Articles

An article

• Four AI Coding Horsemen of the Apocalypse Jan 13, 2026

  What are the risks when everyone can produce code?

• Triple-A Vibe Coding Jan 6, 2026

  AI is your general contractor, and you are the architect.

• Fun Things to Read Dec 16, 2025

  Stories that caught our eye at the end of the year.

• Don’t Waste a Miracle Dec 9, 2025

  Getting determined about AI and determinism.

• I Broke Claude Code’s Will to Live Nov 18, 2025

  How the power of my pure nerdery vanquished the mighty AI.

• Claude Code for Web Ruined My Brain Nov 11, 2025

  I built five projects in a weekend…but at what cost? ($150)

• In My Skills Era Nov 4, 2025

  AI can be transformative, but you’ve got to put the work in.

• The Argument for Letting AI Burn It All Down Oct 26, 2025
• The AI Behemoths Go Horizontal Oct 21, 2025

  OpenAI and Anthropic are broadening their offerings—and coming for the companies building on top of their APIs.

• Good Bot, Bad Bot Oct 14, 2025

  With AI, a rule of thumb is emerging: More to less? Then you’re blessed. Less to more? Shut the door.

• Checking In on the Magic Oct 7, 2025

  Last year, Eric Schmidt made some dramatic claims about what AI could build. Have his predictions come true?

• This Conversation Is Over Sep 30, 2025

  When it comes to AI-powered shopping, dialogue only gets in the way.

• Paywalls Victorious Sep 23, 2025

  On Cloudflare’s very surprising ideas about AI and the future of web publishing—and what we should do instead.

• Some Useful Links: AI Data Licensing, Vibe-Coding Cleanup, and More Sep 16, 2025

  Plus: A breakdown of AI-related things tech giants are currently building.

• The Three Sacred Guardrails of AI Sep 2, 2025

  Solving all of your LLM problems with just nine words.

• AI Is a Power Tool for Bureaucracy Freaks Aug 26, 2025

  When it comes to the vast behemoths of business and government, this technology is a grease for the world’s biggest gears.

• Fast Company on Aboard: It’s a Vibe Product! And It Works! Aug 19, 2025

  “Lumbering, unsexy, but essential.” There’s no higher praise.

• Desperately Seeking Software Aug 12, 2025

  A review of OpenAI’s latest big release, ChatGPT 5.

• AI’s Hot, Hot Mess Aug 5, 2025

  Karen Hao’s Empire of AI is less about computers becoming human—and more about humans being very human.

• Language (and Code) Without Thought Jul 29, 2025

  Using AI to code is like looking into a mirror-world: The LLM generates meaninglessness that you turn into something useful.

• 20 Percent Slower Is a Good Start! Jul 15, 2025

  The key thing missing from most AI conversations is a hyper-specific focus on what these tools do well.

• Four Billion Years of Vibe Coding Jul 8, 2025

  Success may come when the bot is prompting the human, not the other way around.

• How Aboard Works: An Illustrated Guide Jun 24, 2025

  A simple step-by-step breakdown of how we build software—first in minutes, then in weeks.

• Apple Takes Its Bite Jun 10, 2025

  They’ve been taking their time with AI, but at WWDC this week, Apple laid out their vision of the future.

• The Extremely Human Last Mile Jun 3, 2025

  Is AI a big scam, or will our jobs be on the chopping block by 2026?

• Will AI Eat Tech, or Will Tech Eat AI? May 27, 2025

  “Model Context Protocol” brokers peace between old tech and new. It’s a good thing the AI giants are embracing it.

• MS Blurred: Microsoft’s AI Path Gets Slippery May 20, 2025

  Is AI replacing programmers or not? Should coders learn to write poems? What’s really going on?

• The Funnel of the Future is Upside Down May 13, 2025

  With AI, the SaaS funnel can start with custom product delivery—and then you sell the relationship.

• Is “Specification Repair” the AI Endgame? May 6, 2025

  Let’s stop trying to make computers human and get back to making them awesome.

• Using AI to Redirect Yourself—and Save Money! Apr 22, 2025

  Better behavior, on demand.

• The Prophets and the Giants Apr 15, 2025

  Reading between the lines of the AI industry in 2025.

• The Spiders Versus the Web Apr 8, 2025

  AI’s relationship to the web is complicated—but I’m placing a bet on who will win.

• The More Things Change Apr 1, 2025

  In tech, the money is in innovation, but the careers are in predictability.

• Bad Vibes Coding Mar 25, 2025

  You have to choose which steps to skip, and when to slow down.

• The Zeno Effect Mar 18, 2025

  These good ideas will seem trivial to accomplish using AI—and then you’ll be living through the back half of Goodfellas.

• Accepting All the AI Opinions Mar 11, 2025

  No matter where people are on the spectrum of beliefs, most of them seem to agree: This matters.

• The $15 Volvo Mar 4, 2025

  The huge challenge in talking about AI that no one is talking about.

• Hegel on the Death Star Feb 18, 2025

  I don’t know what the “AI center” looks like, but I hope we eventually can find it.

• God Gets Involved Feb 11, 2025

  Notes on the Catholic response to AI.

• DeepSeek Threatened With WhaleJail Feb 4, 2025

  AI keeps getting weirder, plus some great bonus links.

• Desperately Seeking DeepSeek Jan 28, 2025

  There goes the economy! Whoops it’s back!

• Use Worse Tools Jan 21, 2025

  I can’t really understand LLMs unless I keep taking steps backwards.

• Where’s the Dragon? Jan 14, 2025

  I bet you think you know what the dragon is, but you’ll be surprised.

• Software Theater Jan 7, 2025

  The secret, as always, is rehearsal.

• The Eternal Thrift Store Dec 17, 2024

  Like thrift stores, the new AI systems are chaotic, weird—and ultimately human.

• Nobody Knows Anything (Still) Dec 3, 2024

  Some thoughts on AI at the end of 2024—and one great link about the beauty of non-AI tech.

• A Few Quick AI Links Before Thanksgiving Nov 26, 2024

  Teaching robots, brutalist architecture, saving squirrels, and more.

• AI Links, Now With Commentary Nov 19, 2024

  AI and the career ladder, big tech’s training data struggles, and more.

• Crunching the AI Numbers Nov 12, 2024

  The computer gives us information we can process and use—and then we decide what gets written down.

• A Comforting Software Mess Oct 29, 2024

  Claude’s new “computer use” feature is reassuringly janky—you can see all the pieces clanking noisily along.

• Three Quick, Useful AI Links Oct 22, 2024

  An AI tutorial from Ethan Mollick, a helpful tool from Google, and more.

• Building Is Better Than Chatting Oct 15, 2024

  GenAI works best when you can combine its outputs with problem-solving code.

• Four Terror-Free Ways to Talk About AI Oct 8, 2024

  New technologies are hard for humans to grasp in the best of times, and the tail of 2024 is not the best of times.

• Introducing Aboard Climate (Beta) Oct 1, 2024

  A new climate-change integration—plus other exciting updates about where we’re headed in the coming months.

