A List Apart
A List Apart
A List Apart Issue 269
( This RSS Feed: http://www.alistapart.com/rss.xml )
- Understanding Progressive Enhancement
Steven Champeon turned web development upside down, and created an instant best practice of standards-based design, when he introduced the notion of designing for content and experience instead of browsers. In part one of a series, ALA’s Gustafson refreshes us on the principles of progressive enhancement. Upcoming installments will translate the philosophy into sophisticated, future-focused design and code.
- Ten Years
When Google was little more than a napkin sketch and the first dot-com boom was not even a blip, we started a magazine for people who make websites. Celebrate A List Apart's first decade. Join Zeldman for a look back at the way we were—and why we were that way. Find out what we've done and who did it with us, peek into our process, and get a clue about what's next.
New image recognition webapp ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures in Real-Time) is a on a mission to assign relevant tags to digital images based on their content, and wants you to help it learn. While digital image recognition has come a long way in recent years, it's still got a long way to go, and ALIPR's got its share of hits and misses. Upload an image to ALIPR or hand it a URL of an image already online, and the engine will suggest tags, and ask you to add to its list. Some of ALIPR's suggestions are spot-on, but others are way off. You can confirm the hits and suggest other tags to help the engine learn. Check out how ALIPR did with a few images from my Flickr photostream.
You just know you have some obscure, need-it-twice-a-year item, like a camping lantern or holiday wrapping paper stashed away somewhere—but where the heck did you put it? The Unclutterer blog recommends a system for creating a permanent storage inventory so you know what you've stored where. In short, number and photograph all the items you've got stowed away in boxes in the basement, and enter them into an Excel spreadsheet, with links to the digital photos on your hard drive. Store a paper copy of each box list in the box itself, and then somewhere off-site, for insurance purposes. This is one of those "I know I should do this" projects that would make finding stuff—and dealing in case of a disaster—so much easier. A quicker way might be just uploading the photos to Flickr, setting them to private, and using tags to note where each item is. How have you kept track of what stuff you have and where it is? Let us know in the comments. Photo by 
The alpha build of Mobile Firefox (
Got a stack of LPs you want to store on your hard drive instead of on a shelf? Wired's How-To Wiki runs down the steps to 
While Wall Street gets its rescue plan in order, the News Tribune says it's time for you to create your own personal bailout plan—by building up your cash, freezing your credit, and "laying off" expenses you don't really need. The Tribune advises: