Samuel Orr is proucing an hour long documentary on Cicadas. Right now, North America has a broud in the millions singing their song right about now. It won’t be like that for much longer and it will be another 17 years before it happens on this scale again.
Orr is running a Kickstarter campaign to offset the cost of production and get the film to PBS sooner. I’m very tempted to back it… I find bugs fascinating.
…After all, I do have a Merit Badge in Insect Studies.
Last week Matt Gemmell wrote a great piece on designing a blog for readers that just about everyone I read covered. He goes through a long list of “rules” that one should stick to as much as possible to allow the content to take front and center. This line is my favorite:
When I visit a new blog, as I do several times each day, my first assessment is whether the content is obscured by the design. I’ll rarely consider whether the design enhances the content. I’m visiting for a purpose, and the purpose is to read.
That is one reason why I like RSS so much. with a good reader (like Reeder for the Mac and iOS), the content takes center stage. It’s readable and lets me enjoy the author’s words and point of view without distraction. And I often don’t subscribe to sites who truncate their feeds for very long (if at all). If I find the site valuable, I’ll pay to get a long feed; if not, unsubscribed.
It’s also why I tend to stay away from more “mainstream” sites which have multiple columns, header and footer areas, sidebars, media boxes, and all sorts of confusing containers for content I can’t pass judgment on and, therefore, can’t risk wasting my time on something that won’t interest me in the end.
When I did my last redesign, I tried to mirror many of the blogs and authors Matt mentioned as those to be inspired by as I was. I think I’ve done a decent job. Over my vacation, I hope to go through another round of revisions to bring my CSS hacks into a proper child theme while retaining the look I have today.
There may be school of thought from a UI/UX perspective but Matt’s list is pretty spot on. If you’re designing a blog, read this first.
NPR has a full analysis of all the jokes seen on the show throughout the show — including the fourth season on Netflix.
via Stephen Hackett
Marco Arment on Tumblr founder David Karp:
David always obsessed over his newest ideas, features, and designs until they were completely polished and ready to go. He’s a workaholic — he truly lives and breathes Tumblr. I’ve never even seen him show any desire to work on a side project. David is all Tumblr, all the time.
He expects people around him to be similarly into work and Tumblr, and often drove me hard with seemingly impossible demands. But David has a lot of Steve Jobs-like qualities, and like many people who worked for Steve, I look back on Tumblr’s crunch times with mixed feelings: I don’t want to return to that stress level, but David pushed me to do amazing work that I didn’t think was possible.
Marco has nothing but nice things to say about David and the more I read about this deal, the more excited I am at what could happen. It’s good to be excited for the web again.
For all my writing, I use a Mac or iOS device. For my MBP, I use Byword to compose and export to HTML and MarsEdit to publish. On iOS, I exclusively use Poster; If it weren’t for the occasional image and video embeds, I’d probably use it over my Mac 90% of the time.
On the few occasions I end up on a non-Apple computer, I can’t write. My workflow uses Markdown and I can’t or don’t want to install dedicated software on the Linux and Windows computers I come in contact with. Enter Dillinger.
Dillinger is an open source, online Markdown editor with some fantasic features like links to Dropbox and GitHub. It also has the standard export features that most editors have. It’s dual pane so you can see your formatted text as your type. It’s pretty amazing.
Dillinger was started by Joe McCann.