Snake by Blutdurst13
Craigslist: you’re doing it wrong and it’s working
Craigslist is a mess. It’s chock full of scams, porn and trolls. To try to browse it efficiently is to be frustrated. It drives designers crazy because of its homely looks. It drives developers crazy with its deliberate lack of open APIs. “If they would just…” But they wont, and that drives designers and developers nuts.
Designers strive to create systems that are beautiful in their entirety. Developers strive to create systems that are beautiful in their organization. Both those things are great. But neither of those things is the point. Real community will trump design and technology every time. That’s because designers and developers are both just building systems; if they aren’t building those systems for people, the people won’t care. No matter how beautiful, no matter how cutting edge, people will only care about a system to the extent that it gets out of their way and helps them be human.
This is the Craigslist secret:
Last year Newmark got about 195,000 email messages. He estimates that roughly 60 percent were spam. He read all the rest and replied to many.
Customer service is public service
This is why Craigslist works: it’s a community. It’s a place for people. That doesn’t happen on it’s own. Craig is the catalyst.
Want to know how little technology matters in the face of community? Craigslist started life as a simple mailing list run out of a guy’s house. The site had no way of searching listings or even editing them. Did that stop it?
Next time you’re building a system, ask yourself “at the end of the day, am I building this system to help people?”. If you aren’t, you may want to re-think things.
Utopia by Great Ideas
Decline of the English Murder by Great Ideas
Writings from the Zen Masters by Great Ideas
Great Ideas IV
Penguin is set to release the fourth round of its beautiful series.
This series contains many of my favorite books, paired with beautiful design at an affordable price. This is design at its finest.
Nigeria/South Africa at 50 →
In a heart-breaking piece of writing, Nigerian Dele Momodu shares his hurt and frustration at watching his country dissipate at the 50th anniversary of its independence.
The problem is I love Nigeria too much despite our unending miseries. No nation in Africa should be greater than ours: I began to daydream, as usual. We are blessed with the largest population of black people on earth. We are beautiful and brilliant. We are confident, agile and hardworking. We are smart and intelligent. We are bold and ambitious. We are daring and adventurous. We are fashionable and trendy. We are religious and supposed to be God-fearing. We have been entrusted with everything – gold, iron, bauxite, coal, cocoa, oil, gas, bitumen, cotton, wildlife, groundnuts, most fertile land, awesome coastlines, vegetables and fruits, arts and crafts, brains and wisdom that should make everyone of us prosperous.
But our prodigiously wasteful and insatiably greedy rulers have chosen to throw us down, from the pinnacle of the temple to the bottomless pit of hell.
The scary truth is that there are no easy answers to any of this.
You may be honest about others to the extent that you are honest about yourself.
Those who are honest about others, but not about themselves are called critics.
HTML 5: The Markup Language →
Get to know the new (and old) citizens of HTML 5. This spec document gives an overview of the new semantic tags in the language, without delving into the programatic details of Javascript APIs, etc. A perfect intro for a front-end developer.
Found via Jeremy Kieth’s The HTML5 Equilibrium; an excellent read.