engineer
I know a number of people who blog as a way to express themselves, for expression’s sake, rather than for anyone else wanting to read it. It’s a great way to have a place to “scream into the void” and share your thoughts.
Why We All Need a Personal Website – Plus Practical Tips for How to Build One - Adobe 99U
The best time to make a personal website is 20 years ago. The second best time to make a personal website is now.
Chris offers some illustrated advice:
- Define the purpose of your site
- Organize your content
- Look for inspiration
- Own your own domain name
- Build your website
How Google Pagespeed works: Improve Your Score and Search Engine Ranking
Ben shares the secret of SEO. Spoiler: the villain turns out to be Too Much JavaScript. Again.
Time to Interactive (TTI) is the most impactful metric to your performance score.
Therefore, to receive a high PageSpeed score, you will need a speedy TTI measurement.
At a high level, there are two significant factors that hugely influence TTI:
- The amount of JavaScript delivered to the page
- The run time of JavaScript tasks on the main thread
Meet swup
This looks like a handy library for managing page transitions on sites that are not single page apps.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I really think that this handles 80% of the justification for using a single page app architecture.
page-transitions-travelapp
A demo of page transition animations by Sarah—she’s written about how she did it. I really like it as an example of progressive enhancement: you can navigate around the site just fine, but with JavaScript you get the smooth transitions as a bonus.
All of this reminds me of Jake’s proposal for navigation transitions in the browser. I honestly think this would solve 80% of the use-cases for single page apps.
Jon Aizlewood | Design systems don’t start with components
Jon’s worried that thinking about components first might damage the big picture.
One doesn’t create a design system starting with a loose collection of parts before creating the whole.
Won’t somebody think of the parents!?
Without creative direction, a design system becomes a group of disconnected elements existing alongside one another.
From Pages to Patterns – Charlotte Jackson - btconfBER2016 on Vimeo
The video of Charlotte’s excellent pattern library talk that she presented yesterday in Berlin.
Stories and Tools - Anil Dash
This post is ten years old, but I think it might still be the best attempt to demarcate a difference between web “sites” and web “apps”: think of them as stories and tools.
It’s also remarkably prescient about the need for an effort exactly like HTML5:
A widely-distributed, standards-compliant, browser and platform-independent library of functions that would perform the basic user interface functions for a web-based tool, relying on the server side only for the logic and data sourcing.
Page Speed Service Home
Performance shit just got real.
You can now sign up with Google to have your site pass every request through them and get your documents served up optimised.
Page Speed Online
A supremely useful tool from Google for measuring performance.