Cabel Sasser’s talk at XOXO
Phil Nelson A tremendous and upbeat talk about endings, having a cliche meltdown, and the best time of your life. Really can’t recommend this one enough.
Mock Response
A super simple, but super useful, little service that returns various HTTP status codes based the URL called. Helpful tool for testing how your app responds to every HTTP status.
Dnsyo – A DNS propogation tester
Looks like a handy little tool if you’re in the website business, and it even has a pithy one-line description:
In short, it’s nslookup, if nslookup queried over 1500 servers and collated their results.
Bonus points for being open source and installable via pip.
Who I Am and Where To Find Me (SITREP October 2013)
Hi there. I’m Phil Nelson. I code up hot-shit HTML5, CSS, and Javascript user interfaces for [Occipital][occ]. We just launched the Structure Sensor, the first 3D sensor for mobile devices. I built the website. Real proud of it.
I design cool-looking stuff for fun and sometimes profit, and post it to my Dribbble account. I really like video games and play them on Steam sometimes under the username murderthoughts. Most of the time you can find me on Twitter [@philnelson][twit]. I also lurk on App.net, and post stuff on my Tumblr pretty regularly. If you like being alternately delighted beyond belief and crushingly depressed then you’re in the right place.
I also write far too infrequently here at extrafuture.com. Which you are reading. Right now.
Introducing Harp – the static web server with built-in preprocessing
Imagine you were choosing between PNG or JPEG for an image you wanted to serve. You would simply pick the right format for that use case because web servers support either, you need only drop the file in. That is exactly what Harp does with modern web languages. Want to use Stylus? Just name your file with a .styl extension. Prefer LESS’ syntax? Just drop in the LESS source files and go to work. Or use a combination of both, Harp doesn’t care. Harp knows to compile and serve main.styl when main.css is requested, OR main.less if that file exists instead. It’s that simple.
That’s a hell of a pitch, and it’s only about 1/3 of the whole thing. Read the whole post.
W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web’s standards
This is pretty close to the worst possible thing they could’ve done:
Here’s the bad news: the World Wide Web Consortium is going ahead with its plan to add DRM to HTML5, setting the stage for browsers that are designed to disobey their owners and to keep secrets from them so they can’t be forced to do as they’re told. Here’s the (much) worse news: the decision to go forward with the project of standardizing DRM for the Web came from Tim Berners-Lee himself, who seems to have bought into the lie that Hollywood will abandon the Web and move somewhere else (AOL?) if they don’t get to redesign the open Internet to suit their latest profit-maximization scheme.