Mark Pilgrim

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…

I care a lot about having the source of programs available (freedoms 0 and 1), but there's one thing that's always concerned me.

Everyone says that "you can still charge for free software, as long as the source is GPLed", and hence the model is a drop-in replacement for the standard software-vendor model. As long as you trust the goodwill of people, you believe that those who want to use your work will pay full price for it.

But when you give everyone the right to redistribute, for any cost they choose, I feel that might jeopardize potential sales.

For example, a friend of mine wrote an image processing application with a very niche and important application. He wanted to sell it for $200 a copy, lower than what most commercial tools for the same functionality cost. He also wanted to release it as open source/free software.

However, if anyone bought a copy of his software, that person could legally redistribute for free or for a very low cost, say $10. If this person's publicity is better, he/she'll get more sales for a tool he didn't even write. And someone who isn't endowed with a large enough budget would love to get the software from a legally clean channel.

And yes, it even results in atrocities like this - http://cgi.ebay.com/Audacity-1-2-6-audio-editor-computer-software_W0QQitemZ280446402896QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item414be88150 . Mark Pilgrim's book got re-distributed on the Kindle for a nonzero charge (…

Obviously this is a matter of taste (and I'm starting to pile up down votes, so I may very well be in the minority).

I can't give you a date, but consider for example the ongoing discussion in the Perl community about the look of PerlMonks, the new Perl blogs site and the updates to the online Perldoc site and the main Perl site.

Again, I want to stress that I'm not talking about decorative fonts or elaborate colorschemes. A webpage with no margins and very tight line-spacing is not in my mind anywhere near perfectly readable.

As far as the hackers thing goes, I've rarely seen a hacker without a preference for a carefully-crafted PS1 (colors and all) or a good Vim/Emacs/TextMate theme. So it's not the case that hackers don't care at all about appearance in all circumstances.

Edit: Here's a good comparison site: http://diveintomark.org/ The layout is dead simple, but the margins, font choice and line spacing make a huge difference.

"threw up in my mouth a little." "Gee, let me get this straight." "Bullshit." "Seriously?"

I have to say that one of my regrets about growing up in programmer circles is seeing stuff like this held up as an acceptable example of how adults communicate with other adults.

It took me a long time to realize that this style of communication is not necessary, is not effective, and reflects poorly on the speaker. C'mon, this guy appears to be in his 30s or 40s and has written books, so why does he write like he's an angsty teen? (I know Linus does it. I think it's lame when he does it too.)

There's still room for humor and snark, here are three of my favorite blog postings/articles ever, all very snarky, but not embarrassingly juvenile:

http://wanderingbarque.com/nonintersecting/2006/11/15/the-s-stands-for-simple/

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

That, and I thought link rel="next" already existed… and had a more semantic meaning than pre-fetching.

It (and its brother, rel="prev") are meant to inform the browser (which then hopefully informs the user, but that never took off) of what the next or previous page is (in contexts where that makes sense). Maybe it's the next page of an article (evil!), or the next blog post in line. Whatever.

Anyway, this has been around for a while, even mentioned in this post from 2008: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/06/21/minimalism

So it's more accurate to say that Firefox likes to prefetch pages, and will use <link rel="next"> tags to guide it. If you're going to be pre-fetching pages anyway, that seems a reasonable enough way to decide what to fetch, but I agree that I'd prefer pre-fetching to be off.

I got tired of waiting for News.YC to implement the comments links in a format usable by my newsreader. (Yes, I know they're in there, but I don't know of any reader that actually uses the comment tags.) So I made this one. When you hit it, it downloads the feed from News.YC and reformats it into an Atom feed (I like Atom; there's only one standard, not 9 like there are for RSS (see http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss )). The feed is cached for the next five minutes in order to be nice to pg's servers.

Total code: approximately ten lines of Python, thanks to some excellent libraries like http://www.feedparser.org/

pg, if you have any technical adjustments you'd like me to make, like adjusting the time between hits to your rss feed, let me know.