MetaFilter posts tagged with web

always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom

garlic — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:06:26 -0800

Rebound. A simple physics game with 2 controls. How far to the right can you go? found via the Verge

Still far from that digital democracy any utopian could hope for.

iamkimiam — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:01:52 -0800

7 (well, technically 6) myths of the digital divide.

It is a roleplaying game made in excel.

boo_radley — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:35:46 -0800

Arena.Xlsm is the fever dream of a Canadian Chartered Accountant with a love of roleplaying games (Hat tip to Special K over at mefightclub!)

Putting the "I" in IPO

reenum — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 17:50:37 -0800

Mike Merrill decided to sell shares in his life. He now has 160 shareholders who can tell him what to do.

This looks like a job for...

Artw — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:28:54 -0800

SUPERHERO.JS - Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic.

"Please don't use any less than a 16px base font-size for body content"

mediareport — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:53:47 -0800

Stop Using Small Font Sizes "I'm calling you out. All of you. The hackers, the designers, the code monkeys, the word-smiths, the editors, the CSS gurus, and everyone else who works on content management systems and style sheets for news sites. Stop using small font sizes." (The before-and-after examples at the bottom of the post from The Atlantic, Wired and TechCrunch might be useful.)

Born Digital Folklore

Miko — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 07:43:40 -0800

"Its not like we all sat in silence and stared blankly at our TVs waiting for the Internet to show up. We have probably always had vernacular webs of communication." Digital studies scholar Robert Glenn Howard talks about vaccines, the Christian right [PDF], AC/DC guitar tutorials and other "born-digital folklore" on the "vernacular web."

Eulogy for Hotmail

Chinese Jet Pilot — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 13:15:45 -0800

As Microsoft prepares to retire its unfashionable Hotmail in favor of Outlook.com this summer, let's remember the viral marketing revolution that Hotmail invented. Journey back seventeen years to Hotmail's origins, the birth of the dot.com millionaire, and the boozy optimism of a pre-crash web industry in full-growth mode (Wired, December 1998) .

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a 1992 RTS.

zamboni — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 06:45:36 -0800

Play Dune II in your browser.

ARPANET gets audited

msalt — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 08:21:47 -0800

An early tale of the Internet

This Is For Everyone

Wordshore — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 03:13:32 -0800

Twenty two years ago today, a British physicist, former trainspotter, science fiction fan and computer builder, with the help of Robert Cailliau and other colleagues at CERN, executed the first successful communication between a HTTP client and server on the Internet. The web was devised in France (not Switzerland), and built on decades of hypertext and internet protocol developments. The first browser was called WorldWideWeb and ran on the NeXT computer. The first website was info.cern.ch. Despite promotion of the system within CERN, take-up was low for the first year or two. By the end of 1993, there were 623 websites. In May 1994, the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was held (at which the first Best of the Web award winners were announced), attracting 380 participants; the preliminary proceedings are downloadable. In 1995, Matt Haughey designed his first website; in June of that year, there were 23,500 websites - or less than 20,000. However, within 18 months (by the end of 1996), there were over 600,000 websites. In 1998 the first Google index recognized 26 million pages, and by 2000 the number of pages in the "surface" web was measurable in the billions. Estimates of how many websites there are varies as years progress, as does the number of web pages. Some more well-known earlier websites. The author of the software participated in the opening ceremony of this summer's Olympic Games, during which he tweeted. Not everyone knew who he was. This didn't bother him and he won't tell you what he had for breakfast. Family fact: his father worked in the team which developed the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer, followed by text compression techniques and some of the earliest applications of computers in medicine.

webs woven

infini — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:08:54 -0800

The master map of all game companies and their connections

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down

oulipian — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:13:36 -0800

"To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants [...] but they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be." Anil Dash laments The Web We Lost, and offers some suggestions for moving forward.

Everything is fleeting

Wordshore — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 04:27:46 -0800

"It feels strange to be active and highly visible on the Web for 15 years but it was only when I joined Facebook that someone from elementary school or high school ever contacted me." In which on Ev Williams's platform, Mr Haughey compares his experiences of Facebook and Twitter. Other recent comparisons of Facebook and Twitter by Forbes, Forbes again, the New York Times, Social Times and Tweetsmarter.

"That is what $40,000 of film school will get you"

Wordshore — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:17:59 -0800

"Dog owners have a dog park where they can show off their dogs, but cat people don't have that," she says. "The Internet is where people who love cats can go to say, 'Look how cute my cat is.'" On cat videos on the Internet, and maintaining the popularity of Henrí and Maru, while designers of the Scratching Post note how how some owners start writing in a first feline style. Related, "Henrí 2: Paw de Deux" the most popular video in the series, recently won the Golden Kitty. Also links to adverts featuring cats, and on what it's like to watch 10,000 cat videos. And also; while cat owners spend up to 40,000 dollars to go through film school, some cats spend rather less to get a diploma.

Lost in Space

latkes — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 07:38:51 -0800

As I watched my anonymous photo upload, I felt a naughty pang–the type you have surely felt if you, like me, have ever cast your sexual desires out into the two-dimensional, glowing, public/private hybrid world that is the Internet. That first time you pressed “send,” there was a panic that it could all go very, very wrong—but it’s worth it, you think, because you’re kind of horny. via

The case against online pagination

John Cohen — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 11:05:39 -0800

"Splitting articles and photo galleries into multiple pages is evil. It should stop."

Adobe Edge Web Fonts

crunchland — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:42:59 -0800

Adobe is getting in on Google's act, offering 500 font familes of Typekit fonts for you to use for free on your website.

Cloud Consitency

juiceCake — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:52:06 -0800

Netflix has open sourced tools it uses for load balancing and failure management with Amazon Web Services . They plan to release more tools in the future. They are on Github.

RAWR

lazaruslong — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:49:34 -0800

Sometimes, you just have to get the kids and wife together and yell at spiders. "My charge to you is to go out while there are still a few straggling spiders in the yard. Find one in a web and scare the hell out of it. Yell at the top of your lungs. Your neighbors will think you’ve lost your mind, but the joke’s on them because you will know you are enjoying the emerging movement of people who enjoy screaming not because of, but AT arachnids. You’re a pioneer in the sport of Spider Yelling. Yell loudly and yell proudly."

The Internet's Gift to Cooking: Recipe Aggregators

Miko — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 13:54:48 -0800

Ice Cubes - A Recipe. The comments offer many helpful tips.

Monday Wednesday Friday

netbros — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 11:09:50 -0800

Dog House Diaries — we know that web-comics are where all the money and fame is at and we want a piece. It was obvious that in order to be successful in this biz, you need to be good with humor, drawing, math and computers. Well we kick some serious butt at drawing and math so we figured 2 out of 3 wasn’t bad.

Zyngapocalypse Now

Artw — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:54:24 -0800

Both inside and outside the walls of Facebook, the story of social games has become one of dead geese and golden eggs, flatlined growth, formulaic games and shady practises. Many warned that the sector was slowing down, but sometimes giants need to fall. It needs to get bad enough before people start to really consider what's next... So what comes next?

HURF DURF YOUTUBE COMMENTATOR

The Whelk — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 17:34:18 -0800

Turn all Youtube Comments into "HERP DERP" - for Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.

Les Horrible Cernettes

The Whelk — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:31:47 -0800

The First Photo on the Web: A story of crossdressing, particle physics, humorous science-based novelty songs, and terrible photoshop.