• Hedging Our Bets Sep 17, 2024

  How much change will AI bring to the software industry? We see a wide range of outcomes.

• How to Skip the Boring Bits of Coding Sep 3, 2024

  Finishing your weird little projects with AI programming tools.

• What We’ve Learned Building Climate Tools Aug 27, 2024

  Our future is going to involve spiky, unpredictable changes that could cut us off from our software.

• Kill Boredom with Robots Aug 20, 2024

  The function of AI is not simply to generate stuff, but to make things more fun—and more useful.

• The Infinite Command Line Aug 13, 2024

  What would the world look like if there were dozens of AI-ish things happening at once?

• Crashes Can Be Motivating Aug 6, 2024

  In tech downturns, there’s a thrill in seeing what people build with less.

• Why So Bad, AI Ads? Jul 30, 2024

  AI marketing should show enhancement, not replacement.

• Introducing Reqless Jul 16, 2024

  We keep coming back to one big question: What does AI mean for the software industry? Our new podcast tries to answer it.

• In Defense of Corporate Cocktails Jul 9, 2024

  It’s just really nice to talk about something besides politics for a couple hours.

• Cutting-Edge Research Roundup Jun 25, 2024

  Perusing the academic repository Arxiv.org to look for the future of AI.

• A Hug from Godzilla Jun 11, 2024

  Apple’s AI moves resurface a surprisingly old debate.

• Fields of Dreams Jun 4, 2024

  Four new field types will give your cards ridiculous levels of pure raw card power.

• Take Your Data Anywhere May 28, 2024

  Introducing…drum roll…export-to-CSV!

• Aboard and the Zombie Apocalypse May 21, 2024

  Helping small groups of people communicate more effectively—and take action more decisively.

• Unlocking Key Fields May 14, 2024

  Keep the most important bits of data on top.

• Software Can Be Temporary Apr 23, 2024

  The superpower of programming is hacking crap together really fast to see what breaks.

• Learning in Little Steps Apr 16, 2024

  Thinking about Aboard’s AI capabilities like a scientific middle-schooler, by balancing knowledge and practice.

• Aboard Is Brighter, Shinier, AI-Powered, and Much More Useful Apr 9, 2024

  Almost everyone needs to manage data, but few people want to define how data should work.

• Hanging Out in the Software Hallway Apr 2, 2024

  On the liminal space between current and new versions.

• Defining “Success” On Your Own Terms Mar 26, 2024

  You are probably not a hugely powerful and dominant silverback technology gorilla.

• In Software, Slow Is Exciting Mar 19, 2024

  Things that are fast to build tend to be disposable—it’s the complex stuff that has the most impact.

• Beeps of Yore Mar 5, 2024

  Learning from messy tech pasts via the history of the synthesizer industry.

• The Eternal Dream of Instant Software Feb 27, 2024

  Why does it always end up so complicated?

• Is the Web Dying? (No.) Feb 20, 2024

  It may be a huge messy database, but it’s our huge messy database.

• We’re Killing Chat and It’s Your Fault Feb 13, 2024

  You can’t tell people what to want. They will tell you what they want.

• Accepting AI’s Weirdness Feb 6, 2024

  You just have to acknowledge that the intern is extremely high.

• What Makes Software Resilient? Jan 23, 2024

  A rundown of resilience indicators, from trustworthiness to scale.

• Know Your Competition! Jan 9, 2024

  There’s always another alligator pit.

• Let’s Be Less Confused About AI Together Jan 2, 2024

  My goal is simply to understand what the hell is happening with these nerds.

• Our Promise: We Won’t Try to Empower You Dec 19, 2023

  On learning to help users be whatever they want—and get out of the way.

• Don’t Let the Robots Get You Down Dec 12, 2023

  Will AI replace us? The human connection is still in the work itself.

• In Praise of Inauthenticity Dec 5, 2023

  Everyone tries to get authentic too fast. Can’t we build the relationship first?

• Sweep Your Tabs Away! Nov 14, 2023

  Introducing Tab Sweep, a ridiculously easy way to manage your tabs.

• Ways of Seeing Nov 7, 2023

  How to use Kanban view, and other data-visualizing methods.

• Getting to Know Aboard, Video Edition Oct 31, 2023

  Showing off our key features in a brisk seven minutes.

• Meet the Aboard Podcast! Oct 24, 2023

  Please add it to the other 10,000 podcasts you keep meaning to listen to.

• Install the Aboard Extension for Safari Oct 12, 2023

  Once it’s installed, it works just like you’d expect: Click, and links turn into cards.

• Smash That Subscribe Button Oct 10, 2023

  Launching our YouTube channel with a snazzy intro video.

• What About Pricing? Oct 3, 2023

  Let’s be honest about software in 2023: Coupons.

• Nouns! Sep 26, 2023

  This week we rolled out…places! Starting with Lodging (hotels).

• Right-Clicking—Sometimes the Answer! Sep 19, 2023

  An end run around cut-and-paste to make things go faster for you—and lets us make better-looking cards.

• You Should Never Feel Good About Statistics Sep 12, 2023

  In a good analytics meeting, there can be absolutely no good news.

• There Are Many More of You Than Before, Welcome! Sep 5, 2023

  Over the weekend the number of Aboard users crossed the threshold from hundreds into thousands.

• We Launched! Aug 29, 2023

  Off we go, to help as many people as we can.

• At Bloomberg Open Source Is More Than A Buzzword: We Do It Every Day Jul 24, 2023
• A Conversation with Paul Ford, the Now-Former Web Editor of Harper's Magazine Jul 21, 2023
• That Was A Hit?!? : Grab Bag Edition Jul 21, 2023
• Facebook versus the Epiphanator | On the Media Jul 21, 2023
• Behind the Code Curtain | On the Media Jul 21, 2023
• Healthcare dot UGH | On the Media Jul 21, 2023
• Whose Internet Ethics? | On the Media Jul 21, 2023
• Unscroll: An Approach to Making New Things from Old Things Jul 21, 2023
• A Conversation with Paul Ford, Web Editor of Harper's Magazine Jul 21, 2023
• Postlight CEO Paul Ford on Writing, Experimenting and Running A Company Jul 21, 2023
• Thanks For Everything, Bing | On the Media Jul 21, 2023
• Parents And New Music: Thoughts From John Schaefer, a.k.a. Dad Jul 21, 2023
• What Can We Learn From Ashley Madison? | On the Media Jul 21, 2023
• Beautiful Jul 21, 2023
• Thanks for Everything, Bing | On the Media Jul 21, 2023
• A Little Thing on Value Jul 18, 2023

  How long does it take for someone to find utility with our software?

• Everything Got Better Jul 11, 2023

  The Aboard extension, Kanban view, zoom in and out on card size, and more.

• Ducks & Decks Jul 4, 2023

  “This is different than what they said they were going to launch a year ago.”

• What Is Code? If You Don't Know, You Need to Read This Jun 29, 2023
• Happy Eid Al Adha + July 4th! Jun 27, 2023

  We’re doing a ton of work to take things away and simplify the product.

