In Wired Opinion, Alice Marwick explores the roles the Men's Rights Activism movement and the meritocracy myth played in last-week's Donglegate snit-fit. The article is called Why the Tech Community Hates Feminists, and you should read it. It really helps to explain why the incident was so explosive. But briefly: if you threaten cherished ideals around itchy-trigger-finger activists, you're going to have a bad time. They may have it coming, but you're still going to have a bad time.
So yes, I hate it when a company I depend on monkeys with a product I use daily. Especially if the monkeys are carrying it out to the trash-heap, which Google is doing with Reader.
Now, I personally think “that sucks, dude” is one of the few acceptable responses to this sort of trauma. But instead we tend to be subjected to one or more of the following lectures:
At the 2013 Strata conference, LinkedIn senior data scientist Yael Garten gave a talk called “Big Data on Small Devices.” You can see it here – it's about eleven minutes long.
Anvilania is a static site; now, too, is Thudfactor. This is likely to be my preferred strategy for awhile, at least for sites I maintain alone. So why move away from Wordpress, the “largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world”? I had three things I wanted to accomplish. I wanted a more reliable archive, I wanted a more secure server setup, and I wanted speedier response times. Going static gave me all three.
As much as things have changed since the days of “optimized for Netscape,” images have stayed pretty much the same. A lot of us are using PNGs instead of GIFs now, and we have access to 8-bit alpha transparency, but those are details. Minor refinements. Responsive design and high-definition displays make the bitmapped image a real pain in the ass, though, and it's a situation that's likely to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Oh. Well, this is awkward. I never know what to say in these things. I mean, the first post. Blogging is usually no trouble. I've been doing that for years. But I don't have nearly as much practice writing the first posts for blogs. But you have to start somewhere, and here is where I am starting.