But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.
This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!
Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.
There’s quite a crossover between resilience and longevity:
- Understand the requirements
- Keep scope small and fixed
- Reduce dependencies
- Produce static output
- Increase Quality Assurance
🤣
I’m fascinated by eponymous laws, and here’s a whole bunch of them gathered together, including a few I hadn’t heard of (mostly from the world of software).
The album Hounds Of Love by Kate Bush turned 40 years old this month. It has really stood the test of time. It still sounds like nothing else.
It’s kind of two albums in one.
There’s the A side with all those perfect pop songs—Running Up That Hill, Hounds Of Love, Cloudbusting, The Big Sky—each one brilliant and self-contained.
Then there’s the B side, The Ninth Wave. It’s like its own concept album within an album. It’s weird and challening, but I love it.
At times it’s downright frightening but the whole thing ends on a joyous note with The Morning Fog. There’s something about the clarity of the closing lines that brings me to tears:
I’ll tell my mother
I’ll tell my father
I’ll tell my loved one
I’ll tell my brothers
How much I love them
That’s after the magnificence of The Jig Of Life which happily crosses over with my love of Irish traditional music.
But, as with traditional Irish music, Hounds Of Love was not something I was into when I was growing up. Quite the opposite.
See, my brother was really into Kate Bush. And if my brother was into something, then I didn’t want anything to do with it. We didn’t really get along.
Mostly that worked out fine. I don’t think missed out on much by avoiding the Electric Light Orchestra, the Alan Parsons Project, and other Partridge-esque bands. But I was wrong to avoid Kate Bush.
It was only by the time I got to art college that I was able to listen to Hounds Of Love objectively, encouraged to do so by a girlfriend at the time who was a huge fan.
Now I’m listening to it again.
Ah, those closing lines …there’s just something about them.
I’m so sorry.
😲
I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:
RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.
- Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm
- Pick a Framework Before You Know You Need One
- Always, Always Require a Compilation Step
I love the interactive illustrations in this article filled with type and architecture nerdery!
We’re at a point in the most ecosystems where pulling in libraries is not just the default action, it’s seen positively: “Look how modular and composable my code is!” Actually, it might just be a symptom of never wanting to type out more than a few lines.
It always amazes me when people don’t view dependencies as liabilities. To me it feels like the coding equivalent of going to a loan shark. You are asking for technical debt.
There are entire companies who are making a living of supplying you with the tools needed to deal with your dependency mess. In the name of security, we’re pushed to having dependencies and keeping them up to date, despite most of those dependencies being the primary source of security problems.
But there is a simpler path. You write code yourself. Sure, it’s more work up front, but once it’s written, it’s done.
I really like Brad’s new project, Cold Album Drumming:
Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?
I got a kick out of watching him play along to Radiohead’s In Rainbows and The Decemberist’s The Crane Wife.
I was really into The Decemberists in the first decade of the 21st Century. I remember seeing them in a long-gone Brighton venue more than twenty years ago.
But I kind of stopped paying attention to them after they released The Hazards Of Love. Not because I didn’t like that album. Quite the opposite. I love that album. I think in my mind I kind of thought “That’s it, they’ve done it, they can go home now.”
It’s exactly the kind of album I should not like. It’s a concept album. A folk-rock opera.
When I was growing up, concept albums were the antithesis of cool. Prog rock was like an insult.
You have to remember just how tribal music was back in the ’70s and ’80s. In my school, I remember the divide between the kind of people who listened to The Cure and The Smiths versus the kind of people who listened to Prince or Queen. Before that you had the the mods and the rockers, which in hindsight makes no sense—how are The Who and The Jam not rockers?
Looking back now, it’s ridiculous. I get the impression that for most people growing up in the last few decades, those kind of distinctions have been erased. People’s musical intake is smeared across all types and time periods. That is a good thing.
Anyway, a folky prog-rock opera like The Hazards Of Love is exactly the kind of thing that past me would’ve hated. Present me adores it. Maybe it’s because it’s got that folky angle. I suspect Colin Meloy listened to a lot of Horslips—heck, The Decemberists even did their own mini version of The Táin.
Speaking of mythic Irish language epics, I really like John Spillane’s Fíorusice:
Fíoruisce - The Legend of the Lough is a three-act Gaelic folk opera composed by Irish artist John Spillane. It is a macaronic or bilingual work. The work is an imagined re-Gaelicization of the Victorian Cork fairytale Fior-usga collected by Thomas Crofton Croker in the 1800’s and published in his book Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1828). The story is a surreal tale culminating in a drowned kingdom, which as lore tells us, becomes The Lough in Cork city as we know it today. They say, you can see the tops of the underworld towers on a clear day and hear the music of their big party on Midsummer’s night.
Yup, it’s another concept album. And funnily enough, past me was not a fan of John Spillane either.
I first heard him when he was part of a trad band called Nomos in Cork in the early ’90s (the bódhran player’s mother was friends with my mother). I really liked their tunes but I thought the songs were kind of twee.
Over the years, the more of his songs I heard, the more I understood that John Spillane was just being completely open and honest. Past me thought that was twee. Present me really respects it. In fact, I genuinely love his songs like Johnny Don’t Go To Ballincollig and All The Ways You Wander.
And then there’s Passage West. It’s a masterpiece. I might be biased because Passage West is the next town over from Cobh, where I grew up.
So yeah, Fíorusice is something that past me would’ve disdained:
Present me is into all three.
It’s Bandcamp Friday today. I think I know what I’m going to get.
Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.
In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:
“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”
Sunday morning session
Back in July 2023 I went into the studio along with the rest of Salter Cane.
We had been practicing a whole lot of new songs for over a year beforehand. Now we were ready to record them.
We went in with a shared approach. We were going to record everything live. We were going to prioritise the feeling of a particular take over technical accuracy. And we weren’t going to listen back to every take—that can really eat into the available time and energy.
This approach served us really well. We had an incredibly productive couple of days in the studio collaborating with Jake Rousham, who we had worked with on our previous album. We ended up recording eleven songs.
After that burst of activity, we took our time with the next steps. Chris recorded additional vocals for any songs that needed them. Then the process of mixing everything could start.
After that came the mastering. We hired Jon Sevink—fiddler with the Levellers. He did a fantastic job—the difference was quite remarkable!
We decided to keep two songs in reserve to have a nine-song album that feels just the right length.
The album is called Deep Black Water. It’s available now from all the usual digital outlets:
We decided not to make any CDs. We might make a vinyl version if enough people want it.
I really, really like how the album turned out. These are strong songs and I think we did them justice.
I hope you’ll like it too.
Deceptive design meets gamification in this explanatory puzzle game (though I wish it weren’t using the problematic label “dark patterns”).
I created this interactive experience to explore the intersection of design ethics and human psychology, helping us all make more informed choices while browsing the web.
Withdrawing from a conference I was supposed to be speaking at later this year. The line-up currently shows that out of a total of 73 speakers, a grand total of 8 are women.