Links (12,297 links)

List of saas and other tools that might be useful for start-ups.

Knowing 10% of awk's already small syntax, which you can pick up in just a few minutes, will dramatically increase your ability to quickly manipulate data in text files.

joshu asks: "These days, lots of that stuff is available as SaaS. What are the tools and services people use instead of hosting their own?"

What should other artists do? Well, I'm not really bothered. The sad truth is that almost everything almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. This has nothing to do with the internet, of course. Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette's attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal. Almost every artist who sets out to earn a living from art won't get there (for me, it took 19 years before I could afford to quit my day job), whether or not they give away their work, sign to a label, or stick it through every letterbox in Zone 1.

I would like to propose that technologists apply their ample skill to solving the real problems of humanity, not just the perceived problems of their very privileged social set. And for my good friends at several of the aforementioned startups, I challenge you to find a way to solve a social or human problem with your app.

A lightweight, browser-based image processing library that can apply various visual filters to images within a web page.

The brewery springs from the need to have more good beer. Beer deserving of a certain attention. Beer that forces you to confront and consider what you are drinking. Upfront hops, lingering bitternesses, warming alcohols, bodies of malt. Lengths and depths of flavour. We make Pale Ales, India Pale Ales and old school London Porters towards these ends. Bottled alive, to give them time to grow.

"A call to update Henry Wellcome’s curious collection. Please give us a 'thing' no bigger than your head." Does that mean I can donate my head? Or not?

A powerful Photoshop-like CSS gradient editor from ColorZilla.

Transparently integrates with your WordPress blog. File uploads are automatically saved into your Amazon S3 bucket without any extra steps. Once saved, these files will be delivered by Amazon S3, instead of your web host.

Count them. 8.

Check what OpenDNS customers see when they request a domain

Despite spending hours and hours searching the Web and testing plugins and code examples I couldn’t find a single example of a submenu that works the way I want it to (which happens to be the way submenus work in most other CMSs I have worked with). So I ended up coding one myself.

Modified Eric Meyer’s CSS reset for you to use in your HTML 5 projects.

a programme of curated music that sits at the intersection of sound, architecture and experience

Via russelldavies.

These hardboiled CSS3 Media Queries are empty placeholders for targeting the devices and attributes I’m interesting in making responsive designs for right now.

We believe there’s a niche waiting to be filled by someone publishing well-written technical pieces longer than the average blog article but shorter than books and making them available in a variety of formats. We are aiming at depth more than absolute timeliness; there are already plenty of outlets for the latest tech buzz.

Node is an awesome platform to very easily write very well performing servers. Node is an awesome platform to use for your daily shell scripting needs (allowing you to work in your favorite language even for these tasks). Node isn't about creating awesome websites. It's about giving you the power to easily build servers. Web, DNS, SMTP - we've seen all.

"Instead of coding in one language, we're actually coding in two. One is the subset JavaScript that can be run in all browsers, and another is the set of JavaScript that can be run by Node. Knowing the difference between the two languages and context switching between them is simply a required skill. You know what would be awesome? If we wrote our libraries so that they could run either on the server or on the client, and they did so in a transparent way. Maybe it would help to give a concrete example of how this could be awesome." Isn't YUI trying to do this? Lots to catch up on

"Part of the predicate for forks being so disruptive was the idea that there is One True Version — a creation, like a piece of software, a written work, or anything else, that can only be accurately represented by a single ideal expression [...] Until a git named Linus changed that." Worth poking through the comments.

"The future stars of advertising will be the consultants, craftsmen and traders." Pronouncement.

"A step-by-step rundown on how to set up a solid Agile process for coding, testing, and deploying via the cloud." with MikeCI and Codesion

Via markrocky.

"...that people actually want". Rapid app/product development ideas from MBM.

Rather nice.

Rendering first and executing JavaScript second is the key to a faster Web.

"<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”ie=edge,chrome=1″>

As a webmaster, you can use this simple meta tag that the new stable release of Google Chrome Frame can detect, and if present, will render the page using Google Chrome rather than Internet Explorer. This gives users the appearance of using IE, but the speed and standards compliance, and security of Chrome."

Every good developer should have this in their <head>:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">

#optintoawesome

Melted brain.

"Third Door combines professional, flexible, co-working office space, a communal social area and fully equipped Ofsted regulated childcare for pre-school children." Clever.

"Content management remains an unsolved problem. Untold billions of dollars (and hours) have been spent building commercial, open source, and custom content management systems since the first Web page was pushed to a Web server using FTP, and yet they all still suck." High five!

Noticed that the new RSC site is live (did a bit of work on it for the nice folk @harvestdigital): http://www.rsc.org.uk/

Is this progress?

Excellent presentation from Playful 2010.

Via tomtaylor.

I like this. "A quick note to say that I am really disappointed that you have still not paid me the [..] that I'm owed for the work I did for you. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot of money, but actually I think that this is more a matter of respect."

Syntax highlighting for self-hosted Wordpress.

Syntax highlighting using the 'SyntaxHighlighter Evolved' plug-in for self-hosted Wordpress installs.

This is probably where to begin.

Captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook [...] in a database you control, and makes it easy to search, sort, filter, export, and visualize in useful ways.

A small wrapper around LABjs to help use feature detection to load exactly the scripts that your user needs, not just all the scripts that you think they might need.

So here we're collecting all the shims, fallbacks, and polyfills in order to supplant html5 functionality in browsers that don't natively support them. The general idea is that: we, as developers, should be able to develop with the HTML5 apis, and scripts can create the methods and objects that should exist. Developing in this future-proof way means as users upgrade, your code doesn't have to change but users will move to the better, native experience cleanly.

Aside from choosing not to install tracking solutions that come with such a performance penalty (which is not always an option), your best option is to replace the default 500ms timeout in these scripts with something less obtrusive. 100ms is considered the threshold for what we perceive as instantaneous response.