Ryan Tate RSS

2012Tue
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emilygould: The Saddest Shelf In The Library Fuck that! “Philip and Alex’s Guide To Web Publishing” changed my life. You can read it here, though it’s been heavily revised since the original (per Philip Greenpun’s very practical philosophy of what a book should be), so anyone with a library this cool should check out a copy (and then somehow transport yourself to 1998, if at all possible, for context). In all seriousness, Greenspun set a bar and a vision for long-form web writing that has been sadly marginalized. There’s something very touching, 13 years on, about the “Philip and Alex’s” chapters in which he argues for the web as an accessible form of education. This is a book that can remind those of us writing online what the hell we’re working toward.  

emilygould:

The Saddest Shelf In The Library

Fuck that! “Philip and Alex’s Guide To Web Publishing” changed my life. You can read it here, though it’s been heavily revised since the original (per Philip Greenpun’s very practical philosophy of what a book should be), so anyone with a library this cool should check out a copy (and then somehow transport yourself to 1998, if at all possible, for context).

In all seriousness, Greenspun set a bar and a vision for long-form web writing that has been sadly marginalized. There’s something very touching, 13 years on, about the “Philip and Alex’s” chapters in which he argues for the web as an accessible form of education. This is a book that can remind those of us writing online what the hell we’re working toward.  

2011Wed
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Rainz :-(

Rainz :-(

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For all the talk of “bubbles” and crazy valuations, I think most overlook something very fundamental: technology continues to permeate all of our lives in ways we couldn’t imagine just yesterday.
— TechCrunch writer turned venture capitalist MG Siegler, using in 2011 a bubble rationalization that would have sounded just as accurate in 1999, when he was in high school, or in 1845, when 30 little TechCrunches were published on paper.
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By 1845 a full railway mania was raging. By the summer new schemes were being floated at the rate of more than a dozen a week. Scrip was sold by alley men, and the stock exchange resembled a country fair… Schemes for direct lines connecting little-known towns to other little-known towns became a craze, launched more with an eye to garnering investment than actual profits… “We see nine or ten proposals for nearly the same line, all at a premium, when it is well known that only one CAN succeed,” said The Economist.

Trouble began in October 1845, when scrip ceased to pay a premium and shares in established railways began to fall.

— W. Brian Arthur comparing the first dot com collapse to the railway mania of the 19th century, in a paper I fact checked for the March 2002 edition of Business 2.0. At one point in 1845, some 30 different railway investment publications were in circulation. Sound familiar?
2011Sun
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When everyone else calls you a “hopeless alcoholic” or whatever, Grüner Vet has your back. Eight million quietly desperate Austrians can’t be wrong!

When everyone else calls you a “hopeless alcoholic” or whatever, Grüner Vet has your back. Eight million quietly desperate Austrians can’t be wrong!

2011Wed
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Ashton Kutcher’s special “Social Issue” of Details seems to have a certain theme.

Ashton Kutcher’s special “Social Issue” of Details seems to have a certain theme.

2011Tue
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[Page view statistics] are, in particular, helpful as a counterweight to the kind of complacency that all too easily sets in at major news organizations, where you assume that what DC insiders consider good work is also what readers care about.
— Paul Krugman weighs in on the benefits of being at least slightly obsessed with pageviews. Now someone needs to ask the economist to turn his Nobel prize winning mind on pageview bonuses. (CoughFelixCough)
2011Thu
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richardturley: There will be many MANY 9/11 covers in the coming weeks. I’m certain that this will not be the best one of those. But, I’m a sucker for aerial photography so I’m easily sold on this one… These are the issues that posturing editors like to make big grand statements with enormous single topic zeitgeist-capturing feature wells - photo essays, first persons, graphics, essays by eminent thinkers, artist commission photography, covers and imagery, crowd sourced content.. the whole shebang. The pressure to perform and make stand-out issues is intense as magazines compete for the imaginary ‘who did the best 9/11 coverage’ awards. I’m already finding it all a bit tiring… As Dan Frommer writes this morning, it’s a breathtaking cover. All the more impressive because it’s so easy to get trapped in cliché when visualizing this topic. (This makes me wonder if I should be paying more attention to Bloomberg Businessweek.)

richardturley:

There will be many MANY 9/11 covers in the coming weeks. I’m certain that this will not be the best one of those. But, I’m a sucker for aerial photography so I’m easily sold on this one…

These are the issues that posturing editors like to make big grand statements with enormous single topic zeitgeist-capturing feature wells - photo essays, first persons, graphics, essays by eminent thinkers, artist commission photography, covers and imagery, crowd sourced content.. the whole shebang. The pressure to perform and make stand-out issues is intense as magazines compete for the imaginary ‘who did the best 9/11 coverage’ awards. I’m already finding it all a bit tiring…

As Dan Frommer writes this morning, it’s a breathtaking cover. All the more impressive because it’s so easy to get trapped in cliché when visualizing this topic. (This makes me wonder if I should be paying more attention to Bloomberg Businessweek.)

2011Mon
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He was a Nobel Laureate in economics, and generally is portrayed by his commentary as a macroeconomist sympathetic to Keynesian views
— Wikipedia entry on Josiah Barlet. Oh, sorry, whoops, wrong link. 
2011Thu
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Death To McDonald’s Programming Books

Gruber:

Hot off the O’Reilly presses: Matt Neuburg’s 834-page iOS programming tome.

Oh boy: An obese time suck whose reference section will probably be obsolete by the time FedEx drops it off on my doorstep.

Is it still 1991? Do we still need every class and function call documented because gopher is slow on our 1200 baud modems? Are our lives less busy than they were then? Has the number of technologies we need to read about gone down? Are languages developing less quickly?

I’m sure Neuberg has some stellar writing in this thing; his Frontier: The Definitive Guide was the third programming book I ever owned and was immensely helpful. I remember being grateful that someone cared enough to write such a thorough book about such a small platform. I’m also sure that many people will get a lot of value out of this. It may prove to be the definitive iOS guide.

But how long is it going to take to teach technical publishers — and readers — that brevity is a feature, not a bug? If O’Reilly were to cut this book to a quarter of its size it would make it exponentially more useful. Ditto for the Rails book (Pragmatic), Learning Jquery (Packt), and the JavaScript Rhino (O’Reilly).

Paper and bandwidth are cheap, but reader time is valuable.

If you want to “get a solid grounding in all the fundamentals of Cocoa Touch,” you need something that will nestle snugly your skull, not rapidly distend it. Besides, valuing quality over quantity is what made the iOS platform successful in the first place, isn’t it?

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