Updated 03-Aug-2025 A development server recently became compromised, and while this isn't necessarily a good thing, it does raise awareness and provides impetus to strengthen security measures. Access Control A few axioms: Access control is better through certificates (what you have) than passwords (what you know) Two-factor authentication is better than both (what you have ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 HTTPS Everywhere is a wonderful concept, but of course we need functionality first, which means dealing with the whole PKI issue. So, when stuff is located in countries with limited IPv4 addresses, how can this be accomplished? - Simply put SNI allows for any number of certificates to work on a single IP ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is a permanent page about style guides used in writing and for marketing. In particular there two kinds of Style Guides: - Brand Style Guide (for product designers, pr types, and all public and corporate communications) - Publishing Style Guide (for writers, editors, publishers) These two intersect and the Brand Style Guide ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Visual Studio Code Editor -- aka vscode, code -- is my current editor of choice. I used the venerable Atom editor for a number of years. Both use Electron as the platform for development, aka node/js/css. Atom was a Facebook project which has since been abandoned. It is very similar, and not difficult ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I use Markdown daily. The flavor I use is Markdown Extra. I use this in WordPress websites with a very old (2013) version of the Markdown Extra plugin, which simply continues to work. I also use this in local files that I then turn into epub and pdf files using Pandoc, which supports ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 When I was in a PhD program, and before that an MS, the academic researchers and the administration all talked about how important advances in science and scholarship will come from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Disciplinary boundaries had been mined through the decades and ages, and it is cross-disciplinary research where the findings ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 See also Managing Fonts in Debian Note: All else being equal, select TTFs if they are hinted, and OTF fonts if not. Note: Symlink in fonts to /usr/share/fonts and fc-cache -fv in Debian and other Linux. Note: For managing fonts in Debian, see Managing Fonts in Debian Fonts, Typeface, and Typography -- what ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I received an email about Paymo v.3 which was recently released. Paymo is a time-tracking, project management and invoicing cloud-based app (with native applications for desktop and mobile). Paymo has been around a while (hence being on their mailing list), and they have an impressive feature set and really thought through usability. I ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've been engaged in thinking about education and professional development since encountering the fantastic difficulties (most vividly displayed as a university lecturer and student advocate in an advanced graduate program in the mid-2000s). Since then, I have developed a fairly good idea of the exact, largely intractable nature of the difficulties specifically in ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 This is my attempt to give a good set of guidelines based on two sites: Migrationology and Bellroy. What these sites do well and what they do poorly will be discussed, delivering a list of what is important. This post builds on the discussion in Multiplatform Web Design. Summary of Mobile Web Best ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 A famous writer (Borges) once said that he imagined the afterlife (or more precisely Paradise) to be a kind of library. However, what occurs to me now (in at once a banal and deeply moving way) is that not only the afterlife, but Life is a kind of Library. I mean this both ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Yes, screen promiscuous, a term I did not know before reading the piece on Snowpiercer in the LA Times. Short and Longform Trends As John Borthwick reports there are two trends in media consumption seemingly at odds, lots of micro/immediate shortform content being consumed and reflected, as well as longform, quality content that ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Fifteen years ago, Sundays were best spent on the bed with too much coffee and the Sunday New York Times, a massive amount of information. Indeed, it has been said that the Sunday New York Times holds more information than the average serf in the Middle Ages encountered in their lifetime. Occasionally we ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 This brief report could just as easily be called The Status of Education 2.0 but I think we are over this versioning. What is really at work is a de-institutionalization of education as an institution. What we are witnessing is the reorganization of learning outside of the organizing principles of the Medieval University. ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 These misleading terms Adaptive and Responsive don't matter much, but rather the result which is an experience of the user (and higher conversion rates) across various platforms (including operating systems, browsers and screen resolutions). For authors and publishers (both book and web formats), design is a rather important topic. Hardcover, paperback, ebook, web ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Now available on Github Download WP Fountain from WordPress.org WP Fountain is a WordPress Plugin to support Fountain markup< (aka SPMD) for screenplays. Contributors: jeffmcneill, nyousefi Tags: screenwriting, scrippets, scrippet, screenplay, film scripts, movie scripts, fountain Requires at least: 1.5 Tested up to: 3.6 Stable tag: 0.0.1 This plugin modifies screenplay format text ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Back in the days of the typewriter, there was a time when the humble apostrophe would serve as apostrophe, single quote and double quote (two strokes). There were also a few other technical uses or meanings (actually, glyphs), but these three were sufficient overloading of the character. ASCII, HTML, Unicode In the ASCII ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 First published in 2014, updated in 2021 Back in 1998 I applied for a MS in Information Science at UC Berkeley. There was a programming requirement, so I took a C class. Then in 2000 for my graduate thesis we needed some kind of user interface so I designed that in ColdFusion, an ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 For all website designers and administrators, especially those with multiple sites, a common URL structure is the key to sanity. Of course this also works for those who only have one website. After all, best practices for busy site designers are best practices for those with a single site, as well. Basic Rules ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 While many of these projects are obviously a few years old, it seems that everywhere one sees the emergence and increasing importance Node.js and Coffeescript-based tools for publishing. That is, front-end development tools and languages are starting to displace traditional "native" (C and its ilk, misbegotten java) and older scripting languages (python, ruby). ... Read more