Monday Links - Week 235

Small Build, Big Execution

A rats nest of wires on a breadboard is not a finished project, it is an easily damaged mess.

This is basically the motivation that drove me towards Printer – I’d made a hacky thing (Timmy) that ended up being such a hassle to re-assemble when I came back to it, and such a weight on my mind, that I decided to re-build it in such a way that I (or, as it happens, anyone) could come back to it and find a useful artefact. — JA

Public perceptions of statistics (or the Daily Mail is poisonous)

‘A new survey by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London shows just how wrong public opinion can be on key social issues such as crime, benefit fraud and immigration.’ That’s the official description taken from these survey results, but what I think it shows is that Goebbels was right: if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. The Daily Mail constantly appeals to its readers natural xenophobic tendencies to such an extent that people believe their propaganda. They make money by stirring up outrage, consequences be damned. — TW

Low End Box

I told Chris that I’d dig up this link a few weeks ago, and then totally forgot. The hosting provider we use (Linode) is excellent and can supply some pretty powerful machines, with up to 40GB of RAM. However, sometimes the application you want to deploy doesn’t really need more than a few hundred megabytes of RAM or access to a lot of processing power. Heroku is one option for those cases, but you can also rent a low-spec VPS for less than £2 a month from many different providers; Low End Box provides links to all sorts of options. — JA

Why mobile web apps are slow

If mobile browsers are becoming more and more capable, why do so many companies insist on making dedicated apps for their products, rather than building a mobile web app? There’s probably a bit of walled garden building going on, not to mention some herd mentality (we’ve got to be on the App Store!), but this very comprehensive article points at a third reason - web apps on mobile phones are slow and will remain slow. — TW

The #indieweb as a minimum viable social web ecosystem

This great post (hosted on the idno software) explains how we can build on the indieweb movement to find/demonstrate the business value in these “decentralized social models”.

I find the work being done in this area really interesting and it really motivates me to want to build some of the indieweb features into Roosmarks. — CR