Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 155

JavaScript jamboree

It's been a fun post-dConstruct week. Tantek has been staying in Brighton being, as always, the perfect guest. On his last night in the country, we went along to Async, the local JavaScript twice-monthly meet-up, host to a show'n'tell this time 'round.

Tantek demoed his Cassis project. It's nuts. He's creating polyglot scripts that are simultaneously JavaScript and PHP, as well as having the ability to report which context they are running in. I feel partly responsible for this madness: he...

OAuthypocrisy and the Passwordpocalypse

The OAuthcalypse is upon us. Since August 31st, all third-party Twitter services must use OAuth to authenticate. This is a good thing; a very good thing. Before that date, services were allowed to use the password anti-pattern to log you in.

Twitter has put its foot down and declared that the password anti-pattern will no longer be tolerated. Hurrah!

What a shame then, that Twitter is being utterly hypocritical. On their Find Friends page, they encourage you to:

Scan your email address book...

dConstruct 2010

Well, what a week that was! The start of September is dConstruct time here in Brighton—one of the focal points of Clearleft's calendar. Things get hectic in the office in the days and weeks beforehand. Then Brighton becomes the centre of web geekdom for a few days.

Things got rolling with a few workshops, one of which this year was my HTML5 For Web Designers workshop. I think it went pretty well.

A funny thing happened after the workshop…

I was walking from the workshop venue (Lighthouse) into t...

Team meme

I'm somewhat fascinated by the divisive spin on fandom taken by Twilight fans—you know; the whole Team Edward or Team Jacob debate. I wonder what it would be like to take the same approach to more important issues…

"I'm with Team Leibniz" vs. "I'm with Team Newton,"
"I'm with Team Thorne-Hawking" vs. "I'm with Team Preskill,"
"I'm with Team Big Bang" vs. "I'm with Team Steady State."

Get those T-shirts printed!

The secret, however, is knowing when to stop. I do not want to see "I'm with Team H...

TeuxDeux Part Deux

I've tried a few different to-do list apps in my time: Ta-da List, Remember The Milk. They're all much of a muchness (although Remember The Milk's inability to remember me on return visits put me off it after a while).

The one that really fits with my mental model is TuexDeux. It's very, very simple and that's its strength. It does one thing really well.

Now it has been updated with a few little changes.

TeuxDeux Part Deux on Vimeo

I'm very pleased to see that it has become more flexible and f...

Listening

Whenever I take a trip somewhere—like Copenhagen, for example—it's a good opportunity to catch up on what I've been huffduffing. Trains, planes and buses are the killer apps of personal podcasting. In many ways, Huffduffer becomes more useful the further away you are from a computer and an internet connection.

I didn't get the chance to see Mark speak at this year's Web Directions @media in London, but now that I've listened to his talk on Designing Grid Systems, I'm cursing the two-track...

Scandinavian sojourn

I've been on a little trip to Copenhagen. Usually when I go to Denmark, it's for Reboot but alas, there is no Reboot this year. Instead, I was there for Drupalcon.

I have to admit, it was quite a surprise to be asked to speak at a Drupal event. After all, I don't use the Drupal framework. To be fair, I don't use any framework—though I did dabble with Django once. Clearleft is a backend-agnostic company: we do UX, IA, front-end, but we've deliberately avoided committing to one particular...

Slight return

Tantek is bringing back the blog after skipping an entire year:

I had gone from owning (most of) my content, to digital sharecropping. The past two years I watched life-changing, brilliant, and some long-lived sites get killed by owners that knew not what they had, or just gave up.

Leo Laporte is doing the same:

I feel like I've woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I've put in others' hands. It's been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in...

Clarification

HTML5.

You keep using that word.

In a comment on one of Jeffrey's blog posts, Tantek wrote:

We as a community that is learning/relearning/teaching all this stuff need to vigilantly clarify what's what rather than calling things "HTML5″ that are not actually HTML5 (e.g. CSS3, Geolocation, etc. etc.), and correct the marketing messages being shouted from various rooftops so we can better understand and reliably build HTML5 websites and web applications that use HTML5.

Jeff Croft argues just...