Don Marti

Tue 24 Jul 2012 05:17:13 AM PDT

Web development links

(another batch of interesting links that have piled up.)

Eric Holscher: Why Read the Docs matters. "Having a shared platform for all documentation allows for innovation at the platform level, allowing work to be done once and benefit everyone. Having run the site for over a year now, I think there is a third thing that we should be striving for. That is to make the quality of documentation better."

Dan Newcome: The future of Web development isn’t MVC, it’s MVM. Model-View-Mapper, that is.

Jon Mitchell: 3 Reasons Why Everyone Needs to Learn Markdown. "It's amazingly useful just as a writing language. Even if you don't have to convert to HTML at all, it's still an appealing way to format plain text without having to deal with Microsoft Word or another goofy rich-text editor."

Mozilla is already home to some of the best web documentation. New initiative: Introducing “Mozilla Webmaker:” helping the world make the web Introducing Thimble: webmaking made easy Mark Surman has details: Making tools for webmakers.

Reinout van Rees takes good notes on a talk by Christophe Pettus: PostgreSQL when it is not your job. "It actually is pretty hard to seriously misconfigure postgres," but here are the key items to get right.

Everett Zufelt explains the fundamentals of Accessibility for Web developers.

Aaron Swartz: New: The Pokayoke Guide to Developing Software. Develop as a twelve-factor application, among other things.

Deployment advice: Prefer data migrations to initial data. And don't make a SnowflakeServer. Rainforest Blog explains hosting on AWS: A rough guide to keeping your website up through catastrophic events (aka. hosting in a single zone)

Slick-looking new project at Adobe: Brackets: The Open Source Code Editor for the Web

Ellen Bauer, for Smashing Magazine: Create A Responsive, Mobile-First WordPress Theme. "While working on your concept sketches, also think about which layout options to offer in the theme (such as header and sidebar options or multiple widget areas) and how they will adapt to different screen sizes as well."

Hector Garcia describes a skeleton setup for new Django projects: django-nbskel

Luke Plant: PHP, Python and Persuasion

Stephen Hay writes about "cold reading" a mobile user's intent. Great Works of Fiction Presents: The Mobile Context. "I bet the desktop site would be better if they just chucked it and used the “mobile” site for everything. Is the mobile view better because it’s better? Or is it simply better in contrast to a sucky desktop view with irrelevant content?"

Drupal works toward in-place editing. Spark update: WYSIWYG choice

Good series on cleaning up an existing site design for mobile: Adding Responsive Design Features to an Existing Webapp Part 1: Adapting Grid960, Adding Responsive Design Features to an Existing Webapp Part 2: Touchscreens and Tables, Developing a Web Application with a native feel for Tablets