Industry News

Alex Maughan gives some great front-end design and development tips in his article Mobile-first, semantic, and modular front-end design. If any part of your work touches front-end development, I highly recommend this piece. In addition to walking through the tools he uses (and his reasoning), Alex also makes a strong case for progressive enhancement:

Designs should be approached with a content-first and mobile-first mindset. Following this, CSS breakpoints should always be mobile-first....

My fascination with how internet memes change language gets another healthy boost with Annalee Newitz’s excellent article We who spoke LOLcat now speak Doge:

In the internet meme war between cats and dogs, the dogs are currently winning. The “doge” meme features an image (often of an adorable shiba dog), annotated with distinctive phrases representing the thoughts of the dog — or the dragon, or whatever is being depicted. What has the internet gained in its move from LOLcats to doges?...

It’s time for our second test of how well Google Shopping and other shopping search engines find the best prices on products. For this installment, what’s the lowest price from a major retailer for a copy of “Red 2″ in the Blu-ray, DVD and digital download combo pack? Is The Featured Price The Lowest Price?

In this test, as with our last one, we’re trying to see if the “featured price” is better than the low price that can be found on each service, plus who finds the lowest price overall....

Yesterday, at Search Engine Land, I covered how the search for the term [pearl necklace] on Google would return an inappropriate and mostly irrelevant search result in the top positions...

Finally, I have a legitimate excuse for my obsession with sci-fi and post-apocalyptic literature. Apparently it’s going to make me a better designer. I’ll take it! Rebecca J. Rosen explains Why Today’s Inventors Need to Read More Science Fiction:

Once any sort of technology has users, it becomes extremely difficult to change it — even if you know it should or must be changed. [...] How is that affecting our social structure and values? How is that changing the way we view ourselves and...

As you know, Google's Matt Cutts publicly outed that Google went after Anglo Rank's link network and that the penalties and notifications will go out in a few days...

Yahoo has revealed in a US Securities & Exchange Commission filing that nearly one-third of its revenue last quarter — 31% — came from its search deal with Microsoft, according to a Bloomberg report. That’s far higher than the “more than 10%” figure Yahoo previously acknowledged, making it seem even more difficult for the company to potentially walk away the deal.

From the Bloomberg report: The company outlined the portion of revenue it gets from a search agreement with Microsoft Corp....

David Streitfeld takes an interesting look at the complicated relationship between digital and physical books in Out of Print, Maybe, but Not Out of Mind. This part jumped out at me, because it points to a mistake companies often make:

“A lot of these solutions were born out of a programmer’s ability to do something rather than the reader’s enthusiasm for things they need,” said Peter Meyers, author of “Breaking the Page,” a forthcoming look at the digital transformation of books. “We...