Ryan Tomayko

Introducing: Readability 1.5 —

The Arc90 guys have a nice little Readability update. Two new styles with beautiful Typekit faces and more size and margin options.

This is cool too:

Beyond the “wow, this makes reading so much easier” comments is a whole slew of emails from the elderly, people with vision or cognitive difficulties and users that rely on screen readers. It’s incredibly gratifying to see Readability make a difference for so many people.

For the record, I’m rocking the Athelas style (type info) with Large type and Medium margins.

"It's like twitter. Except we charge people to use it." —

This email exchange is quite possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever read on the web. Here’s a tiny piece:

Actually, you were asking me to design a logotype which would have taken me a few hours and fifteen years experience. For free. With pie charts. Usually when people don’t ask me to design them a logo, pie charts or website, I, in return, do not ask them to paint my apartment, drive me to the airport, represent me in court or whatever it is they do for a living. Unfortunately though, as your business model consists entirely of “Facebook is cool, I am going to make a website just like that”, this non exchange of free services has no foundation as you offer nothing of which I wont ask for.

It’s just pages and pages of that.

Thank you @mojombo.

UPDATE: @SimonEdhouse responds
UPDATE: zing

The Weirdest Clouds that You’ll Ever See —

Cloud computing at its best.

Slow Web —

There’s a web that’s well-considered and worth savoring. We’ll show you where. — I fell in love with the term “Slow Web” immediately after reading that description, and the blog isn’t half bad either. If you’re a tl;dr type, or prefer to not wander outside the things on the web that are merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational, then keep moving.

Via: Chris’s Trivium 13sep2009

Common HTTP Implementation Problems, W3C Note —

Interesting W3C Note from January 2003 that I don’t remember ever seeing:

HTTP and URIs are the basis of the World Wide Web, yet they are often misunderstood, and their implementations and uses are sometimes incomplete or incorrect. This document tries to improve this situation by providing a set of good practices to improve implementations of HTTP and related standards (Web servers, server-side Web engines), as well as their use.

The information here is relevant to people who build web apps, not HTTP server implementors — the title is a bit misleading (not actually but practically). I especially like this bit about why short, less meaningful URLs are better than verbose, descriptive URLs. Shortness has become the most important characteristic of URL design in most apps I’ve built recently; SEO be damned.

The Google Search Redesign —

It was terrifying to think that they may have actually considered making the page more edgy in some retarded acknowledgement of bling.com. Best redesign ever.

20 tips for writing for the web —

And every one is worth reading yet another “20 tips” post.

Heroku Pricing —

I’ve been staring at this screen for two sleepless weeks now. Really glad to have it wrapped. James Lindenbaum (CEO/founder/bad-ass) did most of the conceptual design work. seaofclouds did the fucking amazing illustrations and took the design to completion. Pedro Belo did the HTML/JavaScript and server side stuff. Definitely one of the best teams I’ve worked on.

8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs —

Measure, Leading, Quotes, Rhythm, Widows, Emphasis, Scale, and Rags. Great piece.

Dive into history, 2009 edition —

Mark Pilgrim: “Anyway, I now realize that there were some hidden assumptions behind my design decisions in 2000. Some of those assumptions turned out to be wrong, or at least not-completely-right. Sure, a lot of people downloaded dip, but it still pales in comparison to the number of visitors I got from search traffic. In 2000, I fretted about my ‘home page’ and my ‘navigation aids.’ Nobody cares about any of that anymore, and I have nine years of access logs to prove it.”

I don’t think most people realize how little site navigation matters anymore. Your site’s navigation is google, topic sites, blogs, and feeds. The “website” is dead. Long live the individual useful resource.

Things I hate about kitchen user interfaces —

For real. The best microwave is one that has a single timer dial that moves as time elapses. No one ever uses all those buttons. I use exactly one button on my current microwave: “Quick Minute” (hitting it as many times as needed) but I’d prefer a dial.

Taming Perfectionism —

Real artists ship.

Showcase Of Clean And Minimalist Designs —

Smashing Magazine shows off a massive catalog of minimalist designs and then attempts to deconstruct them.

Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design —

Stefano Mazzocchi: “I have a much simpler and humble goal here: give programmers some tricks and some advice in how to proceed to make their web pages look cleaner, more readable and, hopefully, more professional, elegant and original than before.”

Conditional classnames —

Using conditional comments to stick an “ie” classname on <body> so that you can target IE from a single CSS file instead of bringing in a separate stylesheet. Nice hack.

"Air Budd Form Builder" meets "/admin Considered Harmful" —

Bill Burcham applies the technique of making form controls inherit style from their container in the Air Budd Form Builder Rails plugin. Cool.

Minima —

Alex Payne’s tumble-like blog on minimalism in coding and design. I didn’t realize @al3x was such a huge conscious follower of the minimalist aesthetic, although I’ve definitely noticed it in his work.

Google's undocumented favicon to png convertor —

I’m using this on all of my “linkings” index pages now (see here, for example). It works pretty well. I really like the idea of integrating a piece of the destination site’s visual identity instead of using a generic del.icio.us/bookmark icon. Some site’s with favicons don’t work properly, however, and I’d give anything to have another parameter that let me override the default globe icon (this one: ). It’d be nice if I could say, grab the favicon for this domain but if it doesn’t exist, give me the favicon for delicious.com ().

Tap Tap Tap —

Looks like Paul Hammond is in the process of resurrecting his blog.

Typography for Lawyers —

For lawyers?!?? This site is way too useful and right to limit it to lawyers.

