Programming SucksAlso, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts. **** This is what it is to learn programming. You get to know your useful tools, then you look around, and there are some handy new tools nearby and those tools show you the bottomless horror that was always right next to your bed. **** Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it’s literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. […]

snarfed/granary: ? The social web translator.The social web translator. Fetches and converts data between social networks, HTML and JSON with microformats2, ActivityStreams, Atom, JSON Feed, and more. Paul Ford on Twitter: “Oh my god enough about generations it’s just astrology for opinion columnists.” / Twitter How to Build a Low-tech Website? | LOW?TECH MAGAZINEPage size has decreased more than sixfold, number of requests has decreased fivefold, and download speed has increased tenfold. Note that we did not design the website for speed, but for low energy use. ….. In contrast, this website runs on an off-the-grid solar power system with its own energy storage, and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather. Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels. ….. When is the best time to visit? The accessibility of this website depends on the weather in Barcelona, Spain, where the solar-powered web server is located. To help visitors “plan” their visits to Low-tech Magazine, we provide them with several clues. Low-tech Lab List: My Maximalist Lifehacks – McSweeney’s Internet TendencyI always say “yes” — even when no one is asking a question, or speaking, […]

Logging Activity With The Web Beacon API — Smashing MagazineThe Beacon API is used for sending small amounts of data to a server without waiting for a response. That last part is critical and is the key to why Beacon is so useful — our code never even gets to see a response, even if the server sends one. Beacons are specifically for sending data and then forgetting about it. We don’t expect a response and we don’t get a response. Did you know that style and script tags can be set to display: block? | CSS-TricksThe other night, Amit Patel mentioned that you can set script tags in HTML to display: block with CSS and then edit that code inline with the contentEditable attribute. This means that you can then see it all update live in the browser as you type. Shortly after, Marius Gundersen replied that you can do this with the style tag as well. A pre-history of weeknotes, plus why I write them and perhaps why you should too (Week 16)Writing: I know from experience that naming and recording these wobbly feelings is valuable because, at some point in the not-too-distant, you come back to your own work and say, “holy shit, that’s amazing, how was I capable of that,” and then you read the historic […]