Do not feel guilty for not reading the tidal wave of information that piles up on your door everyday. Just don’t. Half the battle in this modern era of information overload is learning how to not care about all the information. We call them feeds, or streams for a reason — they never end. Your only goal should be to build a better net. It’s not to worry about unread counts or friend requests, or virtual corn fields. #

Markdown like RSS is one of those things that has fundamentally changed my relationship with the way that I work. Unlike RSS though I think Markdown is primed for mass adoption. Its ready because it fills a classic need for a lightweight-journaling-note-taking-style syntax, it has wide spread adoption ie network effects, and we are already seeing movements to standardize and proselytize Markdown to a larger community. The other day on App. #

At PicPlz we built a hybrid mobile app. We had a native container written for iOS and Android that hosted a web version of our code. PicPlz was the first time I had worked on a fully mobile website. My operating paradigm was that I was building a website for a small screen. One day, our iOS developer asked me why our follow button didn’t just react when a user touched it. #

I have been standards spelunking recently. ATOM, OStatus, JSON XMPP (hint: that one is a joke), and Activity Steams. All this exploration led me to a conclusion - standards are not the panacea I once thought. There is a lot to like about standards; hard work, thourough thought, and sometimes a success, but we can’t blindly follow the standards off a cliff. I have been presented with an amazing opportunity to spend some time looking through all this prior art. #

The new aesthetic sat in my overflow folder for a while. I probably subscribed to it while working though a best new blog list. It was always curios. The pictures were nice, but like many blogs you figure it out by reading it. When I read the Atlantic piece It finally clicked. If you don’t know, The new aesthetic is an art movement. It’s tag line would be an exploration of how our digital products effect us. #

I gave a talk at the jQuery conference on sunday. I wanted to create one page were all the information about the talk could live. This is that page. Sources: Phonegap Backbone.js HTML5 rocks offline gMail Mobile application cache Six Revisions - web development blog Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript book Lawnchair jquery-offline Details: outline gist of the talk Slides - full slides with speaker notes

I recently spent some time getting to know backbone.js. I wanted to apply it to a mobile app I have been working on. While the code is great, I stumbled on an idea while using it. When I fist start using a framework of any kind, django for example, I almost always use there getting started tutorial. You copy, and paste the code from this tutorial, and then poke and prod it until you get some kind of understand of the code. #

Last night it occurred to me, I might never use PHP in a serious manner ever again. It’s bittersweet. No one is a bigger advocate for leaving PHP behind then me, but it was where it all started for me. I had played around with VB in grade school, but desktop programming never got to me like web programming. PHP was ready for me, meaning the metaphorical person who doesn’t know how to program but wants to learn. #

If you are interested at all in what is happing to curation you should read this well-researched article by Aaron Cope. The article stems from Cope’s time at Stamen Design Group, and Flickr, but it doesn’t stop there. This is a deep article with a lot of links, and references. What the Internet has done to the field of journalism, it will do to the practice of curation. This is not a claim based on empirical study, but rather, a prediction based on the evolution of “social software”, communities of interest that form and exist principally in on-line networks and a need to find stable ground in a digital world where the means and cost of production and distribution has approached zero. #

I have spent the last 3 years, or so, working at Yahoo!, you must raise your voice at the end of the hoo, and it has been awesome. The opportunities to learn, and grow were huge, but it’s time for me to move on. In any organization you can pick it apart, and I have, but my move isn’t about that. If anything, it’s about getting a variety of experience. #