• Cards Get Smarter Jun 20, 2023

  You can now add images and PDFs to cards.

• My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes Jun 14, 2023
• Tags, You’re It! Jun 13, 2023

  One cat can have 50 tags: Whiskers, Friendly, Good With Kids, Perfect Angel, etc.

• All Aboard! May 15, 2023

  So you made it into the Beta! What’s Aboard all about?

• How the Piano Helped Me Fall Back in Love With Tech Apr 30, 2023
• Meet the Aboard Extension Apr 25, 2023

  Data comes in, gets cleaned up, and becomes actionable.

• So Your Kid Wants to Be a Twitch Streamer Apr 24, 2023
• The Real Climate Job of the Future: Carbon Accountant Apr 21, 2023
• God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter Feb 11, 2023
• A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite. What’s Left? Feb 2, 2023
• A Tweet Before Dying Nov 9, 2022
• Dear Artists: Do Not Fear AI Image Generators Nov 2, 2022
• What Modern Humans Can Learn From Ancient Software Sep 13, 2022
• Forget Disruption. Tech Needs to Fetishize Stability Aug 2, 2022
• How to Product Manage for APIs Jul 5, 2022

  When we think about software, what we imagine is based on our own user experience, consisting of the interface, buttons, and words that we can interact ...

• Life Is Great in the Age of No Secrets Jun 11, 2022
• The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake? May 25, 2022
• The Chorus of Complainers May 24, 2022

  My son has been teaching me to play a Very Popular Video Game. As anyone with kids knows, screen time is premium — plus bedtime was coming — so I set a ...

• Time Got So Much Weirder. The World Needs a New Lexicon Apr 13, 2022
• I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana. What Was It All For? Mar 31, 2022
• Learning Things From Internet Videos Feb 15, 2022

  Working in technology, I’m always on the hunt for new ways to explain things. Not long ago, I asked Twitter if anyone could recommend exemplary ...

• The Best Way to Learn Online? Be a Lurker Feb 14, 2022
• A Grand Unified Theory of Buying Stuff Jan 10, 2022
• The Most Efficient Way to Debug the Simulation Nov 30, 2021
• Climate Stress Was Getting Me Down, So I Made a Clicker Game Oct 27, 2021
• Climate Change Starting Points Oct 12, 2021

  Since stepping down as CEO of Postlight, I've been learning about climate change. This work is harder, in many ways, than my work as CEO. Climate ...

• Climate Change Is the New Dot-Com Bubble Sep 26, 2021
• A Field Guide for Nature-Resistant Nerds Aug 5, 2021
• A Pirate’s Favorite Programming Language Jul 6, 2021

  I'd like to understand more about the world of statistics and data science, so I've been learning the programming language R. It has wide applications in ...

• Gina Trapani Named CEO of Postlight, Chris LoSacco Named President Jun 22, 2021

  We're pleased to announce that Gina Trapani has been named Postlight's Chief Executive Officer, and Chris LoSacco has been named President. Gina has been ...

• Crypto Isn’t About Money. It’s About Fandom Jun 8, 2021
• Demo Your Values First May 18, 2021

  I like to watch software company videos, the more enterprise the better. At worst they're hilarious, and at best I might learn something — usually a ...

• Why Humans Are So Bad at Seeing the Future May 16, 2021
• My Dream of the Great Unbundling Apr 7, 2021
• Pleasant Office Things Apr 6, 2021

  Not long ago I wrote about the secret geographies of the office for Wired. I was a little surprised by the reaction. I expected people to yell at me, like ...

• So You Want to Prepare for Doomsday Mar 11, 2021
• Baking Your Layercake Feb 16, 2021

  If there is one lesson I wish the tech industry could learn about itself, it’s that most people wish we would talk less and listen more. Because the state ...

• The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office Feb 7, 2021
• You Can’t Fix a Relationship With a Contract Jan 5, 2021

  Postlight has short contracts, and we’ve discussed contracting on our podcast many times. As a result, many people have emailed us, asking if they could ...

• Block by Block Dec 21, 2020

  Twice a year we bring everyone who works for Postlight to New York City — from around the U.S., and from Beirut, with their families if they choose — and ...

• Money works so hard. Dec 2, 2020

  Money works so hard.

• Ah totally, thank you. Dec 1, 2020

  Ah totally, thank you. I still think of them as temporary because I'm in client services and a lot of them come and go.

• Let’s Skim! The Slack/Salesforce Press Release Dec 1, 2020

  Let’s Skim! The Slack/Salesforce Press Release Histoire naturelle des cétacées , 1804 I find enterprise software fascinating because it operates the entire economy and yet it frequently neglects every single principle of quality that software people may espouse.

• Web Conversation From the Other Side Nov 30, 2020

  Web Conversation From the Other Side I wrote a piece on here the other day in which “2000 me” had a conversation with “2020 me” about the state of the web. It was fun to write, because I love making easy jokes at the expense of the tech industry.

• Web Conversations With the Year 2000 Nov 27, 2020

  Web Conversations With the Year 2000 Comic Insects , 1872 2000 me: Wow you still work on the web, that’s amazing. It must be so easy to publish really interesting web pages.

• Stories I Don’t Finish Nov 24, 2020

  Stories I Don’t Finish What to Draw and How to Draw It I know the title seems evocative but it’s literal. I have a lot of dumb ideas for stories I’ll never finish.

• Things Left Undone Nov 22, 2020

  Things Left Undone Thanks, Wikipedia! Apparently we are due for a national period of healing and a period of cooling off.

• Tech After Trump Nov 17, 2020

  Tech After Trump Eventually, the current chaos will subside. What will the tech industry look like over the next four years?

• Tech After Trump Nov 17, 2020

  Eventually, the current chaos will subside. What will the tech industry look like over the next four years? What should we expect? These aren't ...

• Love the USPS? Join the Infrastructure Appreciation Society! Nov 16, 2020
• The Case for Dashboard-Driven Development Oct 26, 2020

  Once you’ve seen a beautiful project torpedoed before launch by a corporate decision — all that money and time down the drain, all that code left to rot ...

• It's Time to Pick Classes for the 2073-74 School Year! Oct 19, 2020
• Why We Love Enterprise Codeless Sep 29, 2020

  Last week Google released a new product called Tables, which takes square aim at (i.e., looks exactly like) "codeless" development and workflow-management ...

• The Power and Paradox of Bad Software Sep 21, 2020
• Thinking Like Microsoft Sep 1, 2020

  Sometimes you should just stop everything and look at some new big digital artifact to see what it tells you about the world. That's how I feel about ...

• ‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth Aug 17, 2020
• Dogfood for Everybody! Jul 21, 2020

  Postlight is a digital strategy firm that builds software for clients. As go our clients, so go we. We've been surprised to find ourselves growing in the ...

• Build Time Versus Strategy Time Jul 14, 2020

  I've been watching the TV series W1A on Netflix. It's a three-short-season comedy that aired between 2014 and 2017, produced by the BBC. It's also about ...

