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Featured Essays from Our Blog
Where do old posts go when they die?
This post originally appeared as part of XOXCO Dispatch #1. Sign up now to be among the first to read our posts. It is amazing how much content is poured onto the web every day. Just yesterday, our friends over at Pando Daily posted nearly 9,000 words of original writing on their site in form of 14 essays. The homepage holds only 16 posts, which means that some time this weekend, all 9,000 of…
Your Back Catalog
The way we design and publish content for the web usually puts all of the focus on the newest material. The latest article is posted at the top of the homepage, and everything that came before it moves down one slot. For many sites, this means that an article only lives for a few hours or days before it is sent to the archives - not nearly long enough to deliver its full value to the publisher…
Publishers Should Publish, Not Chase Technological Trends
In the complex decisions between responsive HTML5 websites and native mobile applications, publishers shouldn’t take sides. The insight of content management systems (going back decades ago to document processing systems and technologies like SGML) was to separate content from presentation. Somewhere along the line many tools got confused and separated web content from web presentation…
Stop Making Websites
When the term “blog” was coined sometime towards the end of the last century, one of the most difficult problems we faced as an industry was simply how to get more content and more people onto the web. We solved this problem by creating easy to use, web-based content management systems like Blogger and Wordpress to help normal people get their words and pictures onto the web. This…
Reader Aware Design
Update: We released Aware.js to help make your site reader aware! We now use the internet on a diverse set of devices, and these new devices afford us opportunities to read web material in contexts far beyond the traditional desktop monitor. Instead of nervously reloading our favorite blogs throughout the day, we might choose to read the news once a day, in the evening on our tablet. Or, we…
More on password-less login
Since Hacker News and @lukew tweeted links to my password-less login post this morning, almost 400 people have tweeted about it and sent in their feedback. There is a nearly 100 message thread on Hacker News discussing the various strengths and weaknesses of my suggestion. Opinions are too varied to attempt a summary, but there’s a lot of good thinking going on in this thread. Here are a…
Open Source Tools - View More...
Define breakpoints for your responsive design and Breakpoints.js will fire custom events when the browser enters and/or exits that breakpoint.
Aware.js is a simple jQuery plugin that allows a site to customize and personalize content based on a reader's behavior without requiring login, authentication, or any server-side processing.