A lot of web developers have forgotten the lessons of IE6, and just as they used to build desktop websites coded only for one engine, now they’re coding mobile sites specifically for Webkit, even when other browsers would be perfectly capable of rendering the designs they want.

This is exactly the sort of thing that gave IE6 such a stranglehold on the web for so many years (and as much as we’d like it to be, it’s not dead yet), with Netscape/Mozilla and Opera completely marginalized until Firefox managed to break through. It’s not quite so bad because two companies are driving WebKit (Apple & Google) rather than just one (Microsoft), but let’s try to learn from history this time around instead of repeating it.

Call for action on Vendor Prefixes – The Web Standards Project

The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

Originally posted on Google+

Klout’s methodology confuses me. When I first signed on with two profiles — one personal, the other for Speed Force — they classified my personal profile as an “explorer,” and Speed Force as a “specialist.” This makes sense to me. Speed Force also had a higher score for quite a while (it certainly has a bigger audience on any given network).

Sure, there were oddities like their conviction that I was influential about Washington DC rather than DC comics, or Reading Pennsylvania rather than, well, reading, and so on. But at least the overall classifications made sense.

Recently, that’s flipped. My personal profile is scored as having more influence, which I guess makes sense because it’s associated with more social networks (Flickr, Google+, etc.) and I actually do interact more through my personal profiles, especially on FB.

But the weird thing: Now my personal profile is a “specialist,” while Speed Force, which I use exclusively to discuss comics and plug blog posts about comics, is a “socializer.” Huh? Did I post too much about SOPA or something?

Notes: 1. Originally posted on Google+. 2. Klout was a service that tracked your social media influence across multiple networks. You could link Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. to one Klout account and it would try to analyze how you interact with other people on all those networks.

IEEE Spectrum article on The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix.

This was an interesting read, especially for the cloak-and-dagger tactics they had to resort to not only to create the OS in the first place, but to do things like distribute bugfixes (because management was afraid that distributing bugfixes would be considered “support”). Literally on the level of “go to the mailbox on such-and-such street after 2pm.”

(Rescued from my Google+ archive)

Seriously? Bacon flavoring syrup?

A bottle of bacon flavored syrup by Torani.

Seriously? Bacon flavoring syrup?

While I was looking for cinnamon, someone else spotted it and said, “Bacon? You might as well have beef!” (He was looking for peppermint.)

Would you buy this? What would you make with it? A bacon latte? A bacon margarita?