I'm heartbroken about the situation at Twitter. So many of my friends have been impacted by the changes, and I feel helpless beyond offering support and sharing job opportunities. Twitter played a huge role in my career journey, offering a place to connect with others and find my voice. It's how I made many friends and career connections, and I'm grateful for the community it fostered. I dislike the rapid changes happening now, and like many, I'm concerned about its future and how it will survive. While I haven't paid for the service, I feel a sense of debt to the platform and community for all it's given me.
Goodbye HTML5Rocks
HTML5Rocks, a beloved resource for web developers, is shutting down. This post reflects on the site's history, its impact, and the reasons behind its decline. Key factors include the shift away from "HTML5" as a buzzword, changing team priorities, lack of a focused content plan, and challenges with community management. Despite the shutdown, the author expresses gratitude for the experience and the connections made, highlighting the lessons learned about content creation, developer engagement, and the open-source community.
The Wordle Wide Web
I'm so excited by the renewed interest in web development sparked by Wordle! It's a simple, fun game that highlights the power of the web. It's accessible, fast, user-friendly, and has inspired countless developers to create their own versions and variations. This post celebrates Wordle's impact, lists various Wordle-inspired projects (including different language versions, framework implementations, and even tools), and encourages readers to share their own discoveries.
The web that never was
I'm starting a project to document web technologies that didn't become mainstream. For every success story, countless others fade away. I want to explore these untold stories, starting with my own experience with Web Intents. I aim to understand why some projects thrive while others don't, and share these learnings with the community. If you have a similar story, please reach out!
Getting Feedback in to Chrome: Web Developer Insights Community
We've been using surveys like the MDN Developer Needs Survey and our own quarterly surveys to understand web developer challenges and prioritize our efforts. These surveys highlighted issues like web compatibility, testing, and documentation, leading to improvements like our Web Compat initiative and increased focus on MDN documentation. While valuable, these surveys don't offer granular feedback on specific projects or proposals. Direct feedback is essential, but our current approach is informal and inconsistent. To address this, we've partnered with C SPACE to create the Web Developer Insights Community – a dedicated group of ~1000 web developers who'll provide direct feedback to our questions. This community allows open communication among developers while limiting Chrome team influence. We're excited about this new channel for gathering actionable developer insights and encourage you to join if you're interested.
Web Developers. Want help? I want to help. Book a meeting with me.
I'm excited to announce that I'm starting "Office Hours" to connect directly with web developers. Following a successful run at Chrome Dev Summit, I'm opening my calendar for anyone to schedule a meeting with me. I'm happy to discuss anything from JavaScript, CSS, and performance to career advice. I'm especially eager to connect with developers in underrepresented regions. Book a meeting and let's chat!
Rabbits
Check out Nibblin, a forum for rabbit owners and enthusiasts, with a great community!
RE: State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
David Sifry of Technorati reports impressive blogosphere growth, doubling every 5 months and reaching 19.6 million blogs by October 2005. Around 70,000 new blogs are created daily, though spam blogs account for 2-8%. Sifry's data also shows a staggering posting rate, with 700,000-1.3 million new posts daily. While acknowledging Sifry's valuable contribution, I'd like to see more discussion regarding Technorati's API strategy and how they plan to leverage it for future development. Specifically, I'm interested in how Technorati is engaging with the community and incorporating user feedback, especially regarding feature requests on their Wiki.
Tags and Tagging
I've been pondering the use of tags lately, and noticed a lack of diversity in tagging practices. Many use tags for blog promotion or linking related content. I favor the latter, as it aids in content discovery. However, popular tags on sites like Technorati are often too broad (e.g., "books","blogs") making them less useful for finding niche communities. I propose using more specific sub-tags alongside broader ones. For example, if blogging about Asimov's Foundation series, include both "Asimov" and "Foundation Series" as tags. Tools like my Ajax Tagger and tagyu.com can help suggest relevant tags. I encourage everyone to use a wider range of tags to enrich the tag space and improve content discoverability.
Hypothetically Speaking
This blog post asks readers for their opinion on including event announcements related to blog post topics. For example, if a post is about Apple Macs, I wonder if readers would like to know about Mac Expos. Similarly, for a post about World War 2, it asks if announcing related events like commemoration days would be useful. Readers are invited to share their thoughts in the comments or via email.