• The Infinite Loop of Supply Chains Jun 22, 2020
• Black Lives Matter Jun 9, 2020

  Postlight is a company of 60 people in New York City and around the world. We build software for clients. We are unified in our belief in progress. From ...

• We Are All Livestreamers Now, and Zoom Is Our Stage May 18, 2020
• The World’s Worst Calculator May 12, 2020

  The CEO is not supposed to code, but nonetheless I’ve been having fun shipping out a three-weekend project, which I call “Account.” It’s a storytelling ...

• Outcome Unclear: Rooting for the Companies in the Middle Apr 28, 2020

  I see a lot of companies up close, and I probably talk to 100 or 200 organizations a year. As the last month has unfolded, I've started dividing places up ...

• Stones, Clocks, and What We Should Actually Leave Behind Apr 20, 2020
• Hello From Home Mar 17, 2020

  A briefing from Postlight

• How Technology Explodes the Concept of ‘Generations’ Feb 17, 2020
• After App Stores Dec 3, 2019

  You saw that Apple Arcade will allow you to have access to lots of games for a monthly subscription, correct? No more in-app purchases. Just a bunch of ...

• All Managed Up Sep 10, 2019

  I used to hate people managing up to me. I'd feel like I was being shepherded, but over time I started noticing that a lot of the time it wasn't people ...

• Paul Ford Aug 21, 2019
• Carrot Centralization Aug 7, 2019

  One of the joys of my job is I get to talk to hundreds of people about their technology problems. Some hire us; many don't. But it's extremely interesting ...

• Put a Saddle on It Jul 9, 2019

  There's a Netflix show called The Toys That Made Us with an episode about He-Man and the Masters of the Universe toys. He-Man toys were ...

• Letter of Recommendation: Bug Fixes Jun 10, 2019
• The Most Powerful Words in Tech are "It Depends" Jun 3, 2019

  I wrote the cover story in Wired magazine this month. It's called “Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry.” It's a little weird to be ...

• Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry May 13, 2019
• Do the Brand First Apr 9, 2019

  I've learned this the hard way, too many times. Clients come to Postlight and they say, "We need to stand up a new version of our website…" Go on… "—and ...

• Jeremy Mack and Aaron Ortbals Named Postlight Partners Mar 7, 2019

  We’re pleased to announce that Jeremy Mack is now a Managing Partner at Postlight, and that Aaron Ortbals is a Partner at Postlight. Jeremy Mack, Managing ...

• Please, Throw Away Used Whiteboard Markers Feb 19, 2019

  Sometimes you go to the whiteboard and pick up a marker and start to draw or write, only to find that the marker leaves a faint line instead of a bold ...

• R.I.P.C. Jan 2, 2019

  Imagine that: A whole global product strategy was contained within a two-letter initialism. PC. You didn’t even have to have the best product!

• In 20 Years, the Internet Will Have Swallowed You, So Nothing You Do Will Be Private Oct 30, 2018
• Our CMS, Ourselves Oct 28, 2018

  When we started Postlight, we quickly found ourselves in a pickle, with 25 full-time employees and our major client announcing chapter 11 bankruptcy, one ...

• SHIP IT! Jun 18, 2018

  Postlight is a company that builds digital platforms and products, and like every firm we like to market ourselves and tell the world how great we ...

• Ship It! The Game of Product Management Jun 18, 2018

  Ship It! The Game of Product Management Postlight employees in an absolutely unstaged photo just casually playing our game without any prompting from management Postlight is a company that builds digital platforms and products, and like every firm we like to market ourselves and tell the world how great we are.

• Does Microsoft Have the Same Concept of Money as We Do? Jun 8, 2018
• GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button Jun 5, 2018
• CMS ❤ CRM May 23, 2018

  CMS ❤ CRM It’s nice to see two acronyms make friends Illustration by Stephen Carlson At Postlight we build software for lots of different industries (custom search engines, financial APIs, a birding app for the Audubon society , things like that). This means we hear lots of different people complain about software.

• CMS ❤ CRM May 23, 2018

  At Postlight we build software for lots of different industries (custom search engines, financial APIs, a birding app for the Audubon society, ...

• I Tried to Get an AI to Write This Story May 16, 2018
• Silicon Valley Has Failed to Protect Our Data. Here’s How to Fix It Mar 20, 2018
• Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous Mar 8, 2018
• A Knight Piece of Work Mar 1, 2018

  At the end of last year Alejandro de Onís, the Director of Digital Strategy and Design at Knight Foundation, reached out ...

• A Knight Piece of Work Feb 28, 2018

  A Knight Piece of Work The media paid close attention to #blacklivesmatter, and media accounts used the hashtag in rough proportion to how often it appeared in the larger twittersphere. At the end of last year Alejandro de Onís , the Director of Digital Strategy and Design at Knight Foundation , reached out to Postlight and asked if we’d like to create a website that showcased the findings of a forthcoming report.

• I was thinking I should update it to an SD card. Rolling out a rebrand is hard work. Feb 22, 2018

  I was thinking I should update it to an SD card. Rolling out a rebrand is hard work.

• Our Gently Aging Avatars Feb 20, 2018

  Our Gently Aging Avatars Stages of Man’s Life from the Cradle to the Grave Every week or so someone I know on social media, but not in my daily life, updates their avatar, and suddenly they’re three or four years older than they were the day before. Some of these people I’ve known for 20 years, and it’s happened several times.

• This is a good point. Feb 18, 2018

  This is a good point. We should be more mindful that although our age can be measured in months, we’ve reached a stage of rapid growth and public interest, and as a consequence our marketing is reaching many thousands of people who don’t already know us.

• Make the Logo Bigger Feb 14, 2018

  The measure of a good brand is what it can do. It’s a bit of cultural code that you can continually expand and execute in new context. Viral, but in ...

• Make the Logo Bigger Feb 14, 2018

  Make the Logo Bigger By Will Denton and Paul Ford We have a new brand! Friends, let us show it to you.

• Our Gently Aging Avatars Feb 2, 2018

  Every week or so someone I know on social media, but not in my daily life, updates their avatar, and suddenly they’re three or four years older than they ...

• Know Your Ecosystems! Jan 24, 2018

  I used to be on T-Mobile, but I went into a customer service hole so frustrating that at the end, every time I even looked at my phone, I felt disgusted ...

• Know Your Ecosystems! Jan 24, 2018

  Know Your Ecosystems! The phone is the least important part of buying a phone Perfectly adequate ducks I used to be on T-Mobile, but I went into a customer service hole so frustrating that at the end, every time I even looked at my phone, I felt disgusted and powerless.

• Interview with Tech Writer Paul Ford Jan 3, 2018
• Postlight End-of-year Giving 2017 Dec 20, 2017

  Postlight End-of-year Giving 2017 It looks a little Christmas-ey but we have all kinds of people celebrating all kinds of holidays Last year, after our first full year of operation, the people of Postlight identified 33 online charities that we like to support . (Predictably, this led to an essay about the broken online checkout experience at many charity websites.

