Weekly Web Harvest for 2021-12-12

from this twitter post https://twitter.com/profannieoakley/status/1357768408671027202

Run checks and enforce conditions before posts are published. Built and designed for the WordPress block editor.

I guess PURL is the original URL shortener. But it was created not to abbreviate otherwise long and otherwise cumbersome URLs, but to make them more resilient and persistent over time. You could put a PURL into a catalog record and if the URL it pointed to needed to change you changed the redirect on the PURL server, and all the places that pointed to the PURL didn’t need to change. It was a beautifully simple idea, and has influenced other approaches like DOI and Handle. But this simplicity depends on a commitment to keeping the PURL up to date, because:

… every PID is a service commitment involving at least some sweat equity. (Kunze, 2018)

PURLs are only as good as the maintenance work that has gone into updating the underlying URLs when they inevitably change. And in the lucky cases where the underlying URL haven’t changed, all the work that has gone into managing the infrastructure behind that URL namespace in order for that URL to stay the same. Updating to remain the same, with apologies to Wendy Chun.

fun menu animation

The inside cover of Handpicked Tours had a handwritten message where a bookplate typically would go. Bearing the ransom-note-like appearance of having been cut up and reassembled, it offered congratulations —“you just found the ‘central branch’ Book and Zine TRADING Library!”— and instructions: “Be sure to leave something if you take something so the library stays well stocked!” 

Web3 is going just great
…and is definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already-smoldering planet.

A resource that provides guidance for designing ethically humane digital products through patterns focused on user well-being.

Effectively designed data visualizations allow viewers to use their powerful visual systems to understand patterns in data across science, education, health, and public policy. But ineffectively designed visualizations can cause confusion, misunderstanding, or even distrust—especially among viewers with low graphical literacy. We review research-backed guidelines for creating effective and intuitive visualizations oriented toward communicating data to students, coworkers, and the general public. We describe how the visual system can quickly extract broad statistics from a display, whereas poorly designed displays can lead to misperceptions and illusions. Extracting global statistics is fast, but comparing between subsets of values is slow. Effective graphics avoid taxing working memory, guide attention, and respect familiar conventions. Data visualizations can play a critical role in teaching and communication, provided that designers tailor those visualizations to their audience.

So my proposal is seven unconventional guidelines in how we handle websites designed to be informative, to make them easy to maintain and preserve. The guiding intention is that the maintainer will try to keep the website up for at least 10 years, maybe even 20 or 30 years. These are not controversial views necessarily, but are aspirations that are not mainstream—a manifesto for a long-lasting website.

The single tenant web is sustainable and scales differently. It does not have economies of scale. It does not scale vertically like the Big Web. It scales horizontally. As the Small Web scales, no single organisation or person scales alongside it. It does not centralise wealth and power.

Watch Excel experts compete head-to-head for the $10,000 Prize Money. Participants from 37 countries have taken part and now only 8 have left. Watch live on December 11, who will become the master of Excel!

I just received my grade for last week’s assignment for Professor Crane’s psychology course. The LMS reports that he spent 3 minutes grading me and that I earned a 64%. The LMS also shows that he spent an average of 10 minutes per assignment but I somehow only got 3 minutes. I also noticed that he spent 30 seconds looking at my discussion post, even though it was 500 words—meanwhile, he spent an average of three minutes reading per post. Finally, I saw that while grading my assignment (for all of 3 minutes) he also spent time in other browser tabs including LabDepot.com and SpiritHalloween.com. Given all of this, I’m concerned about how adequately Professor Crane is treating me and my work in his course. I have attached a full report of all his interactions with my data in the LMS for further clarification.

h/t Stephen Downes