For several years I have been sharing links with work colleagues, giving my emails the snazzy name of ” is Link Day!”. The day, of course, is the day I send the email. I have been silly in not also sharing these links on my blog, not because of the thousands of regular reads I have (ha!) but because I regularly find really useful resources I easily forget about. So, without further ado, is my latest Link Day:
Performance/UX/Responsive design
Google have expanded their Web/Fundamentals section with great information on website performance: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/
Incredibly detailed case study of a performance audit for several sites by speed genius Paul Irish: http://www.paulirish.com/2015/advanced-performance-audits-with-devtools/
Improve mobile UX with these six podcasts: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2015/03/06/improve-your-mobile-ux-with-these-six-podcasts-2/
An oldie but a goodie. Leeds lad Harry Roberts gives a great overview of performance tweaks to make on websites: http://csswizardry.com/2013/01/front-end-performance-for-web-designers-and-front-end-developers/
The BBC news site is now fully responsive: http://responsivenews.co.uk/post/114413142693/weve-made-it
Presentation by Bruce Lawson on responsive images: http://brucelawson.github.io/talks/2015/respimg/ (can’t find a video, sorry)
Jeffrey Zeldman on progressive enhancement, and what it means for wearables: https://the-pastry-box-project.net/jeffrey-zeldman/2015-March-21
Oh my word, Kathy Sierra has a new book out: http://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425149544&sr=8-1&keywords=badass&tag=rnwap-20 (here’s a trailer video: https://vimeo.com/122214185)
Lots of performance tooling resources: http://perf-tooling.today/
Strategies for staying on top of web performance: https://css-tricks.com/strategies-for-staying-on-top-of-web-performance/
Accessibility
There is ample evidence to suggest that increasing accessibility of a website increases interaction and conversion. Here’s a list of sites that get accessibility right: http://a11ywins.tumblr.com/
Penman Ross (16 years old!) nails why progressive enhancement matters: http://alistapart.com/article/let-links-be-links
Yet another company in a lawsuit over web accessibility: http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/03/20/scribd-faces-setback-in-lawsuit-over-accessibility/
Design
Anna Debenham has put together a great set of resources about Style Guides: http://styleguides.io/
A set of lovely loaders in pure CSS: http://connoratherton.com/loaders
Huge set of design patterns for inspiration: http://www.pttrns.com/
“A collaborative research project aimed at designing better tools and practices for learning web development”: http://openhtml.org/
Development
Free course on JavaScript design patterns: https://www.udacity.com/course/ud989
Interactive tutorial and reference site for the Markdown formatting language: http://thisismarkdown.com/
If you want to get into Angular don’t forget accessibility: http://simplyaccessible.com/article/spangular-accessibility/
Good writeup of use of flexbox for a site header: http://www.lottejackson.com/blog/with-a-spoonful-of-flexbox
Open source book on JavaScript development: https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS
Business, teamwork and general interest
We know strategy is important, and execution of that strategy more important still. So why do they often unravel? https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-strategy-execution-unravelsand-what-to-do-about-it Contains the great line “no Gantt chart survives contact with reality”.
Don’t say the solution is easy until you’ve worked out what the problem is: http://curtismchale.ca/2014/10/21/dont-say-its-easy-you-have-no-idea-yet-if-it-is-easy/
The illusion of free: an essay by Laura Kalbag: http://alistapart.com/column/the-illusion-of-free
And finally
“A website should be so easy to use a drunk user could use it”. This guy will test that for you: http://theuserisdrunk.com/
You may not have heard of “the mother of all demos” (fascinating story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos) but it’s now an opera: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/epic-demo-computer-history-now-opera/
“Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop”. Monica Lewinsky on the price of shame: http://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame
BusinessTown, inspired by Richard Scarry: http://welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com/
Submarine cable map 2015: http://submarine-cable-map-2015.telegeography.com/