• Postlight End-of-year Giving 2017 Dec 20, 2017

  Last year, after our first full year of operation, the people of Postlight identified 33 online charities that we like to support. (Predictably, this led ...

• Driving Traffic Nov 29, 2017

  Driving Traffic Taking the new BMW. com for a spin What we all think of when we think of a BMW.

• Driving Traffic Nov 29, 2017

  It was very interesting to see that BMW has re-launched as a magazine. Above, you can see what it used to look like. And here’s how it looks today: ...

• Big Data, Small Effort Nov 15, 2017

  Big Data, Small Effort An awful lot of really interesting public data is made available in CSV format. This is good and bad.

• Big Data, Small Effort Nov 15, 2017

  An awful lot of really interesting public data is made available in CSV format. This is good and bad. If I give you a CSV file, you can open it up in ...

• But…Tina…you’re someone who has something to prove? Oct 12, 2017

  But…Tina…you’re someone who has something to prove? And you prove it?

• “Irony Doesn’t Scale” Oct 10, 2017

  “Irony Doesn’t Scale” Last week my co-founder Rich Ziade wrote about what he’s learned and experienced over the last two years of running our product studio, Postlight . Which made me wonder: What have I learned working alongside him?

• Postlight: Our Mission & Our Values Oct 10, 2017

  Postlight: Our Mission & Our Values Written by many people at Postlight in 2016 and 2017. Published for our second anniversary.

• “Irony Doesn’t Scale” Oct 10, 2017

  Last week, my co-founder Rich Ziade wrote about what he’s learned and experienced over the last two years of running our product studio, Postlight. Which ...

• On Being a Good Platform Citizen Sep 20, 2017

  A while ago the Obama Foundation (Full disclosure: they are a much-appreciated Postlight client!) asked an important general question: “What makes a ...

• On Being a Good Platform Citizen Sep 20, 2017

  On Being a Good Platform Citizen A while ago the Obama Foundation (Full disclosure: they are a much-appreciated Postlight client! Secondary disclosure: we’re hosting an event with them next Thursday, you should come .

• Postlight Is Seeking a Director of Product Management in NYC (plus Product Managers and Product… Sep 6, 2017

  Postlight Is Seeking a Director of Product Management in NYC (plus Product Managers and Product Designers) Hope you like exposed brick because you’re about to get a lot of it Hello, world. Postlight, our digital product studio at 101 5th Ave in NYC, is seeing a lot of growth.

• Decentralize It! Aug 22, 2017

  There’s a good research report that was just published. It’s called “Defending​ ​Internet​ ​Freedom​ ​through​ ​Decentralization: Back​ ​to​ ​the​ ...

• Decentralize It! Aug 22, 2017

  Decentralize It! Very centralized There’s a good research report that was just published.

• Be Our Guest! Jul 11, 2017

  I wanted to put together a short guide for people who have been asked to be in the media—whether called for comment, asked to appear on a podcast or TV ...

• Be Our Guest! Jul 10, 2017

  “Newsroom of the New York Times newspaper. ” Public Domain .

• NYC in the summers Jul 9, 2017

  Prospect Park NYC in the summers I felt like writing tonight, so… It is unfashionable to express this, but I love New York City in the summer. Tonight I sat outside on the balcony and used our electric grill (less illegal than other grills) to make dinner.

• Ten Minutes of Silence Jun 27, 2017

  Ten Minutes of Silence By Paul Ford , Co-founder, Postlight The Museum of Silence, Berlin. Image courtesy Museumderstille, CC BY-SA 4.

• Gina Trapani Named Postlight Partner Jun 14, 2017

  Gina Trapani Named Postlight Partner Some Personnel News By Paul Ford and Rich Ziade , Co-Founders, Postlight Portrait by Bill Wadman We’re pleased to announce that Gina Trapani has been named a Partner at Postlight . Since she started at Postlight in 2016, Gina has managed the high-performing engineering teams that delivered some of our most important client products.

• We Ship Again! Bloomberg Lens and the Internet Apr 18, 2017

  We, Postlight, made something new with Bloomberg Media! A nice fellow named Michael Shane, who is the Global Head of Digital Innovation for Bloomberg ...

• We ship again! Apr 18, 2017

  We ship again! Postlight and Bloomberg launch a new web tool that makes you smarter, and your news better By Paul Ford , Co-founder, Postlight For desktop, a shiny new Chrome extension; for mobile, a whole new share sheet experience.

• Forensic Storytelling Feb 26, 2017

  Forensic Storytelling French spy captured during the Franco-Prussian War . L’espion — Alphonse de Neuville — 1880 WayMo , the self-driving car part of Google, has filed a complaint against Uber .

• Friday Links: Engineering Edition Feb 16, 2017

  Friday Links: Engineering Edition We plan to monetize Widening Gyre via a freemium model. Here are the most interesting links this week from our engineering department.

• The Beautiful TI-108 Feb 15, 2017

  The Internet is inundated with lists, but nonetheless I think it’s a good exercise to make personal lists of great things. For example in the past I’ve ...

• The Beautiful TI-108 Feb 15, 2017

  The Beautiful TI-108 By Paul Ford , co-founder, Postlight The Internet is inundated with lists, but nonetheless I think it’s a good exercise to make personal lists of great things. For example in the past I’ve written about the “ great works of software .

• Jeffrey Zeldman on news design, part two Feb 8, 2017

  Jeffrey Zeldman on news design, part two Not long ago we published a report by our friend Jeffrey Zeldman on some experimental news design work that was happening under the auspices of the Poynter Design Challenge . Jeffrey has returned with Part II of that effort—in which he shows more of his own work.

• Against Storytelling Feb 5, 2017

  My co-founder Rich Ziade and I are out in San Francisco for a conference. The hotel we’re in is very…designed. I think the designers wanted the rooms to ...

• Against Storytelling Feb 5, 2017

  Against Storytelling My co-founder Rich Ziade and I are out in San Francisco for a conference. The hotel we’re in is very…designed.

• PROGRESS! Gina Trapani on What’s Up With the Mercury AMP Converter Jan 31, 2017

  PROGRESS! Gina Trapani on What’s Up With the Mercury AMP Converter Quick ad: HEY SAN FRANCISCO — Postlight co-founders Rich Ziade and Paul Ford are heading your way next week!

• Guest Post: Jeffrey Zeldman at the Poynter Design Challenge Jan 29, 2017

  Guest Post: Jeffrey Zeldman at the Poynter Design Challenge Our friend Jeffrey Zeldman recently participated in the Poynter Design Challenge— “a project to create new visual models for digital news publications” sponsored by William R. Hearst III, hosted by the Poynter Institute , and directed by publication designer Roger Black .

• Drew Bell on How Standards Stick Around Jan 24, 2017

  Drew Bell on How Standards Stick Around Today Drew Bell , Engineer at Postlight, writes in about something that at first seems kind of obscure—the fact that weather service alerts are often IN ALL CAPS. You know: “SEVERE WINDS WILL CAN DAMAGE ROOFS AND MAY DISLODGE SIGNS.

