It’s been a while since I’ve examined any new code editors using Notepad++ all of the time. I found this article mentioning 5 new free editors that I’m going to explore over the next few weeks. They all look pretty cool.
Web
Mapping the world
Groundbreaking, Tech, Thought Provoking, Travel, WebI love this article, a neat and practical way of developing the world in which we live.
http:// http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/06/missing-maps-human-genome-project-unmapped-cities
Whether the goal is to prevent cholera or crime, Missing Maps is a crucial first step. For much of the developing world, our current digital maps may as well say ‘Here there be dragons.’ There’s a long way to go, but someone has at last picked up a sword.
Irish now on Duolingo
Ireland, Mobile, Tech, Thought Provoking, WebDuolingo which is a fantastic language learning tool (I have it on my phone). It’s perfect for short bursts of brushing up on a language in small 10 minute sessions.
Now, I just found this post on Reddit that they have added Irish.
It’s still in beta so it can only be used on your computer. Once, it has come out of beta, it will be available on the mobile app.
Cool!
Who is this site for?
Tech, Thought Provoking, Web Seth Godin comes up with a set of crucial questions for those businesses that have a website.
- Who is this site for?
- How did they find out about it?
- What does the design remind them of?
- What do you want them to do when they get here?
- How will they decide to do that, and what promises do you make to cause that action?
I put it here because I want to remember it. Perhaps you will like it too.
The death of Google Reader
Tech, Thought Provoking, WebRead two great articles on the death of Google Reader this week explaining the bigger picture of why it was shutdown.
Marco Arment in this wonderful post Lockdown contends that Google with Facebook and Twitter is building walled gardens to lock users in. The open RSS model doesn’t fit that strategy.
That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset†it. “Clean it up.†“Retire†it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.
Well, fuck them, and fuck that.
Following on from that:
Dare Obasanjo writes that Google are no longer pretending to be the good guys anymore.
His conclusion:
Google Reader has been living on borrowed time since Facebook and Twitter became prominent. The only thing that has changed in 2013 is that Google’s management doesn’t think it’s worth it to throw a bone to millions of geeks and early adopters by keeping the lights running on the service with its existing skeleton crew. This new Google doesn’t care if geeks and early adopters just see it as another money hungry corporation that only focuses on the bottom line. Larry Page doesn’t give a shit.
Welcome to the new Google.
Buzzfeed actually received an increase is traffic from Google Reader after it was announced. The graphic showing the comparison of traffic from Google+ and Reader is quite illuminating.
I initially used Bloglines to for reading rss feeds but after they closed down, I did examine moving to Google Reader but instead chose netvibes which is free for individuals. I was uncomfortable about handing over another service to an ever smaller number of providers. There was also the fact that feeds are a core part of netvibes whereas Reader was just another auxiliary part of Google.
My advice: Stick to services that are provided by companies where the service is a core part of their business.
How to name things
Thought Provoking, WebHow to name things. Some great ideas here.
Flickr just announced one terabyte of space for every user!
Mobile, Photography, Tech, WebVery interesting coming one day after they announce the acquisition of Tumblr and their promise not to screw it up. The look and feel of the site has also been updated and places all of the focus on the images. I wonder how this will affect the pro model that they use?
“It puts Flickr back on the agenda making it relevant to both hobbyist and professional photographers alike, but it also reignites the whole storage capacity war that started with Gmail and that we are now seeing with cloud file sharing services.”
Google offers users a total of 15GB of free storage across its core cloud services. Facebook does not impose such a limit but downgrades the quality of high-resolution photos.
Reasons you need your own website
Business, Tech, WebJust saw this post and many of the reasons also apply to organisations and individuals outside of music. I don’t understand why many business point potential customers to a facebook or myspace page.
Especially, when they are not controlling the experience.
It’s your’s… forever
I’ve said this more than once in this post.
You get the point right?
Your Facebook Page and your Bandcamp page are NOT yours. They belong to other people and cannot be forced to do all the things that you might want to do.
Text editor inside the browser
Tech, Thought Provoking, WebType the following text into the address bar of your browser.
data:text/html;charset=utf-8, <title>TextEditor</title><body contenteditable style="font-size:2rem;font-family:monaco;line-height:1.4;max-width:60rem;margin:0 auto;padding:4rem;" spellcheck="false"><h1>Text Editor</h1><p>Start Here.
Voila, a text editor inside your browser.
Thanks to Jose Jesus Perez Aguiaga and the commenters. There may even be better suggestions in the comments later on.
Facebook may be building a web search engine in addition to their Graph Search
Tech, WebWhy do I think this? I have created some new sites in the last two weeks, some of which I have not publicised or linked to on Facebook. Very soon after publishing new pages, the site has stats from what looks like a facebook crawler on the site. Very interesting. It seems to be much more active in crawling the site than Microsoft or Google. This would suggest that they are collecting their own map of the internet outside of links that are posted within Facebook. What else could it mean than building data for a generic web search engine? Haven’t really seen anyone else mention this so far.