In Reading Newsletters with Feedbin and Reeder Federico Viticci rebels against the new too-cool-for-school notion of reading what should be on web browsers as newsletters in email clients.
services
Designer & Developer Support
When other web suppliers tap us it’s usually for our ExpressionEngine chops.
Recently
Introducing version 3 of painter Juan Carlos Bronstein’s site
This one was a labor of love wherein the background remains dark, the panther pink.
Florida Council of Independent Schools adopts CSF’s Master In-Service system
The system handles re-certification for teachers at over 160 independent Florida schools.
products
External SAEF (Free)
Insert a row into any MySQL database table using a form on an ExpressionEngine page.
Tied Entries (Free)
An ExpressionEngine plugin to access content entries further than a single relationship away.
Elsewhere
“More news, less junk. Faster.” Brent Simmons has just released the free and open source RSS reader NetNewsWire app for iOS. This may well be a visible dent in the universe.
In an interview with Kelly Gulmont on MacObserver, he says in an interview that one of the things he’s most proud of is that search is really fast (in a 20-minute podcast, this, remarkably, is the only bit of substance; I won’t be listening again).
There’s a review up at MacStories, “NetNewsWire for iOS and iPadOS Review: The Perfect Complement to the App’s macOS Counterpart” while Cult of Mac has “NetNewsWire is reborn on iOS”. Also 9to5Mac.
DesignBoom’s sauna page. This is just great work about great work about great living.
In CSS-only fluid modular type scales, Trys Mudford lays out the code for letting type grow appropriately (and uses the Golden Ratio for the steps). Very nice!
And I love the applied musical modular scale, which I’d not seen before, one of those great things that in retrospect seem obvious.
I’ve been fumbling towards all this without stopping to actually systematize it as they’ve done. And they did it here in Brighton, at Clearleft. Kudos.
My go-to type foundry Hoefler&Co have really stepped up their website game at typography.com, with a thrilling new typeface combination throughout of Idlewild for eyebrows and Ideal Sans for titles, and their rich How We Use Type feature for each font family.
Is RSS coming back?, a topic today at /r/webdev. According to the comments, a) it never went away, b) no.
Great thread: What do software engineers who work at a large scale understand that other developers don’t? at /r/programming.
The inaugural State of SaaS Report.
In trying to improve the performance of an ExpressionEngine-powered web-based system, I came across the following database fields within MySQL query WHERE clauses that therefore should be indexed but aren’t:
- exp_actions: class, method
- exp_categories: cat_url_title
- exp_ce_cache_tagged_items: item_id
- exp_channels: channel_title
- exp_channel_fields: field_name
- exp_extensions: enabled, hook, priority
- exp_fieldtypes: name
- exp_members: in_authorlist, screen_name, username
- exp_menu_items: sort
- exp_modules: module_name
- exp_playa_relationships: parent_is_draft
- exp_plugins: is_typography_related
Every little helps.
Smoother CSS shadows by Philipp Brumm. Simple; excellent. [via CSSTricks]
Processes
Architecture
Before building your site or system, plans are required for both the back and front ends.
Design
It’s the competing considerations themselves that coalesce to form the design.
Installation & configuration
As well as smarts, what really makes a successful implementation likely is experience.
N
ow that the site’s wireframes have been generated during the architecture process, we turn them into mock-ups using visual elements such as a logo and an icon set; visual conventions such as a color scheme and a typeface collection; and visual rules such as a grid layout. Design appears in Jesse James Garrett’s useful Elements of User Experience diagram as the top level, labelled Visual Design.
As well as these elements, conventions and rules, the design must take into account a number of considerations that may initially appear to conflict until, with work, the tensions among them coalesce to actually form the design.
Dieter Rams, renowned industrial designer, has 10 Principles of Good Design.
Good design:
- is innovative
- makes a product useful
- is aesthetic
- helps us to understand a product
- is unobtrusive
- is honest
- is long-lasting
- is consequent to the last detail
- is concerned with the environment
- is as little design as possible.
The entire process, with dependencies
