Justin Gallagher

Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals.

Is the idea behind Craigslist just so good that design and innovation don’t matter? What if they did focus on design and innovation? Would it have a positive or negative effect? 

(via Instapaper)

Looks nice.  I have a few ideas to use this on already.

I like Hacker News, but the site’s design just kills my eyes.  All of the text is so small and so close together.  To remedy this, I made a quick Sylish script to fix things up a bit.  Granted, you get more headlines per screen with the original style, but for me, the new style is much quicker to scan.  Check it out at the link above if you’re interested.

Here’s what it looks like:

Before:

After:

The vision seems to be to create a system wich can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).

One of my favorite links in a while.  This bookmarklet removes all the clutter from pages leaving just the nicely formatted article text.  I’ve been using this a lot tonight, and it works great.  Highly recommended for cleaning up cluttered and ad ridden pages.

A continuing series of short screencasts with details on how to scale Rails applications.  Episodes so far include responsiveness, page caching, fragment caching and action caching.

Enough with the limitations of the web, we won’t have it. It’s time to raise our standards. Here, you’ll find only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts.

A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.

An interesting write up on some of the technical decisions behind Muxtape, including their decision to move from PHP to Ruby on Rails.

“How long do you think it would take to re-write the site in Rails?”
“Umm, well..”, Cmd-T, “localhost:3000”, Enter, “It already is.”

Haven’t tested this yet, but it would be real cool if it worked well

Good introduction to optimizing a wordpress based blog for search engines.

Seems like a good list…

Google yourself, and if you don’t like the results, fix them.