• On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: Living Like a Millionaire on Pennies a Day – "Now, I’m not talking about racking up thousands of dollars in consumer debt, or buying fancy cars and houses. I’m talking about something more valuable than that: having time. The only pre-requisite to living like a millionaire is being able to overcome your fear of uncertainty." Google: Google Street View Cars Sniffed Wi-Fi Networks | News & Opinion | PCMag.com – "Google Inc said its fleet of cars responsible for photographing streets around the world have for several years accidentally collected personal information that consumers send over wireless networks." Good job, Google. I'd completely slept on this…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: How to keep someone with you forever – "You create a sick system." I wanted to cry when I read this. Looking Back — Discord&Rhyme – "To be successful at bootstrapping, you have to cut every feature except those you think are absolutely necessary. Then you cut some that you thought that you absolutely had to have. You compromise your design because you need to get the product to market. You ignore automated testing and documentation because your code is too unstable to be held back by rigorous processes." Launching beta, or “How to decide when and where to cut corners” – 200+ Seamless Patterns Perfect…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    Just a few: Passive voice is killing your design documents – " I would argue that if the goal is to communicate clearly, actually stating and explaining the uncertainties is going to be much more helpful to readers." The Size Of Our World – Bad graphical quality, but cool comparison. 6174 (number) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Who comes up with stuff like this? Who sits around adding and subtracting numbers to find patterns? Ta Prohm temple at Angkor, Cambodia – Absolutely gorgeous. 8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live – I don't normally read the Onion (maybe I should!), but this…

  • Uncategorized

    Search-building: custom or Google

    Until earlier this week, I had a lousy site search in place. It was one of Google’s Custom Search Engines, barely configured and only on its own page, due to it’s hefty (and blocking!) JavaScript. I’d long since disabled WordPress’s search since my stories aren’t being run in WordPress, and I didn’t feel like trying to chew on the internal search mechanisms to include the stories. Last week, I started playing around with a project to create my own (Python) site search, including a crawler and Whoosh-based search. I’d seen the implementation of a Lucene search in Zend go fairly easy-peasy, and liked the idea of a self-hosted search. Problem…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: A Beginner’s Guide to Website Feedback – If I can wrap up and launch this damn character sheet app, stuff in this post will be handy for when it betas, especially the surveying. I suspect the LARPing audience will be sufficiently… opinionated to speak on it. Six Useful CSS3 Tools – Some of these are pretty slick, if you're moving into CSS3 development. Sharpening the blade, part MCMXVII: Nine Amazing Hours. – This is incredibly cool, and I plan to use it for a bit and see if it helps me focus. Amazing Examples of Paper Art – I almost hate to link to this, in…