Tags: expression

Personalization

A look at how personalisation works in digital interfaces and real-world objects.

Indiepeople

I believe strongly in the indieweb principles of distributed ownership, control, and independence. For me, the important thing is that this is how we get to a diverse web. A web where everyone can define not just what they write but how they present is by definition far more expressive, diverse, and interesting than one where most online content and identities must be squished into templates created by a handful of companies based on their financial needs. In other words, the open web is far superior to a medium controlled by corporations in order to sell ads. The former encourages expression; the latter encourages consumerist conformity.

Personal Websites as Self-Portraiture | starbreaker.org

What, then, is a personal website? It is precisely that, personal. It is a new kind of self-portraiture done not with pencils, charcoal, ink, or paint. Instead it is self-portraiture done in markup language, code, prose, images, audio, and video.

A Recipe to Your Own Home-Coded Personal Website

There’s a sort of joy in getting to manually create the site of your own where you have the freedom to add anything you want onto it, much like a homemade meal has that special touch to it.

Interfacecritique — Olia Lialina: From My To Me

Don’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation.

• From: jeremy@adactio.com
• To: guardian.readers@theguardian.com

Hello,

My name is Jeremy and I’ve been a paid subscriber to The Guardian for a few years now. But I’m considering cancelling my account after reading this editorial.

On the face of it, the headline of the article sound reasonable and hard to disagree with. But the substance of the article downplays anti-trans views as simply being “gender critical.” This is akin to describing segregationist views as “integration critical.”

This line is particularly egregious:

As a society, we need to resolve the question of how to protect the privacy, dignity and rights of trans women while also respecting the privacy, dignity and rights of those born female.

Setting up these positions as though one in any way invalidates the other gives oxygen to those who wish to paint someone’s identity as a threat. I’m very disappointed to see this viewpoint expressed in an editorial on The Guardian website.

Yours,

Jeremy Keith

mmm.page

This is a fun drag’n’drop way to make websites. And I like the philosophy:

Websites shouldn’t all look the same. We prefer campy, kitschy, messy, imperfect.

esoteric.codes

Languages, platforms, and systems that break from the norms of computing.

Simon Collison | This used to be our playground

Tending this website keeps me sane. I think of it as a digital garden, a kind of sanctuary. … And if my site is a kind of garden, then I see myself as both gardener and architect, in so much as I make plans and prepare the ground, then sow things that grow in all directions. Some things die, but others thrive, and that’s how my garden grows. And I tend it for me; visitors are a bonus.

A thoughtful and impassioned plea from Colly for more personal publishing:

I know that social media deprived the personal site of oxygen, but you are not your Twitter profile, nor are you your LinkedIn profile. You are not your Medium page. You are not your tiny presence on the company’s About page. If you are, then you look just like everyone else, and that’s not you at all. Right?

Painting With the Web · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.

Fussy Web, True Meaning. · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Websites are primarily seen as functional software, built to fulfill a business objective and to reach quantifiable goals. The field of user experience is obsessed with KPIs, jobs-to-be-done, optimized user flows, and conversion rates. And in quest of ever more efficient processes – and in the spirit of true modernists –, design and development teams try to standardize solutions into reusable templates and components, streamlined pattern libraries, and scalable design systems.

iHateRegex - regex cheatsheet for haters

Piece together your own regular expression or choose from a pre-made selection.

(Like the creator if this site, I’m not a fan of regular expressions …or they’re not a fan of me. The logic just doesn’t stick in my brain.)

It’s Time to Get Personal ◆ 24 ways

When people ask where to find you on the web, what do you tell them? Your personal website can be your home on the web. Or, if you don’t like to share your personal life in public, it can be more like your office. As with your home or your office, you can make it work for your own needs. Do you need a place that’s great for socialising, or somewhere to present your work? Without the constraints of somebody else’s platform, you get to choose what works for you.

A terrific piece from Laura enumerating the many ways that having your own website can empower you.

Have you already got your own website already? Fabulous! Is there anything you can do to make it easier for those who don’t have their own sites yet? Could you help a person move their site away from a big platform? Could you write a tutorial or script that provides guidance and reassurance?

Exploring the Linguistics Behind Regular Expressions

Before reading this article, I didn’t understand regular expressions. But now, having read this article, I don’t understand regular expressions and I don’t understand linguistics. Progress!

Xaviera López

Beautiful animation work.

VerbalExpressions/JSVerbalExpressions

Regular expressions are my kryptonite so I can definitely imagine using the PHP port of this plain English syntax.

Cameron’s World

A wonderful collection of treasures excavated from GeoCities. Explore, enjoy, and remember what a crime it is that Yahoo wiped out so much creativity and expression.

Travis Schmeisser: We Used To Build Forts on Vimeo

I loved this talk from Travis at New Adventures in Web Design, especially when he talked of the importance of Geocities and MySpace in democratising creative expression on the web.

We may have later bonded over that Ze Frank quote while in the toilet at the after-party …there may have even been hugs.

Responsive images with ExpressionEngine — John Faulds

Here’s an approach to responsive images in the Expression Engine CMS …but I fundamentally disagree with the UA-sniffing required.

txt2re: headache relief for programmers :: regular expression generator

I’m rubbish at regular expressions so this little tool might just save my skin someday.