Blue skies headed into the weekend.
Scales.
Sunday night.
A tiny XX concert. (at NPR Headquarters)
2013
Things were getting dusty with a faint hint of adaptive grid moldiness around here, so I finally took the plunge and retooled the design with the goal of moving to a fluid-grid responsive design focused on readability and large photo display.
We’re still coming to you live from Tumblr’s AWS servers, with static files served from my own S3 bucket. I toyed with the idea of moving over to Wordpress, but the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t add up for me. I love not having to maintain a server running MySQL, and Tumblr seems to have hit their stride on the uptime issues which have all but disappeared in the last year. No, I don’t have a copy of my blog’s data in a structured format, but I am backing up content to Dropbox via IFTTT in case of catastrophic data loss. Creating a new Tumblr theme from scratch was cake with Dave Santos’ Tumblr Boilerplate to establish a solid baseline of all the various content types.
The old layout was built on top of Dave Gamache’s great Skeleton grid and typography package. The new design abandons Skeleton in favor of a frankenstein monster of Bootstrap’s typography and mixins package and Zurb Foundation’s fluid grid. Bootstrap’s grid is solid, but the Zurb tool is slightly more robust with discrete mobile grid assignments and push/pull offsets. I opted to use LESS for preprocessing, which means the Foundation grid is included as pure CSS instead of the SASS component from the Foundation package. The LESS files are authored in Sublime Text and compiled with the LESS-build package before being shipped off to S3.
Body copy is set in Freight Text Pro and most everything else is Freight Sans Pro. Fonts are served by Typekit.
Visually, this is the most minimal design I’ve ever deployed on the site. Type-driven and stripped-down may be the flavor of the month, but I feel strongly that it’s the right toolkit for the mix of content the site has historically seen. Here’s hoping an uncluttered palette will be the catalyst for more and better content on the blog going forward.
Mall walk.
The New York Times has graciously provided us a great test case for the long-running discussion of vertical scrolling versus horizontal paging in digital reading experiences.
To my eyes there is no contest. The comfortable measure and web-native vertical scroll behavior of the web app is far superior to the app store multiple-column layout from an ease-of-reading perspective.
Which experience do you prefer?
Today I set up my own Brian Boyer-style RWD testing rig with this Griffin PowerMate and Brian’s sample Applescript. Such a great idea.
Thanks, Brian!
Innovation in Journalism Goes Begging for Support
David Carr’s excellent report on the last-ditch attempt to fund Homicide Watch through a Kickstarter campaign contains some important and thought-provoking observations about the state of philanthropic funding in the world of journalism.
I thought about Homicide Watch when I read Alan D. Mutter’s recent post about the big chunks of financing that are going to tiny experimental outfits named The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. In May, the Ford Foundation gave The Times $1 million over two years to hire five reporters to cover ethnic and prison issues even though the paper is owned by the Tribune Company, which may be in bankruptcy but has amassed nearly $2.4 billion in cash during its three and a half years in court.
In July, the foundation awarded The Washington Post $500,000 for government accountability reporting.
The numbers are staggering in comparison to the modest $40,000 goal to fund another year of homicide coverage in Washington. Carr agreed:
Shouldn’t financing meant for journalistic innovation go to the green shoots like Homicide Watch and not be used to fertilize giant dead-tree media? I am all for putting more reporting boots on the ground, but the existential dilemma confronting media will require new answers, not stopgap funds for legacy approaches.
Late Sunday evening the Homicide Watch campaign reached its goal with three days left on the clock and nearly $1,000 in additional contributions. I am thrilled for my friends, and so relieved that a broad coalition of supporters recognized the value of Laura and Chris’ work in a community severely underserved on this important beat.
Difficult questions remain, though, when successful bootstrapped journalism startups lose out to legacy news operations in the hunt for foundational giving.
A few shots from the Code With Me workshop hosted at NPR this weekend. Many thanks to Sisi Wei and Tom Giratikanon for leading the effort.
