A couple of weeks ago I built a website for One to Watch using GitHub Pages. It’s incredibly simple to do: just create a website — either static or Jekyll generated — within a branch of your existing GitHub repo called gh-pages. It’s automatically published for you as soon as you push the branch to GitHub. Obviously as it’s hosted by GitHub it’s very fast to load. Even better, there’s no extra cost to using your own domain.
From Pitchfork’s review of Purity Ring’s Shrines. First some context:
Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point.
Then, pow!
[…] and then “Grandloves”, with unwelcome guest vocals from Isaac Emmanuel of Young Magic, is like having a guy standing between you and the work, and he won’t stop talking on his cell.
What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable?
What if we all realized that social networks are a societal good (at least as good as a local alt [newspaper] weekly) but not necessarily good businesses? We’re all desperately hoping that Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr will figure out the secret ingredient that turns a large-scale community of free members into a cash machine. What if we’re all just waiting for the impossible? Like a business that turns water into gold? We’ve got lots of water, we just need to figure out the gold part…
In the care and feeding of software engineers, Nicholas Zakas says:
I have a theory. That theory is that software engineers see themselves very differently than those with whom they work. I’ve come to this conclusion after over a decade in the software industry working at companies large and small. Companies (product managers, designers, other managers) tend to look at software engineers as builders. It’s the job of the product manager to dream up what to build, the job of the designer to make it aesthetically pleasing, and the job of the engineer to build what they came up with. Basically, engineers are looked at as the short-order cooks of the industry.
UX is often spoken of in terms of the look and feel of visual elements: the layout of a navigation or the arrangement of fields on a form. A UI-layer thing.
It’s comforting to believe this: you’ve a specialist on your team who can deal with the “UX stuff”. This is a delusion. One person isn’t capable of covering all your bases because UX is defined by virtually every facet of your product, from design through implementation. While the UXer on your team can oversee things to an extent, it’s hard for them to retrofit good UX if it’s not baked in from the start.