Rob Weychert, a Philadelphia-based designer/web developer I’ve been following for decades goes deep on the article layout framework he put developed for ProPublica:
Our articles are built on an underlying grid structure, which varies depending on the size of the reader’s device or browser window. On most mobile phones, the layout is based on a narrow four-column grid. On a tablet, it might be six or eight columns. And in a large desktop browser window, there’s enough room for 14 columns, the largest version of the grid.
[…]
We’ve built all of these layout options into our content management system so they don’t require our producers to have any coding skills to use them. But for code-savvy power users who want to extend the system, it’s built with Column Setter, the open-source tool we developed for grid-based editorial design. We recently updated it with a variety of new features.
As someone who has to revisit this exact issue periodically, it’s really cool to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how it works at one of your favorite news publications, and to hear one of your heroes go deep on fundamentals like this.
I just received an email from Record Bird, a new release tracking app, announcing that they are shutting down due to financial difficulties.
Over time, we witnessed that it became more and more expensive for us, but also for artists to get fans to download an app. Yet scale was the only way to create a sustainable and economically profitable model.
Source: email newsletter from Record Bird not published online
As most web developers do, I sit in an office chair for a significant portion of my day. As most web developers don’t, I take regular breaks where I walk briskly around town, or cycle across it. Ergonomics are not my primary concern, but comfort certainly is. Is their a chair for me?
I joined Facebook back in 2006 when it first opened to the general public. I did this mostly because I was involved in building a social network platform to help artists, record labels, and management companies take their web presence back from MySpace. Fast-forward 11 years: I’m focusing more on my own music, Facebook is the new MySpace, and here I am trying to take back ownership of my web presence from them.
You know that letter I sent to my representative in July, urging her to support net neutrality? I sent one to John Garamendi, too. I heard back from him today in another encouraging canned message.
My senator responded to a letter I sent last month urging her to support net neutrality. She responded today with a somewhat canned message, which signals to me that many of my California neighbors also took the time to share their concerns with her. Yay!
Net neutrality is good. It means all websites on the internet get the same bandwidth. Netflix.com loads as fast as thebigreason.com. The new FCC Chairman plans to overturn regulations that keep the internet neutral and allow internet providers (telecoms ie. Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, etc.) to charge more money for increased bandwidth. It also has some very ominous implications for free speech.
I get a lot of inquiries as to where I’m playing next (which I am extremely humbled by and appreciative of), but I’m not much of a future planner. I live in the “now.” You know, like a renegade. These things are hard for me to remember off hand, so I made a listing of my Upcoming gigs for this website.
Mandrill just announced that they are requiring all of their users to have a paid monthly MailChimp account by the end of April. As a heavy Campaign Monitor user, I completely understand why they are doing this, and don’t fault them in the slightest for it. However, this complicated things substantially for me, and one of my more vulnerable clients.
To those of you who subscribe to the RSS feed of this website, I just rolled out an improved feed, so you may want to update your RSS reader. The new URL is https://thebigreason.com/feed/
I don’t know why the Macron is always left out of the HTML entity lineup, but I use them a lot. Here is a reference in case you need to put a line over it.
My apologies for the broken image links and any spammy redirects you may have encountered here recently. My shared server was victimized by some bot hacking, and I’m still tidying things up.
About a month ago, I tendered my resignation at ground(ctrl). The experience has been surreal. I contributed a good portion of my life to the cause there. While I’m extremely proud of the team we assembled and what we were able to accomplish in five short years, it has been a relief to have a few weeks off to reflect and decompress without the pressure of what has to be done when I get back.
In a recent project, I wanted to apply a CSS transition to the hover state of a table row and some menu items. The problem was that my hover state used a gradient background and I wanted the gradient to fade in and out. Background colors can be faded in, but background images can only be moved around. My solution was to fade in a background color and animate the position of the background image.
