joshuago’s Bookmarks

11 JUN 2011
Implementing bookmarklets in JavaScript

Don't pollute the global namespace. Finish with undefined.

04 JUN 2011
[John Piper] What Tone Should Preachers Aim At?

Stay focused and don't make it about you; pursue the tone of the text. But let it be informed and colored by the tone of the bigger picture. Written for Christian preachers, but principles are generally applicable.

20 MAY 2011
[Zeynep Tufekci] Why Twitter’s Oral Culture Irritates Bill Keller (and why this is an important issue)

The abundance of printed material replaced the natural, visceral human oral psychodynamics with those of literate and written ones. Twitter and Facebook bring us back to that unpolished conversational flow.

13 MAY 2011
[Gary North] Time to Get Rich

Start saving early, because compound interest does wonders. And do whatever it takes to create or maintain fire in your belly.

10 MAY 2011
[Washington Post] Low-tech Skilcraft pens endure in a high-tech world

Among the elaborate seals, bronze statues and marble hallways that adorn federal Washington, there is another symbol of the machinery of government that is often overlooked: the lowly ballpoint pen.

09 MAY 2011
[Fred Wilson] Competition - The Pros and Cons

Competitors will invest in marketing, and the combined marketing efforts of a number of competitors will accelerate the development of a nascent market. It is very hard to build a market all alone. Also, when a large company enters a market, it validates the market in the minds of many who had not been paying attention to it before.

06 MAY 2011
[Oliver Reichenstein] Business Class: Freemium for News?

Reading news online feels like flying Economy. Loud distracting banners, cheap stock picture material, sloppy typography, a lot of useless comment noise, machine generated reading tips, no human service, and a claustrophobic information design make the reading experience a torture.

05 MAY 2011
[Frank Chimero] Running Towards

We should go pro and abandon anti. Because believing in something? Going after it by running as hard as you can? That is not cool—it is ugly and it is awesome. Why be reductive? Why undercut a true and honest attempt?

04 MAY 2011
[Coda Hale] How To Safely Store A Password

Use bcrypt because it's slow as hell. It introduces a work factor which affects how expensive the hash function will be, and can keep up with Moore's law.

29 APR 2011
[Jeff Bezos] 2010 Letter to Shareholders

Letter to Amazon's shareholders detailing the nature of investments technology infrastructure. Favorite tidbit, personally, is about how technologies are implemented almost exclusively as services, because it "reduces side effects and allows services to evolve at their own pace without impacting the other components of the overall system."