Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse

A search engine for images and audio that’s either under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.

Carbon Dioxide Removal Primer

A Creative Commons licensed web book that you can read online.

Carbon dioxide removal at a climate-significant scale is one of the most complex endeavors we can imagine, interlocking technologies, social systems, economies, transportation systems, agricultural systems, and, of course, the political economy required to fund it. This primer aims to lower the learning curve for action by putting as many facts as possible in the hands of the people who will take on this challenge. This book can eliminate much uncertainty and fear, and, we hope, speed the process of getting real solutions into the field.

Building a client side proxy

This is a great way to use a service worker to circumvent censorship:

After the visitor opens the website once over a VPN, the service worker is downloaded and installed. The VPN can then be disabled, and the service worker will take over to request content from non-blocked servers, effectively acting as a proxy.

AccentDesign/Fractal-Atomic: An awesome starter point for your Fractal UI component library

If you want to use Brad’s Atomic Design naming convention—atoms, molecules, etc.—and you like using Fractal for making your components, this starter kit is just for you:

Keep what you need, delete what you don’t and add whatever you like on top of whats already there.

Redux: Lazy loading youtube embeds

Remy has an excellent improvement on that article I linked to yesterday on using srcdoc with iframes. Rather than using srcdoc instead of src, you can use srcdoc as well as src. That way you can support older browsers too!

Lazy load embedded YouTube videos - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

This is a clever use of the srcdoc attribute on iframes.

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

Books in the public domain, lovingly designed and typeset, available in multiple formats for free. Great works of fiction from Austen, Conrad, Stevenson, Wells, Hardy, Doyle, and Dickens, along with classics of non-fiction like Darwin’s The Origin of Species and Shackleton’s South!

Self-Host Your Static Assets – CSS Wizardry

Trust no one! Harry enumerates the reason why you should be self-hosting your assets (and busts some myths along the way).

There really is very little reason to leave your static assets on anyone else’s infrastructure. The perceived benefits are often a myth, and even if they weren’t, the trade-offs simply aren’t worth it. Loading assets from multiple origins is demonstrably slower.

When 7 KB Equals 7 MB - Cloud Four

I remember Jason telling me about this weird service worker caching behaviour a little while back. This piece is a great bit of sleuthing in tracking down the root causes of this strange issue, followed up with a sensible solution.

The Untold Story of Jaime Levy, Punk-Rock Cyber-Publishing Pioneer

This excerpt from Claire L. Evans’s new book Broad Band sounds like Halt and Catch Fire, but for real.

Many people saw the web for the first time in Jaime’s loft, on a Mac II her hacker friend Phiber Optik set up with a 28.8K internet connection. As avant-garde guitarist Elliott Sharp performed live, and another friend, DJ Spooky, played house tracks, Jaime’s guests gathered around the Mac’s small screen. At the top of 1994, there were fewer than 1,000 websites in the world, mostly personal home pages. These converts would call themselves the “early true believers,” counting the year of their arrival online as a mark of status, the way the first punks claimed 1977.

How Fast Is Amp Really? - TimKadlec.com

An excellent, thorough, even-handed analysis of AMP’s performance from Tim. The AMP format doesn’t make that much of a difference, the AMP cache does speed things up (as would any CDN), but it’s the pre-rendering that really delivers the performance boost …as long as you give up your URLs.

But right now, the incentives being placed on AMP content seem to be accomplishing exactly what you would think: they’re incentivizing AMP, not performance.

Medium is only an edge server of your POSSE CDN, your own blog is the origin

Medium, Twitter, Facebook and others are edge services for your content … Your platform is the origin.

A Little Surprise Is Waiting For You Here — Meet The Next Smashing Magazine

An open beta of Smashing Magazine’s redesign, which looks like it could be a real poster child for progressive enhancement:

We do our best to ensure that content is accessible and enhanced progressively, with performance in mind. If JavaScript isn’t available or if the network is slow, then we deliver content via static fallbacks (for example, by linking directly to Google search), as well as a service worker that persistently stores CSS, JavaScripts, SVGs, font files and other assets in its cache.

Introducing Universal SSL

Great news from Cloudflare—https endpoints by default!

This means that if you’re planning on switching on TLS for your site, but you’re using Cloudflare as a CDN, you’ve got one less thing to change (and goodness knows you’re going to have enough to do already).

I really like their reasoning for doing this, despite the fact that it might mean that they take a financial hit:

Having cutting-edge encryption may not seem important to a small blog, but it is critical to advancing the encrypted-by-default future of the Internet. Every byte, however seemingly mundane, that flows encrypted across the Internet makes it more difficult for those who wish to intercept, throttle, or censor the web. In other words, ensuring your personal blog is available over HTTPS makes it more likely that a human rights organization or social media service or independent journalist will be accessible around the world. Together we can do great things.

xkcd: Syllable Planning

This is called expletive infixation.

I’ll always remember the “Phila-fucking-delphia” example from Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct:

If you said “Philadel-fucking-phia”, you’d be laughed out of the pool hall.

Photo Album - Imgur

At least one of these will probably drive you crazy.

Dance Yrself Clean - LCD Soundsystem - Muppets rock out in Brighton ! - YouTube

A trifecta of nice things:

1. Muppets.
2. Brighton.
3. LCD Soundsystem.

xkcd: Standards

So true, it hurts.

Book of Speed

An online book about website performance by Stoyan Steganov, released into the public domain. Excellent!

Unlicense.org » Unlicense Yourself: Set Your Code Free

A handy template for releasing code into the public domain.