Minimalism Revisited Theme —

Jonas Arnfred: “This theme is a sleek and simple minimalist design for wordpress made to bring the content forward, and everything else out of view. The theme is designed with a focus on typography and effective whitespace …”

There’s More Than One Way to Skin a… Dataset —

This is why I have a really weird fetish for graphs. It’s not the colors and shapes, it’s the fact that any data has an infinite set of potential visualizations and some are vastly better than others, depending on your needs.

Minimalism —

if any – Another hella-great minimalist design.

Typesites review's jon tangerine —

Nice review of the various typographic tact found at Jon Tangerine’s Pith & pulp http://jontangerine.com/

The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces —

Interesting look at evolution of UI and the semi-recent trend of adopting the web’s content oriented interface. Definitely overlaps with the fundamentals of “admin debris” and related ideas.

highlight.js —

JavaScript based source highlighter with support for many languages in separate modules. Similar to the JavaScript Prettifier in that <pre><code> blocks are automatically detected and highlighted without an explicit language class.

Why PHP is good but bad —

Not sure how I missed linking to this. Pretty much mirrors my feelings on PHP to a T, except more thought out.

Why your Flash website sucks —

Spot on.

Presentational JavaScript to adjust text line-height in proportion to text column width. —

“If you can’t control the text width the next best thing you can do to compensate for an overly wide text measure is to increase the leading.” — I never considered that but it makes sense.

Printing a Book with CSS: Boom! —

Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie show off some of Prince’s more advanced CSS and HTML features, including styling page size, generating headers/footers, advanced use of the CSS content attribute, page numbering, cross-references, and table of contents.

Dear IE6, I hate you —

“There comes a time in every old browser’s life to pack up shop and, well, fuck off. This time has come and gone for IE6 …” Also: “42% of global users are still browsing the web with IE6.”

The problem with pixels —

“… anybody who’s ever built out a relatively complex design using ems will agree that at some point they wondered if the benefit was really worth the effort.”

Provide us with the email address we should not contact. —

Makes sense to me.

ArchitectNotes - Varnish —

“I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975.”

Run Internet Explorer 5/6/7 Natively in OS X —

This trumps Leopard for most important Mac development this year as far as I’m concerned. Words cannot explain the hatred I’ve developed for booting up multiple Parallels VMs to get at IE.

Submit a Twitter Bug —

Gets my vote in Best Bug Reporting Screen.

USING COLOR IN INFORMATION DISPLAY GRAPHICS —

Color theory for computer interface designers.

Why Programmers suck at Picking Colors —

“Let me repeat this because it’s very important: contrast is the basic building block of UI design.”

CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL —

“… CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don’t build actual web apps…”

E-mail is not a platform for design [zeldman.com] —

“But when I say HTML mail still sucks, I don’t mean it sucks because support for design in e-mail today is like support for standards in web browsers in 1998. I mean it sucks because nobody needs it. It impedes rather than aids communication.”

Diavlo [demon.nl] —

Absolutely beautiful font … and free.

Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid —

Yes! I’ve been doing this for a few months now with the corp. assets and I won’t go back. You can really see the text snap into a vertical rhythm when you hit it.

Less sucky multiple-select lists —

Another interesting take on multi-select lists that uses checkboxes with labels and colors.

Multi-Select Lists vs. Checkboxes —

I’m real close to hating multi-select list boxes right now. Using an overflowed UL of checkboxes has some interesting pros (and cons).

Amos O. Olagunju / St. Cloud State University —

This is the “home page” of a professor who teaches web design at St. Cloud State University. Don’t go there.

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without —

Very nice list of CSS techniques.

Graffletopia - Stencils for OmniGraffle —

Rock on.

kuler —

Handsome Flash based color mixing tool and color theme sharing site.

Web Pages That Suck presents the biggest web design mistakes in 2004 learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design —

A perfect article.

Most websites are crammed with small text that is a pain to read. Why? —

I’m sure I don’t know.

CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions —

Big list of resources on CSS based forms.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web —

This site is really starting to come along now. The latest addition on how to manage vertical spacing in intervals is something I’ve been wondering about for a while now.

AJAX Activity indicators —

Animated GIFs designed to indicate your site is doing something…

Curing Float Drops and Wraps —

I run into these problems on a daily basis…

CSS Import™ —

this site rocks

Color Scheme Generator 2 —

This is probably the nicest color picker for choosing compliments off of a base color.

300 Images From 1800 Sites —

A bunch of nice little bullet images. I can never find them when I need them…

JavaScript Reference —

Decent javascript reference. I really like the format but the cards are images so you can’t use your browser’s find to locate stuff…

Web Building: Style Templates —

Big list of sites that provide CC licensed CSS layouts and tools for generating layouts.

Emacs WebDev Environment —

Information on setting up emacs for (X)HTML web development including nxml-mode, rng-validate-mode, etc.

CSS - Quirks mode and strict mode —

Information on quirks vs. strict mode for HTML/CSS rendering: how to trigger, what DOCTYPEs do what, etc.

4096 Color Wheel Version 2.1 —

Is it just me or are color pickers the only apps that are innovating on the web? You can never have too many of these.

Cascading Style Cheatsheet —

Styled for landscape printing…

Quotations and citations: quoting text —

Some information on using proper q and blockquote elements in HTML and then styling them with CSS to fix all the browser brokeness.

Full-back HTML tattoo —

hardcore!

communication skills —

Punctuation substitution!

ColorMatch Remix —

Another great all-html color-picking app.

Full CSS Property Compatibility Chart —

red/green/yellow for specific css attribute support in major browsers.