• “Practice”—Now on the Web! Jan 22, 2017

  “Practice”—Now on the Web! Bridging the print/digital divide since 2017 We have a podcast called Track Changes (you listen, right?

• Thanks to You, I Get It Now Jan 21, 2017

  Thanks to You, I Get It Now A Grateful Note Dear Social Media Friend, You know how they say that some arguments don’t make sense in 140 characters or less? Well, today your arguments destroyed me.

• I might use that! Jan 12, 2017

  I might use that!

• Friday Links: Design Edition Jan 5, 2017

  Friday Links: Design Edition Links extracted from the chat flow of Postlight’s most excellent Design department. (We’re hiring product designers.

• Going Deep on a Checkbox Jan 4, 2017

  Going Deep on a Checkbox Yesterday I wrote a little bit about the experience of giving money via charitable websites , and I criticized not-for-profit websites that ask their users to “make a monthly donation”— My expectation was to give a one-time gift. Many of the sites had “Make this a monthly donation” as an option.

• Going Deep on a Checkbox Jan 4, 2017

  Yesterday I wrote a little bit about the experience of giving money via charitable websites, and I criticized not-for-profit websites that ask their users ...

• Shut Up and Take My Money! Jan 3, 2017

  Shut Up and Take My Money! User experience notes from 33 online charities By Paul Ford , Co-founder, Postlight Oh god not this Before the holidays, the people of Postlight came up with a list of charities .

• Shut Up and Take My Money! Jan 3, 2017

  Before the holidays, the people of Postlight came up with a list of charities. I liked learning about all the different causes supported by the people who ...

• I think folks he’ll appoint also have it in for Iran in the same way Bush II had it in for Iraq. Dec 29, 2016

  I think folks he’ll appoint also have it in for Iran in the same way Bush II had it in for Iraq. And since this is a deeply corruptible administration that ignores intelligence reports, if someone wants that war enough they’ll probably get it.

• Year in Review: 2016 Dec 26, 2016

  Year in Review: 2016 Sic. What should we make of 2016?

• Postlight’s Big Well-Intentioned List of Not-For-Profit Organizations That Are Trying to Make a Difference In Our Highly Confusing and Rapidly-Changing World Dec 21, 2016

  This morning we did a quick census of the office, wrote a few lines of Python to turn a Google Spreadsheet into some HTML, and came up with this list of ...

• Postlight’s Big Well-Intentioned List of Not-For-Profit Organizations That Are Trying to Make a… Dec 20, 2016

  Postlight’s Big Well-Intentioned List of Not-For-Profit Organizations That Are Trying to Make a Difference in Our Highly Confusing and Rapidly-Changing World This morning we did a quick census of the office, wrote a few lines of Python to turn a Google Spreadsheet into some HTML, and came up with this list of the 33 charities we like to support. It’s a good year to give something away.

• Kevin Barrett on Kind Social Networks Dec 13, 2016

  Kevin Barrett on Kind Social Networks Kevin Barrett is Senior Software Engineer, Postlight, and he writes about managing his own social network — Before I joined Postlight I spent a couple of years running Airendipity , a sort of twee social network in which everyone was anonymous and all you could do was send little paper airplanes with some text inside. The paper airplanes would bounce around the globe from phone to phone, picking up placenames ( your plane just landed in Cairo!

• Five Links! Dec 11, 2016

  Five Links! The entire Internet could, maybe should, be archived in Canada .

• I read your note with interest. Dec 8, 2016

  I read your note with interest. However I am going to speak and write exactly as I have been for the last 20 years.

• Q & A & Mission Statements Dec 5, 2016

  Q & A & Mission Statements Hmm. Answering listener mail : This week Paul and Rich answer a few letters: First, an architect asks Rich to expand upon his analogy between small teams of software developers and architecture firms; then, a Facebook-weary listener asks why there isn’t an easy way to pull your content from the platform.

• I think/hope that folks will get their act together on this. Dec 4, 2016

  I think/hope that folks will get their act together on this. The left is really big on taking credit as the social progressive party but of course the history is filled with things like Kennedy asking MLK to chill out because all the protests were making us look bad to the Russians.

• All my dumb questions, December 2016 Dec 4, 2016

  All my dumb questions, December 2016 This weekend I just wanted to write down the stuff in my head that is driving me bananas. I’m surrounded by tons of really confident answers about the world right now but frankly the answer industry has some explaining to do, or some explainers to write, and no matter how many times I hit refresh no one—left or right—is really nailing it.

• Five Plus Gina Trapani on Impostor Syndrome Nov 29, 2016

  Five Plus Gina Trapani on Impostor Syndrome Not for you, Uber Gina Trapani on Impostor Syndrome Today Gina Trapani , Director of Engineering, Postlight, writes a great essay to remind us that we’re all faking it —and we shouldn’t judge ourselves harshly for that, but rather embrace it. It’s a good message for anyone who works in technology—a fashion industry, despite everyone’s protestations—and also a good message for the moment.

• Kevin Barrett on Building an iOS App That Helps You Meditate Nov 22, 2016

  Kevin Barrett on Building an iOS App That Helps You Meditate A meditation interface should be pretty minimal, right? Kevin Barrett is Senior Software Engineer, Postlight, and he recently wrote up the work he did building an app for INSCAPE, a new meditation start-up in NYC.

• Get Me Central! (A quick explainer) Nov 20, 2016

  Get Me Central! (A quick explainer) By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight These nice people are having a transaction, but sadly the platform will not scale As we all now know, we live in an age of massive centralized digital platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft LinkedIn, and the like are the conduits for a vast amount of our personal and professional interactions, and they profit accordingly.

• Get Me Central! Nov 20, 2016

  As we all now know, we live in an age of massive centralized digital platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft LinkedIn, and the like are the conduits for a ...

• Understanding the Fake News Problem Nov 19, 2016
• Facebook and the 2016 Election Nov 13, 2016

  Facebook is, to its chagrin, part of the conversation about the outcome of the 2016 election. Here is a list of some special moments that we have all ...

• Thanks! Fixed. Nov 13, 2016

  Thanks! Fixed.

• Facebook, 2016 election Nov 13, 2016

  Facebook, 2016 election Facebook is, to its chagrin, part of the conversation about the outcome of the 2016 election. Here is a list of some special moments that we have all shared with Facebook: Facebook has ~1.

• Our mission statement is under revision by our team and we’ll share it in time. Nov 10, 2016

  Our mission statement is under revision by our team and we’ll share it in time. In the meantime readers will simply have to imagine how awesome it is.

• Note to all-hands Nov 9, 2016

  Note to all-hands Usually we wear shoes Things around the office and on chat were looking kind of grim, and I was asked if I could say something to boost morale. I sort of mumbled this out at the all-hands meeting, and I figured I’d mumble it here, too.

• Drew Bell on the Spreadsheets of the Great British Baking Show Nov 1, 2016

  Drew Bell on the Spreadsheets of the Great British Baking Show If you’re watching TV on a computer it’s easy enough to take a screenshot of whatever catches your eye. That’s what happened to Drew Bell , Engineer, Postlight, as he watched the Great British Baking Show.

