Seattle’s iconic tower is getting its first deep cleaning since the thing opened in 1962, and KOMO has some pretty awesome pictures of it going down. I wonder how noticeable the different will be? The needle does look dirty — and I’m not talking its phallic shape.
Details and comments »Big congrats to my old cronies at the Lawrence Journal-World (Best News Web Site with fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors), as well as my friends at MSNBC.com (Best Community Web Site with over 1 million unique monthly visitors), and The New York Times (Best News Web Site with over 1 million unique monthly visitors and others).
Details and comments »Several months ago, I spoke at Refresh Seattle. Kenny Meyers came. We met and became friends. For months, he has bothered me to write a blog post on the topic I spoke about, rehashing my slides and presentation. For months, I ignored him. So, the bastard wrote the blog post himself.
And it’s good. Check it out.
Details and comments »Sarah pointed me to this stop-motion animation today, and my jaw dropped. It’s incredibly beautiful, but beyond that, I can’t even begin to conceive how difficult and tedious it must have been to make. Truly an amazing work.
Details and comments »Keith wrote a really nice and thorough piece on how to engage Blue Flavor, if you might be interested in talking to us. He talks about how we scope, estimate, and charge for projects, what kind of projects we want (and don’t want), and how both sides can be successful in the early stages — and this is only part one of a series.
Details and comments »After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails…
As a Django fan and evangelist, I admit it would give me great pleasure to see this as a colossal failure for Rails, point, laugh, and generally poke fun at all the Rails fanboys and girls.
But let’s be real for one minute. Twitter doesn’t suck because of Rails. Twitter sucks because they have ridiculous amounts of traffic (especially to their API and SMS gateways), a limited ability to cache (a non-realtime Twitter is a pretty useless Twitter), and (as far as I can tell), they’re not making any money, so they probably have limited resources to pour into more hardware.
The bottom line is that Twitter will probably cause major scaling problems for any platform, be it Rails, Django, Java, .NET, PHP, or tin cans with a string tied between them. Ruby is undeniably slow compared to Python, Java, and PHP, but I really doubt the problems Twitter deals with are at the Ruby level, anyway. Much as I wish they weren’t, anyone who says Twitter sucks because of Ruby on Rails is either foolish or joking.
Twitter sucks because of Rails. Just joking.
Details and comments »Great Mac-buying advice from the guys at Macword. There definitely are still a lot of people out there who seem to think you need a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro for even moderately heavy use, such as that a typical web designer does. In reality, a Macbook or iMac is plenty of computer for 90% of users out there. General rule: unless you’re a hardcore Mac gamer or doing professional-level video editing or 3D modeling, you probably don’t need a pro-level machine.
Details and comments »If you use Django and Omnigraffle and find yourself mocking up Django admin screens, this could be useful.
Details and comments »A large database of celebrities, coupled with the products they use, with a pretty design slapped on top of it. Awesome.
Details and comments »You Look Nice Today is an audio-based Journal of Emotional Hygiene, staffed by lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies.
In other words, its a podcast by some of the funniest dudes on Twitter. Check it out.
Details and comments »Safari is probably the most reliable browser out there when it comes to rendering things as a standards-aware developer would expect, but there are those rare times when you need to target it specifically with some unique rules. For those cases, this article will point you in the right direction.
Details and comments »Its name is a bit on the cheesy side — but wow, this is one sexy-lookin’ car.
Details and comments »Eye-Fi, the already-cool line of WiFi enabled SD cards, just added a new trick to its bag: geocoding. The cards use WiFi triangulation (the same technology used in Apple’s iPhone) to determine your location and embed the data in each photo’s EXIF data. Unfortunately, this is never 100% accurate, like GPS technology would be (which probably is a dealbreaker for me). Still, at $130, this a is clever and affordable solution to quickly geotagging your photos.
Details and comments »My buddy Sarah has been ranting about this for a few weeks now, and she’s finally put it on her blog. I totally agree with her: 90% of the time, a text message, e-mail, IM, or voicemail is the right form of communication. It’s not that often that you really need to talk to me on the phone. As such, Sarah wants a data-only plan from her wireless provider. Sarah and I have both been bitten in the ass by massive overage charges on SMS messages — all the while using a miniscule percentage of our voice minutes. Give us an unlimited data-only plan, and we’ll be happy to pay by-the-minute for the few voice calls we do make.
Details and comments »I don’t know many other languages well, but I do know that Python was the first language that ever really made sense to me — and I attribute that, in large part, to the clean syntax and large collection of included and third-party libraries.
Details and comments »“Hillary Clinton began the race with all sorts of advantages, but she and her advisers never grasped how much had changed.” A nice summary of the reasons why Obama was able to overtake Hillary, despite her being the obvious choice.
Details and comments »A new package which aims to let you associate Django users with OpenIDs, providing a login workflow similar to that of ma.gnolia. Haven’t tried it, but it sounds good!
Details and comments »Dan, Justin, and Rob roll out a big new feature for StrawPoll—the ability to run your own Twitter polls. Clever stuff, using the Summize API. Nice job, guys!
Details and comments »Wow. This parkour-inspired game looks like a ton of fun. Amazing visuals. via Wilson.
Details and comments »Friend of Blue Flavor, Kenny Meyers, has a blog. Its first post is titled, “Peaxal.com is up. Fuck you.” It’s funny. Kenny’s a smart and witty young dude who’s also a talented writer — this is a blog to watch.
Details and comments »Two questions: 1. Steampunk is mainstream, now? Weird. 2. Did the New York Times really just use a numeral “2” in a headline? Wow, maybe txt’ing really is killing the English language.
Details and comments »The great team at Pb Elemental has built another beautiful house in my Seattle neighborhood. When I can afford it (read: never), these guys are my choice. Love it.
Details and comments »Web operations can only thrive when they are staffed by people who get the Web and enjoy using the Web. These are people who categorically prefer the Web over print publications. If this doesn’t describe your journalism organization, then you are doing something wrong.
Word.
Details and comments »Sara’s got a short little how-to on using clipping and transparency in web design to create some screens over photos and other similar layout options. Good stuff!
Details and comments »Flickr’s George Oates has a great piece on A List Apart about building community around your site — something that Flickr has done as well as anyone.
Details and comments »I’m anxious to meet these two. I’m pretty fascinated by the coworking concept, and Office Nomads looks to be a great new space in Seatte.
Details and comments »So it appears that, short of a set of stone tablets carried down from the hills of Mountain View, we do have a fairly clear answer. Using CSS image replacement in a responsible way, where the image truthfully represents the content it’s replacing, is safe to use. The simple act of hiding text from users is not enough to get your site banned from Google’s index.
I think most of us have always suspected non-shady use of image replacement would be fine by Google, but now we (mostly) know for sure. Thanks, Dave!
Details and comments »I actually welled up here in the office when I watched this video of the incredible display of sportsmanship that went down when Western Oregon’s Senior softballer Sara Tucholsky hit her first career homerun in a conference championship game, only to blow out her knee as she rounded first base. “You hit the ball over the fence — you deserve it.” Awesome story, man. Awesome. via Kottke.
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