Links
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Ghostweather R&D Blog: Teaching a Semester of D3.js
On teaching D3.js to journalism students with no JavaScript experience. I can barely imagine.
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How the Web Works: A Primer for Newcomers to Web Development (or anyone, really) | Preethi Kasireddy
Looks like a good intro to the kinds of things many of us have as a mental model and take for granted. (via Adactio)
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zalew / django-flickr — Bitbucket
“Provides a mechanism to mirror user’s Flickr photos into a Django project.”
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Search Films - London Cinema
A nice site for finding what films are on near a location. (via @jobby)
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On Edward Hopper by Mark Strand | The New York Review of Books
I particularly like the first half, on Hopper’s preparatory drawings. “It was not that he needed to be sure how to paint a sugar dispenser or salt shaker as in Nighthawks (1942), but that they should become his.”
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The year of the Good Night Lamp
Alex on what she’s learned so far from getting her product made, marketed and shipped.
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In Defense Of George Lucas | Birth.Movies.Death.
Good on why the first Star Wars was so original and so personal. Unlike the tedious, clunky, calculating nostalgia-fest of The Force Awakens.
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How & How Not to Be Good by John Gray | The New York Review of Books
Critiquing Peter Singer’s “effective altruism”. (subscribers only)
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From Persuasion to Usability - Design Meets the Internet (Noisy Decent Graphics)
Good talk (in video or text) by Ben Terrett about how design works at GOV.UK. “Design has fallen into the marketing trap of persuasion and it needs to get back to being about usability.”
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Building a library from scratch (almost) - libraries librarians books | Ask MetaFilter
How to start and run a library, because I like reading about how to start and run things you’ve little experience of starting and running.
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Plotto; a new method of plot suggestion for writers of creative fiction
A 1928 guide to creating plots, free on Archive.org.
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Advice & Info - Independent Cinema Office
Loads of really practical introductory info about starting and running an independent cinema in the UK. (No, I was just interested.)
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Flask Web Development - O’Reilly Media
This book was really good for helping to structure a slightly larger Flask site than I was previously used to. I’m liking Flask, but it does require piecing together lots of knowledge to sew parts together.
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Opposing Funds Duel on Tesla Valuation | SumZero
I’m not as interested in Tesla’s share price as I am in whether the company can succeed or not, which, fundamentally, this article is about. (via Monevator)
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Here’s a great way to boost your income in an hour
That sounds like spam but it’s actually about the benefits of, as a freelancer, writing yourself a detailed job description.
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The toxic side of free. Or: how I lost the love for my side project (part 1)
Five parts on the difficulties with running a website, JS Bin. DDoS attacks, spammers, when and how to make people pay, child porn, and, most troublesome of all, the new VATMOSS rules.
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Ghost Streets of Los Angeles
Seeing the paths of, probably, old streetcar lines in the shapes of buildings in satellite photos.
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Rightmove.co.uk - Featured Collections
Sure I’ve said this before, but I hope Rightmove, Zoopla, and/or estate agents are archiving photos. It’d be an amazing resource for historians.
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oldweb.today
Browse pages archived on archive.org using period browsers and operating systems. Amazing, although the screen sizes seem a bit large to me, for the period. (via Waxy)
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James Meek · Diary: Real Murderers! · LRB 8 October 2015
Nearly forgot to link to this. I’m surprised I haven’t heard of Khrzhanovsky’s film / event / play / art / reconstruction / whatever, called ‘Dau’, before because it sounds *bonkers*. Really.
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Corbyn in the Media - Paul Myerscough (London Review of Books)
This is good on the Guardian being out of touch, in denial, with all those who voted for Corbyn, and on the “impartiality” of the BBC.
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The Beginning of the End of Big Government IT | MetaFilter
Good discussion of this stuff, with calm defences by danhon and migurski in the face of (understandable) cynicism that sees the private sector as either big, dumb corporates or small, dumb Silicon Valley techbros. (via @neb)
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Getting Started | d3.compose
A way to generate d3-powered charts more easily, or another confusing abstraction layer? I don’t know because I haven’t actually tried it. (via @eliothill)
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The best jQuery validation plugin to validate form fields, support Bootstrap, Foundation, Pure, SemanticUI, UIKit frameworks
Despite the annoying information-light front page, this seems really good compared to other JS form validators I’ve used, and worth the money.
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How To Structure Large Flask Applications | DigitalOcean
Always a pleasure to find useful tutorials that step though things clearly and Just Work.
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Flickr: The Help Forum: Clicking Archives Takes Me To My Camera Roll
Flickr has turned off their Archive pages - listing the photos you took/uploaded in a given month/day - in favour of their “Camera Roll”. Just show me web pages of photos from a date! It’s the basics.
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The mystery of the white dress shirt — Medium
Bryan Boyer on closing down their Makeshift Society Brooklyn coworking space. Lovely thoughtful postmortem.
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New Creatives | designswarm {thoughts}
Alex on… people like me, and many friends, it seems. I’m not sure about the term itself, but it does seem like a reasonably identifiable “thing”.
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Mad Max: Fury Road Costume Thread
I spent too long reading people working out how to copy every tiny detail of Max’s costume, even before the film was out. Although I don’t quite get the whole “dress up like a character who looks nothing like you” thing.