• Toy Vano on shipping three projects in two months Oct 30, 2016

  Toy Vano on shipping three projects in two months Toy Vano is Product Manager, Postlight, and upon coming to work here was immediately hit with a pretty significant task: Launch three products in two months. Wheeeee.

• Meet the Mercury Web Parser—a new, general-purpose web API that works alongside our AMP converter Oct 25, 2016

  Meet the Mercury Web Parser—a new, general-purpose web API that works alongside our AMP converter A little while ago Postlight launched an anything-to-Google AMP converter. We called it— the Postlight Mercury AMP Converter .

• Postlight at a year! Oct 19, 2016

  We’re having our one-year anniversary tonight, and launching Postlight Labs. It’s been a lot of preparation—we’re in our new office, announcing some new ...

• Postlight at a year! Oct 19, 2016

  Postlight at a year! The cover of our new book We’re having our one-year anniversary tonight , and launching Postlight Labs.

• Gina Trapani on “WordPress Without Shame” Oct 18, 2016

  Gina Trapani on “WordPress Without Shame” MY GOD SHUTTERSTOCK WHAT EVEN IS THIS HOW IS THIS HAPPENING Today Gina Trapani , Director of Engineering at Postlight, writes about one of the web-development industry’s most complicated relationships —its long-term, complex, co-dependent, and often frustrating relationship with WordPress, which, lest you forget, is the generative force behind a massive percentage of the web pages in this world. But not every nail needs a fully-custom hammer.

• South by South Give Me My Damn Maple Syrup Oct 9, 2016

  South by South Give Me My Damn Maple Syrup Product and Politics on the White House Lawn By Paul Ford , co-founder, Postlight Last Monday, Postlight co-founder Rich Ziade and I attended South by South Lawn , the White House’s take on South by Southwest . In many ways the event resembled Any Old Technology Conference — lots of small tents showcasing various organizations and projects, and a booth sponsored by Starbucks.

• Introducing an Awesome CMS List Oct 2, 2016

  Introducing an Awesome CMS List Jeremy Mack , Director of Engineering at Postlight, recently compiled a list of interesting, exciting, and popular content management systems— Awesome Content Management Systems . He writes : Headless content management systems are gaining popularity.

• Friday Links: Design Edition Sep 29, 2016

  Friday Links: Design Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our design department. Thanks to Matt Quintanilla .

• Podcast #32: Clover Newsletter—Turning over a new leaf (or four) with founders Liza Darwin and… Sep 26, 2016

  Podcast #32: Clover Newsletter—Turning over a new leaf (or four) with founders Liza Darwin and Casey Lewis Liza Darwin and Casey Lewis. Photograph courtesy of Liz Riccardi.

• Friday Links: Product Edition Sep 22, 2016

  Friday Links: Product Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our product department. Thanks to Tyler Strand .

• My Co-Founder, the Skittle Sep 20, 2016

  I am the co-founder of a 38-person New York City software company called Postlight. The other co-founder, Rich Ziade, was born in Lebanon. In the ...

• My Co-Founder, the Skittle Sep 20, 2016

  My Co-Founder, the Skittle I am the co-founder of a 38-person New York City software company called Postlight . The other co-founder, Rich Ziade , was born in Lebanon.

• Podcast #31: “See media for pic” — a conversation on emergency alerts Sep 19, 2016

  Podcast #31: “See media for pic” — a conversation on emergency alerts Terrorism and technology: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk about a host of topics in the wake of the past weekend’s bombing in Manhattan. They cover the state of the city and the collective reaction of its residents, the ease of international communication in the digital age, and the emergency alert that went out early Monday morning that named the suspected perpetrator and said simply, “See media for pic.

• Friday Links: Engineering Edition Sep 15, 2016

  Friday Links: Engineering Edition Source: Women of Color in Tech stock images . License: CC Attribution 2.

• Making It Work: Instant.me Sep 14, 2016

  Making It Work: Instant. me A few months ago, Time Inc.

• Making It Work: Instant.me Sep 14, 2016

  A few months ago, Time Inc. — the home of some of the biggest consumer publishing brands in the world—asked Postlight if we could help build a new kind of ...

• Counterpoint: If your big company wants to innovate, hire whiny crybabies Sep 13, 2016

  Counterpoint: If your big company wants to innovate, hire whiny crybabies By Rich Ziade , co-founder, Postlight Phone: Zeynep Demir / Shutterstock. com On Monday, my Postlight co-founder Paul Ford wrote an article here asserting that we shouldn’t be surprised that a big, hulking company like Apple can’t unleash a game-changing piece of technology in 2016 because…well…it’s big, and hulking, and really more motivated to make big bags of money than change the world.

• Podcast #30: Brightcove, Big City—Talking video with David Mendels Sep 12, 2016

  Podcast #30: Brightcove, Big City—Talking video with David Mendels Image courtesy of David Mendels Our all-video future: This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to David Mendels , the CEO of the video-hosting platform Brightcove . They discuss video’s rise and its current dominance on the web, eSports , “snackable video,” Rich’s relationship with his cable bill, and Pokémon GO.

• A New New New Thing? Sep 12, 2016

  There’s an inevitable news cycle around Apple events: The company launches something, like the iPhone 7, building on or deeply integrated with their ...

• A New New New Thing? Sep 11, 2016

  A New New New Thing? There’s an inevitable news cycle around Apple events: The company launches something, like the iPhone 7, building on or deeply integrated with their existing incredibly successful product line.

• Friday Links: Design Edition Sep 8, 2016

  Friday Links: Design Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our design department. Thanks to Matt Quintanilla .

• Gina Trapani on Postlight’s Friendly Bot Sep 6, 2016

  Gina Trapani on Postlight’s Friendly Bot We have a nice chatbot at Postlight who helps us with our work. Today Director of Engineering Gina Trapani explains what the bot is , and how helpful it can be.

• Podcast #29: Who’s Gonna Drive You Home — Talking Self-Driving Cars Sep 5, 2016

  Podcast #29: Who’s Gonna Drive You Home — Talking Self-Driving Cars Andrey 69 / Shutterstock. com What does our self-driving future look like?

• Friday Links: Product Edition Sep 1, 2016

  Friday Links: Product Edition In the pattern library Here are the most interesting links this week from our product department. Thanks to Tyler Strand .

• Three Algorithm Reads Aug 31, 2016

  Three Algorithm Reads “ How algorithms rule our working lives ,” by Cathy O’Neil, in the Guardian : These algorithmic “solutions” are targeted at genuine problems. School principals cannot be relied upon to consistently flag problematic teachers, because those teachers are also often their friends.

• Three Algorithm Reads Aug 31, 2016

  “How algorithms rule our working lives,” by Cathy O’Neil, in the Guardian: These algorithmic “solutions” are targeted at genuine problems. School ...

