Massive Censorship of Digg Uncovered

A cadre of right-wing users have been conspiring to bury links they don’t like. It’s staggering the amount of effort they put in: the ringleader alone voted on (dugg? digged?) 70,000 links in a year on the site.

The Best Magazine Articles Ever

Kevin Kelly is compiling a crowd-sourced compendium of great magazine journalism.

My contribution to the list is Hazlitt’s typically acerbic ‘On Common-Place Critics’, from The Examiner, 24th November, 1816.

It’s one of my favourite nuggets of Hazlitt, but I had an ulterior motive in submitting it: the list is, understandably, skewed in favour of post-war US journalism, and I hoped to nudge contributors in different directions. Hasn’t worked, yet–‘On Common-Place Critics’ is still the only piece on the list published prior to 1939–so if you’re an expert in 18th Century periodicals, Little Magazines, fanzines or anglophone publications outwith the US and UK, get in touch with Kevin at the link above.

10k Apart

A competition to design a web app in less than ten kilobytes of code, though you can use external libraries, which is a bit of a swizz.

I can’t believe it’s been eight years since the last edition of The 5k, the original, rather more rigorous comp. that, in a roundabout way, introduced me to the Game Neverending, which had a chatroom with photo-sharing built in, a handy feature which eventually morphed into Flickr.

The Secret Law of Page Harmony

From a fascinating essay on book design and page harmony.

CLI-Lover

A piece for Lifehacker on taking notes at the command line.

E-Blogs

Each day, we select blogposts from 5 countries: The United-Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain. We have them translated into 5 languages.

Cause List

Donny made a site that shows you what’s going on in courts of law across England & Wales, right now; I knocked up a stylesheet to make the data a bit more readable.

Bob George

Download

I'll be buying several copies of the Mirror tomorrow to get my hands on Prince's latest, 20Ten.

It will, of course, be a profound disappointment.

And I mean profound.

I've been listening, obsessively, to Prince almost every day since 1987, when, aged ten, I heard Sign "☮" the Times.

Unfortunately for me, that was the year that Prince hit his peak.

Of course, I've had the joy of seeing him live, of exploring the back catalogue, of trading bootleg cassettes with fellow fans in the pre-internet age, of filling hard drives with obscurities and live shows since the dawn of Bittorrent, even of shaking Prince by the hand after watching him play for three hours straight in a New York nightclub, backed by the Family Stone!

But every year since 1987, Prince has disappointed me--a teeny tiny bit, with Lovesexy, a hell of a lot, with shameful pap like The Chocolate Invasion--and every single year, for twenty-three years I have let myself believe that this new album will be the return to form, the one that realigns his recorded output with the continuing brilliance of the live sets.

And then I buy the tabloid, or sign up to the website, or do whatever silly thing it is Prince wants me to do to get my hands on his new record, only to have my hopes dashed by weak songs or, worse, anaemic rehashes of unreleased material that I've loved in bootleg form, or seen live.

Oh well.

The song above is Prince at his sloppiest, sleaziest and strangest, doing a perfunctory practice run-through of Bob George at Paisley Park on April 5th, 1988, during a rehearsal for the Sign "☮" the Times tour.

At the end of the recording, Prince says, 'We're getting away with murder...'.

He wasn't then, but he will be tommorrow.

Unless...

Fluid Images

I rejigged the CSS for One Thing Well last night, making it semi-fluid, responsive to changes in browser window width and better suited to viewing on iPhones and iPads.

I ran into one problem: how to resize wide images for smaller browser windows without affecting small images?

Handily, when Tumblr resizes large images, it appends the width of an image to its filename–eg.,tumblr_guagfduyfa_500.png–so I could use CSS attribute selectors:

img[src$="_500"] {
width:100%;
max-width:500px;
}

img[src$="_400"] {
width:100%;
max-width:400px;
}

Now, if the width of the containing <article> tag drops below 400px or 500px, the image will shrink to fit in all modern browsers.