And digs itself deeper into irrelevance.
Traditional publishers have resorted to perverting their online content with needless pagination and obnoxious advertisements.
So what does poor Jimmy Reader do when he has to print a physical copy of the article for whatever reason? Click the nice “Print Version” button, of course.
Oh, what’s that, Mr. Publisher? You can’t get ad revenue from a print page? Some readers are resorting to clicking “Print Preview” and then pressing their convenient little Read Later bookmarklet because they’re fed up with your shenanigans?
Ah, so rather than offer readers real incentives to pay for content or employing less obtrusive advertising techniques, you make your Print Previews completely worthless.
And if you think that’s funny, try requesting a WebReprint. The Wall Street Journal now charges $475 to link to one of its articles. For a month. And then the URL expires.
Tumblr Staff: Dashboard API: Part 1 -
Get it while it’s hot!
Dashboard posts are now accessible from the Tumblr API, and there’s a shit-ton more coming to the API over the next few
weeksdays.While I’m sure you guys will concoct plenty of things we haven’t even begun to imagine, the things we’re super-excited to see are any …
This calls for celebration.
I’m so psyched that this is now a financially viable consumer good. I would love to show people what a day of school is like.
So this is exciting:
The IPO filing on Friday from the six-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric Roadster, marks the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Co made its share debut in 1956.
Last time I checked, coffee did not look like that.
The former iteration of my home page was underwhelming at best. It made abysmal use of Google App Engine’s offerings to the point that my GAE account had been reduced to a free, low-latency static file server (which is by no means a bad thing).
But alas, my bank account balance is running low: I figured I should have a nice place to refer potential freelance clients to. So I took a few days out of my winter break to come up with a new design and get to work creating it. Going into the project, I had a few explicit goals:
Initially, I tried just implementing the site as a tumblr template and loading the rest of the content (twitter, flickr, last.fm, AIM) through JavaScript with some simple $.getJSON calls. After a few days of private use, I decided this method was too unreliable:
So, with these observations in mind, I returned to my former mistress, App Engine, who welcomed me with outstretched arms. I am by no means a proficient Python programmer, but I was able to hack together a passable backend that stores incoming data at regular intervals.
The end result is something that hopefully looks decent and renders reliably. I’m using a ton of experimental CSS, some of which is webkit exclusive for the time being: custom scrollbars and -webkit-transitions come to mind. The redesign should, however, look half decent in most modern browsers. I have not even tried visiting in IE; I’m guessing it won’t be too colorful, seeing as most of the colors are in rgba.
I’m prone to borrow and experiment with ideas unapologetically, but I must give credit where credit is due:
I’m sure I’ve overlooked a few, but so it goes. Now, if you’ll humor me, here’s something I’m proud of that I haven’t really seen elsewhere. Despite having a Python-powered backend rendering the initial page, I’ve got my script checking for new content every 30 seconds, so if I happen to be listening to a song or posting a tweet or getting onto AIM when you visit, the page will dynamically update in (almost) real time. Feel free to poke around and critique the source code.
I have a few novel ideas for making good use of the tumblr-powered content. Stick around long enough and I might even get around to realizing them. In the meantime, please send comments, questions, amorous solicitations, and potential freelance website work my way via email.
Scrollbars, as it turns out, are a bit complicated. I thought this diagram might help.
Visit webkit.org for an extensive list of relevant pseudo elements and classes.
The recent redesigns of maxvoltar.com and orderedlist.com both feature a design subtlety that I haven’t formerly seen in the wild (omitting webkit.org):
Minute as they may seem, the custom scrollbars are a nice touch, offering the designer that much more control over the viewing experience (provided you’re using Chrome or Safari, of course). I’m guessing we’ll start seeing many more sites donning custom scrollbars as we move into 2010.
If you’re interested in how the effect is achieved, here are the relevant bits of CSS for hiding the default scrollbar (extracted from Maxvoltar’s stylesheet):
// the @media stuff is for viewers on mobile devices
html {
overflow: hidden;
}
@media only screen and (max-device-width:480px) {
html {
overflow: auto;
}
}
body {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
bottom: 0;
right: 10px; // could be a different value
overflow-y: scroll;
overflow-x: hidden;
}
@media only screen and (max-device-width:480px) {
body {
position: relative;
top: auto;
right: auto;
bottom: auto;
left: auto;
overflow: auto;
}
}
Beyond that, it’s just a matter of styling the scrollbars to your liking. Check out Ordered List’s style sheet as a starting point.
For whatever reason, in-page scrollbars don’t play nice with some of Safari’s keyboard shortcuts (command up/down, spacebar), but page up/down still function as expected.
I guess I’ll start counting down the days before this becomes as commonplace and abused as rounded corners. The irony of it all is that Internet Explorer was actually the first to implement scrollbar styling. We’re ten years late to the party.
Update: Looks like Ordered List has removed their custom scrollbar for the time being. I think it might be my fault.
Version 3 of the Compatriot theme is now available with infinite scrolling, keyboard navigation, and music posts with album artwork. Enjoy.