Week 438 - Interesting links

Still Blogging in 2017

Tim Bray explains why he continues to blog in 2017. This paragraph in particular resonated with me.

The great dan­ger is that the Web’s fu­ture is mall-like: No space re­al­ly pub­lic, no store­fronts but na­tion­al brands’, no vi­su­als com­posed by am­a­teurs, noth­ing that’s on of­fer just for its own sake, and for love.

Reading these sort of posts make me want to write/post more. — CR

Fuck Facebook

John Gruber builds on Dave Winer’s reasons for not linking to Facebook with this passionate post about how Facebook is against the open web.

Treat Facebook as the private walled garden that it is. If you want something to be publicly accessible, post it to a real blog on any platform that embraces the real web, the open one.

As someone without an account I’m somewhat fascinated by the fact that Facebook is essentially invisible to me for the reasons mentioned in these posts. A quick search suggests that there are nearly 2 billion active Facebook users and yet I’ve essentially never seen anything that they’ve created. — CR

Deserter Election Manifesto

This is a manifesto I can get behind! Mostly because “The potato will be allowed into the ‘five-a-day’ club” :-) — CR

How much does a website cost?

I think this article by Harry Robbins is a really nice way to help someone non-technical understand what’s involved in building a website, what things you might be able to do yourself, and how much it might cost. It also pokes fun at the likes of Accenture and Serco for charging way too much! — JM

Accessible UK Train Timetables: Performance notes

This is a really fascinating write-up by Matthew Somerville on how he’s managed to make his excellent website seven times quicker than the official website on mobile devices. The train-related headings are a nice touch too. I was particularly interested by the “Going off the rails” section which explains how he’s used a Service Worker to do add some off-line caching functionality. — JM

Beaker: A peer-to-peer Web browser

This is a bit of a wacky experiment which borrows some of the ideas from Scuttlebutt which I mentioned a few weeks back. As I understand it, you can publish content on your server to a secure peer-to-peer network and easily create forks of other people’s content. It reminds me a bit of Ward Cunningham’s Smallest Federated Wiki, particularly given the JavaScript API which allows you to read & write to the website’s own files. — JM