• Blogs are my newspapers

Designing websites for readers and writers

"Thankfully, we're starting to see something of a Renaissance. Comment-forms are dropping off blogs like vestigial tails. Text sizes are increasing yearly, and sites are being stripped and whitewashed, with most of their old cruft gone without a trace. The medium is starting to disappear again." - Content as Medium by Matt Gemmell

"Strip away the images and gradients and vectors from even the fanciest web page, and you'll find that the web is mostly words." - The CODE Keyboard by Jeff Atwood

"But the most powerful tool on the web is still words. At its heart, web design should be about words." - Words by Justin Jackson

• The War on Wordsmiths

• The short story of Longreads, according to founder Mark Armstrong

• Crafting an online media story

• The CODE Keyboard - "We know how to use the most powerful tool on the web – words. Strip away the images and gradients and vectors from even the fanciest web page, and you'll find that the web is mostly words. If you believe, as I do, in the power of words, then keyboards have to be one of the most amazing tools mankind has ever created."

• Content as Medium

• GitHub system for writers

• Words

• Reminder: Design is still about words

• The honest web design

• 4 Reasons I Use Large Type

• Are Current Web Design Trends Pushing Us Back to 1999?
  • Hacker News thread

• Readability

• The Making of Medium

• Favorite website

• I like blogging software

• A Reader-First Internet

• Subcompact Publishing

• Lazy Eyes - How we read online

• Posts by Matt Gemmell
  • Designing blogs for readers
    • Hacker News thread
  • Comments Off
  • Comments Still Off
  • Comments Commentary

• new blogging networks:
  • http://medium.com
  • http://svbtle.com

• Planned new personal blogging/publishing platform: http://john.onolan.org/ghost

• Responsive Typography: The Basics

• blog design: http://malone.cc

• nice blog design: http://sketchingwithcode.com

Blogs are my newspapers

Comment in October 14, 2013 Hacker News thread about the public launch of the Ghost blogging app.

Blogs are my newspapers, thats why. For me accessibility and downwards compatability outweigh the "product" a lot. I have a low-end smart phone for which most "products" are ununsable. Why do people throw away expensive hardware that woks perfectly fine? Because the modern software doesn't run on it.

Take for example the opposite: http://blog.fefe.de

That is a product that meets my demands: I can read on any device, using multiple clients. I could read this page with a dual-core as well as with a gameboy. Serve TTF font's, maybe I rather use bitmap fonts? Doesn't matter.

I could read that blog using Mosaic, lynx, w3m... kindle displays... It also works fine for braille terminals.

I guess I am more interested in powerful systems than the pityful products of the App-bubble. After all I am a programmer.

#design - #blogging - #typography - #content - #writing - #longform - #blog_jr