Interesting Things Circa March 2013

Back in 2008 I had a blog series going where I did occasional blog post / news recaps with lists of interesting things. (Fun note: I ran that using ma.gnolia.com and stopped around the same time, but not necessarily because, they bit the dust.). I used that to post interesting things I'd been reading about, and given unlimited time would write long, insightful blog posts about.

I've noticed lately that I've been declaring browser tab bankruptcy quite often, and that these interesting things deserved a home. Around that same time, I've started enjoying Scott Hanselman's fun, "no worries, have some links!" style newsletter posts lately. So, for an unspecified amount of time, I am reinstituting the "here's some neat stuff" series. I will intend to follow up with long, insightful posts about some of these things, but probably will not. On with the show!

Working from home

Yahoo recently required remote employees to stop being remote or stop being employees. As a remote employee since 2005, I can definitely see both sides. It works for some companies, some employee, and some roles. When it's good it's great, but I've seen it abused.

Goodbye Google Reader, what's ahead for RSS?

Google announced they're shutting down Google Reader. I used to follow 1500+ individual RSS feeds (actually read them all), but lately haven't quite so much. Still, sad to see this go and hope those who predict this will help rather than exterminate RSS as a technology are right.

Glimpse 1.0 Ships

Glimpse is a great web debugging aid which provides in-browser information about what's happening on the server. They recently released versions 1.0 and 1.1. We interviewed them on Herding Code in February.

Semantic Release Notes

The Glimpse developers also just released the Semantic Release Notes proposal: Semantic Release Notes (SRN) is a text-to-object-to-html conversion tool for application authors. SRN specifically aims to produce semantic release notes from a Markdown document. This allows authors to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text document, convert it to a structured data format (typically JSON or XML) and from this format, convert it into any styled representation (typically html) or to consume the information programatically within 3rd party applications.

http://www.semanticreleasenotes.org/

scriptcs - Living on the edge in C# without a project on the wings of Roslyn and NuGet

Glenn Block and friends have spun up a neat project which allows you to write .NET apps with your favorite text editor, NuGet and the power of Roslyn!

CoffeeScript releases

Some cool new features in the recent CoffeeScript releases, including Literate CoffeeScript and Source Maps support.

Icon Fonts and SVG

As a long time fan of replacing web bitmap images (gif, jpg, png) with vector based formats when possible, I've been happy to see both the emergence of icon fonts as well as renewed interest in SVG for high-DPI display support.

Angular, Ember, brain hurt

Miscellany

Things I'm doing or involved with

2 Comments

  • man you are amazing of what you share

  • Google's announcement was one of the biggest surprises on the Internet in the last months. Google Reader had a lot of users and it was a very polished RSS Reader. But they decided it's not worth the effort and we will probably see at Google I/O 2013 what features they will continue to improve.

Comments have been disabled for this content.