A few days ago, the big tech news was that Jack Dorsey was stepping down from his role as Twitter CEO to focus on Square, the payment processor he founded in 2009. Two days later, it was announced that Square will now rebrand under the umbrella of Block. Like Meta and Alphabet, Block is a parent company — Square will remain Square, just as Facebook is still Facebook. The only actual product name change is that of Square Crypto will now be known as...

It’s almost Halloween, so we were all expecting the odd scare, but little could have prepared us for the blood-chilling horror of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ‘acting’ amazed in front of a green-screened mockup of The Metaverse, during his keynote at the company’s Connect event. Zuckerberg — or The Zuckster, as I imagine he introduces himself when arriving uninvited to your birthday drinks — was in the process of announcing...

The web industry is beset by competing ideals and goals so that the simplicity of numbers makes sense to us: one is more than zero, two is more than one. When it comes to any metric, there is an understandable temptation to focus on volume. In some cases, absolute metrics make more sense than others. If your goal is to make money, then $1 is marginally better than $0, and $2 is marginally better than $1. However, even in ecommerce, some conversions...

In my experience, the biggest challenge that freelancers face — more than winning clients or setting prices — is project management; take on too much work, and you’ll start missing deadlines, take on too little, and you’ll start missing your rent. Some people are naturally organized; they rock up at their desk at 08:59, fully confident in what they will spend the next 8–12 hours working on. Let’s be kind and say that I am not one of...

Choosing to work for free, pro bono, gratis, without charge is something that most of us find ourselves doing at one time or another. Whether we’re filling a hole in our portfolio, there’s a friend or relative we feel beholden to, or because there’s an opportunity to aid a cause we value. Recently, I agreed to take on some work, free of charge, for a charity whose goals I share. Because it’s a cause I believe in, I enjoyed the idea of being...

Craft CMS is increasing in popularity, and as it does, the previously relatively scant range of plugins is growing rapidly. There are plugins for Craft ranging from simple field utilities to the full ecommerce solution provided by Pixel & Tonic — the makers of Craft. An early decision that has borne fruit for Craft has been the plugin licensing model. Paid plugins for Craft charge an initial license fee and then a reduced annual renewal...

On June 29th, GitHub announced Copilot, an AI-powered auto-complete for programmers, prompting a debate about the ethics of borrowed code. GitHub is one of the biggest code repositories on the Internet. It hosts billions of lines of code, creating an unparalleled dataset with which to train a coding AI. And that is exactly what OpenAI, via GitHub, thanks to its owners Microsoft has done — training Copilot using public repositories. The...

There is no shortage of places to buy fonts online, but the quality of what is on offer is variable, and the way of searching catalogs has remained largely unchanged since the first stores appeared decades ago. I Love Typography — a popular source of news about typography and type design since 2007 — has stepped into the marketplace, starting by inviting some of the world’s top designers to contribute to its new store, resulting in 40 foundries...

It’s fair to say that AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a controversial topic among web developers. AMP is a Google-guided technology that strips down web pages to a limited sub-set of tags to serve pages faster. It was developed as a web-based rival to native news apps from vendors like Apple. The controversy first arose when it was clear how much influence Google had over the conventions, essentially creating a tiered Web overseen by a single...

Inclusive design is often mistaken for accessibility, or even used as an interchangeable term, which is a good indication that most designers don’t know what it means. Accessibility is a process that seeks to mitigate issues in a design that is not sufficiently universal; inclusive design increases the universality of the design. In real-world terms, an accessible building may replace its front steps with a ramp; an inclusive building...

This week, a significant portion of the Web fell over when on Tuesday, sites powered by Fastly were impacted by a massive outage that affected around 85% of the network. The near-total collapse — which was quickly identified and remedied — took out sites including GitHub, Stack Overflow, PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Reddit, Amazon, and CNN. Furthermore, it was all but impossible to express rage on Twitter because the server that handles...

This week, in a move like something from a particularly eventful episode of The Office, popular project management app company Basecamp banned political and societal discussion in the company's internal communications. In a post that has been revised for “clarification,” the company’s co-founder Jason Fried listed six rules for employees: No societal or political discussions at work; No more ‘paternalistic’ benefits;...

At the dawn of the web-era, there was much focus on how environmentally friendly websites were: we’d chop down fewer trees, ship fewer products, and travel less for business. And because the web was small, any negative impact it had was relatively small. But the Internet’s no longer small, and neither is the impact it has on the environment. The average website uses 211,000g of CO2 per year, watching a video online outputs an estimated 0.2g...

Over the last fortnight one site builder has gone toe-to-toe with another, as Wix launched a marketing campaign aimed at attracting WordPress users, and instead attracted universal ire. First, Wix sent out expensive headphones as gifts to key WordPress “influencers” in an attempt to lure them to the platform. Second, they produced a series of adverts that instead of promoting their own product, tried to imply that WordPress is so bad...