Mike Davidson, a designer and former Twitter executive, writes about web design, domains, remote work, and his time at Twitter.
HN links his sIFR font-replacement technique, his domain-snatching guide, and his post on leaving Twitter, which one commenter calls the best commentary on the Twitter situation.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5856, the most-dup'ed JS bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org. Or this fun blog post from 2004 that blames Apple ("Apple Flunks First Grade Math"):
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/apple-calculator
Finite binary floating point representations do not handle powers of five well. It takes much greater precision (bignums under the hood) to round the last digit properly when converting from binary to decimal (see the David M. Gay and Guy Steele paper and code for dtoa.c). Without hints from the JS hacker (Number.prototype.toFixed) the bad rounding shows up -- try javascript:alert(.1 + .2).
bignums (among alternative solutions) fix this bug.
bignums also are not necessarily a whole lot slower than doubles, since you can optimize to fixnums for common cases. JITs can do pretty well. It's not as if double is so fast, even with SSE4, that int doesn't still win.
But the main bug to fix is the rounding or powers-of-five inexpressiveness issue. It's a real usability problem.
I recommend the Non-Designer's Design Book as well.
However, there are a few little hacks that seemed to work well for some sites I had to put up.
1. A nice compelling photograph is a little easy on the eye and seems to make up for a lack of content on the front page.
2. Use sIFR (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/) to add fantastic typography to your site, and make it more visually appealing.
3. Using wordpress as a frontend for your website (even if you don't have a weblog) allows you to swap in one of thousands of fantastic themes.
Whenever a friend asks me to put together a website, I just ask him/her to pick a theme, and host wordpress with static pages. It's a lot more easier to maintain and has more choices as far as visual content is concerned.
[edit: formatting]
At Newsvine, we capitalized on an opportunity when John McCain and his campaign people hijacked some graphics from my MySpace design tutorial without permission. He referenced/hotlinked images hosted on my server on his own MySpace page so one day I "hacked" his site by changing the graphics. The prank got us on TechCrunch immediately (no surprise), the local news in Seattle (kind of a surprise), and then featured on The Daily Show (huge f'ing surprise and still a career highlight!). Here is the coverage:
TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/
Local News: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/03/king-5-covers-mccain-myspace-prank
The Daily Show: http://www.mikeindustries.com/scratch/dailyshow.mp4
This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006.
Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the Newsvine backend. If the troll flag was set to true, Newsvine would add a random 10-60 second delay to every page load for the troll's account. IIRC it solved the problem pretty effectively.
1- http://mikeindustries.com/blog/
2- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsvine
It actually looks like a nice take on feed aggregation - and sports is a great niche to start with.
If you're planning on taking the look & feel further in the direction of print news, check out sIFR and consider making it an interface option. You have a lot to gain by improving the quality of the page. (sIFR is here: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/)
In your place, I would also play with placement and formatting of certain stories with respect to the others. It would probably require backend work, but determining which of those stories is most important and then displaying them as such would be pretty cool.
There are two different privacy issues at play.
1. You consent to being tracked in exchange for services consumed (Google Maps Navigation, for example).
2. You don't consent to it but you're still being tracked. Not only that, the data is then sold to any and every buyer. For example: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2019/07/superhuman-is-spying-on-you
OP has problems with #2.
> Copyright, on the other hand, is much easier.
Sure, no reason why privacy can't be too. Here's a simple framework to think about Privacy online: Provide an opt-out for tracking, selling / sharing data etc etc.