The power of prototyping:
Most of my work is a set of disposables rather than deliverables, and I celebrate this.
I like the three questions that Chris asks himself:
- What’s the quickest, cheapest thing I can create to help make the next design decision?
- What can I create to best demonstrate the essence of the concept?
- How can I most effectively share the thinking behind the design with decision-makers?
While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.
This is excellent! A free web book (it’s a book! it’s a website!) that teaches you how to make a website from scratch:
I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.
👏
Fifteen years after the first one, Papercamp is back this September and the line-up looks good.
Long live the papernet!
There is something divine about creating. From building software to writing a book to completing a self-portrait, every act of creation is a miniature Genesis.
Speaking of doing things the long hard stupid way:
If you want to leave a fingerprint of talent on the world that lasts, get your hands dirty and practice your skill, because work that is beautiful and timeless demands dedication.
I feel my trajectory as a musician maps to the trajectory of the web industry. The web is still young. We’re all still figuring stuff out and we’re all eager to get better. In our eagerness to get better, we’re reaching for more complexity. More complex abstractions, build processes, and tools. Because who wants to be bored playing in 4/4 when you can be playing in 7/16?
I hope we in the web field will arrive at the same realization that I did as a musician: complexity is not synonymous with quality.
Can I get an “Amen!”?
Our hack week at CERN to reproduce the WorldWideWeb browser was five days long. That’s also the length of a design sprint. So …was what we did a design sprint?
I’m going to say no.
On the surface, our project has all the hallmarks of a design sprint. A group of people who don’t normally work together were thrown into an instense week of problem-solving and building, culminating in a tangible testable output. But when you look closer, the journey itself was quite different. A design sprint is typical broken into five phases, each one mapped on to a day of work:
There was certainly plenty of understanding, sketching, and prototyping involved in our hack week at CERN, but we knew going in what the output would be at the end of the week. That’s not the case with most design sprints: figuring out what you’re going to make is half the work. In our case, we knew what needed to be produced; we just had to figure out how. Our process looked more like this:
Now you could say that it’s a kind of design sprint, but I think there’s value in reserving the term “design sprint” for the specific five-day process. As it is, there’s enough confusion between the term “sprint” in its agile sense and “design sprint”.
As the commercial viability of the web grew, we saw more and more users become consumers and not creators. Many consumers see websites as black boxes full of magic that they could never understand. Because of this, they would never think to try to create something.
This is a shame. We lost a little piece of the magic of the web when this culture came about.
A call to action to create a fan site about something you love. It would be an unmonetisable enthusiasm. But it’s still worth doing:
- The act of creation itself is fun!
- Sharing something you love with the world is worthwhile.
- You’ll learn something.
So here’s the challenge:
- Create a Fan Site.
- Help someone create a Fan Site.
- Create a webring.
Charlotte’s opening talk at the Material conference was really excellent—a great narrative at the intersection of code and creativity.
This looks like a really interesting two-day event here in Brighton in November. Like Indie Web Camp, it features one day of talks followed by one day of making.
After a day of tech talks from project teams using their skills for social good, you’ll have the chance to take part in workshops and hackathons to use your own talents for a worthy cause.
And you get to go up the i360.
The ideas and images that come to mind when you think of technology as an instrument are more useful than if you think of it as a tool. Instruments — I’m specifically talking about musical instruments — are a way to create culture.
You approach instruments with a set of expectations and associations that are more humane. It’s built into their very purpose. Instruments are meant to make something for other people, not making things. When you use an instrument, you have an expectation that it is going to take effort to use it well. Using an instrument takes practice. You form a relationship with that object. It becomes part of your identity that you make something with it. You tune it. You understand that there’s no such thing as a “best” guitar in the same way that there’s not necessarily a “best” phone.
Although design gets conflated with creation, its the act of improving what already exists — organising a room, editing a text, refining an interface, refactoring a codebase — that I enjoy the most.
Making fire, building shelter, throwing spears …all useful post-apocalyptic skills documented on the primitive technology blog.
Primitive technology is a hobby where you make things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials. This is the strict rule. If you want a fire- use fire sticks, an axe- pick up a stone and shape it, a hut- build one from trees, mud, rocks etc. The challenge is seeing how far you can go without modern technology. If this hobby interests you then this blog might be what you are looking for.
I think it’s worth revisiting this post by Laurie on a regular basis for a shot of perspective and inspiration.
The web saved my life and then built me a new one. A single living entity, it touches everything in the world and is always getting better — and I can help. I owe it so much; if I can help it out, make it better in any small way, how can I possibly refuse? And if I can make it easier for other people to help make it better, then my efforts are multiplied.
Indie Web Camp Brighton 2016 is done and dusted. It’s hard to believe that it’s already in its fifth(!) year. As with previous years, it was a lot of fun.
The first day—the discussions day—covered a lot of topics. I led a session on service workers, where we brainstormed offline and caching strategies for personal websites.
There was a design session looking at alternatives to simply presenting everything in a stream. Some great ideas came out of that. And there was a session all about bookmarking and linking. That one really got my brain whirring with ideas for the second day—the making/coding day.
I’ve learned from previous Indie Web Camps that a good strategy for the second day is to have two tasks to tackle: one that’s really easy (so you’ve at least got that to demo at the end), and one that’s more ambitious. This time, I put together a list of potential goals, and then ordered them by difficulty. By the end of the day, I managed to get a few of them done.
First off, I added a small bit of code to my bookmarking flow, so that any time I link to something, I send a ping to the Internet Archive to grab a copy of that URL. So here’s a link I bookmarked to one of Remy’s blog posts, and here it is in the Wayback Machine—see how the date of storage matches the date of my link.
The code to do that was pretty straightforward. I needed to hit this endpoint:
http://web.archive.org/save/{url}
I also updated my bookmarklet for posting links so that, if I’ve highlighted any text on the page I’m linking to, that text is automatically pasted in to the description.
I tweaked my webmentions a bit so that if I receive a webmention that has a type of bookmark-of, that is displayed differently to a comment, or a like, or a share. Here’s an example of Aaron bookmarking one of my articles.
The more ambitious plan was to create an over-arching /tags area for my site. I already have tag-based navigation for my journal and my links:
But until this weekend, I didn’t have the combined view:
I didn’t get around to adding pagination. That’s something I should definitely add, because some of those pages get veeeeery long. But I did spend some time adding sparklines. They can be quite revealing, especially on topics that were hot ten years ago, but have faded over time, or topics that have becoming more and more popular with each year.
All in all, a very productive weekend.
Jake describes the pivotal moment of his web awakening:
I explored the world wide web. I was amazed by the freedom of information, how anyone could publish, anyone could read. Then I found a little button labeled “View source”. That was the moment I fell in love with the web.
It all goes back to having a ZX Spectrum apparently. Pah! Luxury! I had a ZX81—one K of RAM …1K! Tell that to the young people today, and they wouldn’t believe you.
Anyway, this is a lovely little reminiscence by Jake, although I have no idea why he hasn’t published it on his own site.
Still a few days left to back this great project for Brighton:
Build, tinker, make and play! For anyone with imagination, The Brighton Makerlab lets ages 8 to 80 create cool stuff with technology.
Good news, Brighton! There’s a Maker Club opening up on London Road (above the new Presuming Ed coffee shop). Grab your robot kits and come along.
Shutterstock are running a series on their blog called “The Best Thing I Ever Created” and they asked me for a contribution. So I wrote about The Session.