Les Orchard writes about web tech, Firefox, feeds, bookmarks, and Commodore 64 nostalgia.
HN commenters link it for practical references, such as a Twitter-faves-to-OPML tool and an early write-up of HTML5 drag and drop in Firefox.
Here are my top ten, mostly web-related in some way because of my interests. These are the "loud alpha geeks" - the ones who broadcast their interests via regularly-updated blogs or curated links. (There are plenty of "quiet alpha geeks" who are just as "alpha" but not as easy to follow online.)
Brad Fitzpatrick (http://brad.livejournal.com/) - creator of LiveJournal and Danga, now at Google working on PubSubHubbub, the Social Graph API, etc.
John Resig (http://ejohn.org/, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeresig) - jQuery, Mozilla, lots of other JavaScript and browser stuff.
Paul Bucheit (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=paul) - creator of GMail and FriendFeed, now at Facebook.
Ryan Tomayko (http://tomayko.com) - Ruby, Sinatra, now working at GitHub, has an excellent linkblog.
Simon Willison (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=simonw) - Django, Python, also has an excellent linkblog.
Leslie Orchard (http://decafbad.com/) - Previously at Delicious/Yahoo, wrote books on JavaScript, Dojo, RSS, now at Mozilla. Follow his bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/deusx
Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/) - Atom, HTML5, Linux, Python, Greasemonkey, formerly at IBM, now at Google. Bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/wearehugh
John Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/) - Apple news and punditry, linkblog.
Sam Ruby (http://intertwingly.net/blog/) - Atom, Python, Ruby, Rails, XML, HTML5, SVG. Read what he reads at: http://planet.intertwingly.net/
Kevin Kelly…
Drag and drop from the desktop is an HTML5 feature, but support elsewhere may not be as strong as in Chrome.
Here's an earlier article about support in FF:
http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/07/15/html5-drag-and-drop
Last I checked, one weakness of the FF support is that it can only read a dropped file into memory in its entirety -- not by fileBlob slices. That may not be fatal for typical-sized email attachments, but is a serious limitation for one of my desired applications.
(I'm not sure I'm even reading the HTML5 drag-and-drop spec right about reading ranges... but they wouldn't spec a feature that could only work with files that easily fit in the browser's memory, would they?)
> Firefox did, with a subscribe button in the address bar. https://mariolurig.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/firefox-rss-icon.png
Is that from Firefox 3.6? I would have to confirm this, but I'm pretty sure they started de-emphasizing RSS around 2011 with Firefox 4.0.
It was many years ago, I was looking at some discussion about it here: https://decafbad.com/blog/2011/01/15/how-to-use-feed-auto-discovery-in-firefox-4/
I remember being rustled about it back then, also.
Les Orchard (who used to work for delicious.com) has a good response to this article. Part of his argument is that Flickr is a really bad place to start a tag analysis, since people generally only tag their own stuff (the big win for tags comes when lots of people provide their personal tags for a single entity, meaning you can look at the data in aggregate). http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/01/18/tags-do-work-for-me-at-least
I'll +1 everyone who is recommending Jekyll. I've rolled my own blog engines (first one was Java/Struts 10 years ago) but I'm loving the zen of blogging via creating and pushing Markdown files to GitHub.
It's simple, provides me with a versioned and easily portable archive and doesn't require constant security updates. Here are some tips from migrating from WP: http://decafbad.com/blog/2011/06/08/moved-to-jekyll
actually, they are most likely using part of the new drag and drop API in HTML5. firefox and chrome both provide a `ev.originalEvent.dataTransfer` object as part of the DragEvent interface. additionally (and importantly), they allow the drag/drop to originate from outside of the browser.
see: http://decafbad.com/blog/2009/07/15/html5-drag-and-drop
and: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/07/html5-drag-and-drop/