My first months in cyberspace (Phil Gyford’s website)
This is a wonderfully evocative description of what it was like to go online 30 years ago.
Link tags: history
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Decentralizing quality || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader
I’ve personally struggled to implement a decentralized approach to quality in many of my teams. I believe in it from an academic standpoint, but in practice it works against the grain of every traditional management structure. Managers want ‘one neck to wring’ when things go wrong. Decentralized quality makes that impossible. So I’ve compromised, centralized, become the bottleneck I know slows things down. It’s easier to defend in meetings. But when I’ve managed to decentralize quality — most memorably when I was running a small agency and could write the org chart myself — I’ve been able to do some of the best work of my career.
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It | The New Yorker
A profile of Tim and the World World Web.
Hack to the Future - Frontend - Matt Hobbs
Put the kettle on. This is a long one!
Matt takes a trip down memory lane and looks at all the frontend tools, technologies, and techniques that have come and gone over the years.
But this isn’t about nostalgia (although it does make you appreciate how far we’ve come). He’s looking at whether anything from the past is worth keeping today.
Studying past best practices and legacy systems is crucial for understanding the evolution of technology and making informed decisions today.
There’s only one technique that makes the cut:
After discussing countless legacy approaches and techniques best left in the past, you’ve finally arrived at a truly timeless and Incredibly important methodology.
We Are Still the Web - The History of the Web
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
Welcome to Medieval Murder Maps
CSI London, York, and Oxford:
Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities.
Beautiful Public Data
A curated selection of visually interesting datasets collected by local, state and federal government agencies.
This site must’ve started as a way of showcasing really interesting collections, but now it’s turning into an archive of what’s being systematically destroyed by the current US regime.
Frame of preference – Aresluna
Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!
While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.
Bravo!
Nuberodesign > Blog > Designing for the Eye
I love the interactive illustrations in this article filled with type and architecture nerdery!
Toolmen | A Working Library
Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.
👏👏👏
Can Directories Rise Again? - The History of the Web
Search has bent in quality towards its earliest days, difficult to navigate and often unhelpful. And the remedy may be the same as it was a quarter century ago.
The history of album art || Matthew Ström, designer-leader
An enjoyable guided tour of album artwork starting at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Back to the Crazebox! - Toons Back To A Website - Homestar Runner
Let’s go back to a website!
Beach daydreams, lost at sea (Interconnected)
Matt’s beach thoughts are like a satisfying susurrus in my RSS reader.
An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1 - Ars Technica
Here’s a fun account of the early days of the ARPANET.
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad | The Orwell Foundation
After the sort of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen.
George Orwell on the coming of spring during the darkest of times:
It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
The web was always about redistribution of power. Let’s bring that back.
Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.
The hardest working font in Manhattan – Aresluna
This is absolutely wonderful!
There’s deep dives and then there’s Marcin’s deeeeeeep dives. Sit back and enjoy this wholesome detective work, all beautifully presented with lovely interactive elements.
This is what the web is for!
The Tyranny of Now — The New Atlantis
I’m not a fan of Nicholas Carr and his moral panics, but this is an excellent dive into some historical media theory.
What Innis saw is that some media are particularly good at transporting information across space, while others are particularly good at transporting it through time. Some are space-biased while others are time-biased. Each medium’s temporal or spatial emphasis stems from its material qualities. Time-biased media tend to be heavy and durable. They last a long time, but they are not easy to move around. Think of a gravestone carved out of granite or marble. Its message can remain legible for centuries, but only those who visit the cemetery are able to read it. Space-biased media tend to be lightweight and portable. They’re easy to carry, but they decay or degrade quickly. Think of a newspaper printed on cheap, thin stock. It can be distributed in the morning to a large, widely dispersed readership, but by evening it’s in the trash.