• Twine as a Process Modeling Tool Aug 30, 2016

  Twine is a tool that lets you make point-and-click games that run in a web browser—what a lot of people refer to as “choose your own adventure” or CYOA ...

• Twine as a Process Modeling Tool Aug 30, 2016

  Twine as a Process Modeling Tool Twine is a tool that lets you make point-and-click games that run in a web browser—what a lot of people refer to as “choose your own adventure” or CYOA games. It’s pretty easy to make a game, which means that the Twine community is fairly big and diverse.

• Podcast #28: Rational Geographic — Map Chat with Aaron Straup Cope Aug 29, 2016

  Podcast #28: Rational Geographic — Map Chat with Aaron Straup Cope Image courtesy of Tom Coates The history and the future of geotagging: this week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to Aaron Straup Cope, a programmer who works with maps and geographical datasets. The conversation covers his time as one of Flickr’s earliest employees, data visualization, gazetteers, the evils of Wal-Mart, geocoding (and reverse geocoding), and one of the most controversial decisions in online mapping — Google’s decision to cut off the poles and make the world a square.

• Friday Links: Engineering Edition Aug 25, 2016

  Friday Links: Engineering Edition Every day Here are the most interesting links this week from our engineering department. Thanks to Jeremy Mack .

• The Street View From the Cheap Seats Aug 24, 2016

  As previously pointed out, there are interesting things happening in open-source geo right now. So here’s another interesting thing: OpenStreetView, which ...

• The Street View From the Cheap Seats Aug 24, 2016

  The Street View From the Cheap Seats All it takes is for one person to visit Stockton As previously pointed out, there are interesting things happening in open-source geo right now . So here’s another interesting thing: OpenStreetView , which is a sort of open-source/crowd-sourced Google Street View but maintained by an independent company ( Telenav , TNAV on NASDAQ), referenced to the data in OpenStreetMap .

• Drew Bell on front-end engineering as a kind of translation Aug 23, 2016

  Drew Bell on front-end engineering as a kind of translation Drew Bell is a front-end engineer at Postlight— a role he describes as “the awkward middle child of the development pipeline” —and one that requires a ton of conversation . In a platonic and pure (albeit heartless) engineering world, perhaps Drew would cheerfully accept designs and specifications and turn them into functioning app experiences that run in a web browser, with nary a peep or question.

• Podcast #27: Julia Pimsleur — Found in Translation Aug 22, 2016

  Podcast #27: Julia Pimsleur — Found in Translation Image courtesy of Julia Pimsleur Helping women build million-dollar businesses: this week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to Julia Pimsleur, founder of the Little Pim foreign language-learning series and author of Million Dollar Women: The Essential Guide for Female Entrepreneurs Who Want to Go Big . They discuss her career trajectory, from documentary filmmaker to nonprofit fundraiser to entrepreneur, and talk about her experiences raising venture capital — and how the specific challenges for women in the VC world led her to start teaching other female entrepreneurs.

• Friday Links: Design Edition, plus pictures of “graphic designers working” from our stock photo… Aug 18, 2016

  Friday Links: Design Edition, plus pictures of “graphic designers working” from our stock photo service Here are the most interesting links this week from our design department this week. Thanks to Matt Quintanilla .

• A strange digital time capsule Aug 17, 2016

  A strange digital time capsule Historical reënactment It’s a hectic news cycle so let’s take a look at an artifact of historical interest that has nothing to do with the current news cycle: A nearly two-hour battle between OS/2 and Windows NT . Another excellent Gene video production It was 1993.

• Podcast #26: This Is Haughey Do It Aug 15, 2016

  Podcast #26: This Is Haughey Do It Photo courtesy Summer Wilson The evolution of MetaFilter : this week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter, the collection of sites and communities that Paul describes as “one of the real success stories of the web. ” The conversation covers Matt’s early career at Pyra Labs, the accessibility of digital technologies, his current job as a writer for Slack , and how if you spend enough time publishing online, you’ll inevitably attract the attention of two groups — trolls and lawyers.

• Just time and effort. Aug 13, 2016

  Just time and effort.

• Friday Links: Product Edition Aug 11, 2016

  Friday Links: Product Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our product department (and elsewhere in Postlight). Thanks to Tyler Strand .

• Exactly — it should also be quite easy to embed AMP too. Lot of problems before that can be solved. Aug 9, 2016

  Exactly — it should also be quite easy to embed AMP too. Lot of problems before that can be solved.

• Janet Kim on Product as Marketing Aug 9, 2016

  Janet Kim on Product as Marketing Janet Kim is a Product Designer at Postlight. She recently went to a conference in Brooklyn and heard a talk by Gene Liebel about the nuts and bolts of product as a business—the way that digital products (like apps) can supplant and enhance relationships with users, in measurable ways that supplant advertising—but at much less cost.

• Your point is completely valid and it raises good concerns. Aug 8, 2016

  Your point is completely valid and it raises good concerns. In this case, I think it’s worth separating AMP and Google’s implementation.

• Hi, Adewale. Aug 8, 2016

  Hi, Adewale. I’m not really asking for anyone to do anything, nor do I expect Google to do anything in particular—I’m just noting the gap between where the platform is and where it could be.

• Podcast #25: Elizabeth Spiers is Multi-dimensional Aug 8, 2016

  Podcast #25: Elizabeth Spiers is Multi-dimensional Image courtesy of Elizabeth Spiers From digital journalism to virtual reality: this week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to Elizabeth Spiers , whom Paul describes as “both a human being and essentially a human media platform. ” (Elizabeth scales the description back a bit with “digital media nerd.

• So AMP is pretty easy to work with. Aug 7, 2016

  So AMP is pretty easy to work with. And different people are producing AMP.

• We’re Bullish on AMP Aug 7, 2016

  We’re Bullish on AMP A little on-the-nose but what can you do. By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight Google is now planning to show AMP links everywhere in its mobile search results — that is to say, in a place that probably drives a lot of traffic to your site.

• We’re Bullish on AMP Aug 7, 2016

  Google is now planning to show AMP links everywhere in its mobile search results — that is to say, in a place that probably drives a lot of traffic to ...

• Friday Links: Engineering Edition Aug 4, 2016

  Friday Links: Engineering Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our engineering department. (You might notice that we do a lot of React development.

• Selected VHS Covers Aug 2, 2016

  Selected VHS Covers By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight VHS boxes never made it into the “unique art form” category in the same way that vinyl record album sleeves did. Album sleeves were a foot square on a side—room to play for a graphic designer.

• Podcast #24: Event Verizon Aug 1, 2016

  Podcast #24: Event Verizon Verizon just bought Yahoo, but what exactly did they get? This week, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss the acquisition of the beleaguered Yahoo, and mull over the long games of companies like Verizon, Google, Facebook, and Apple.

• World of Water Parks Jul 31, 2016

  World of Water Parks By Paul Ford, co-founder, Postlight I’m the father to four-year-old twins and sometimes we chill out with YouTube videos. Being four, when they like something they want more of the same— but also a little novelty.

• Saturday Links: Design Edition Jul 29, 2016

  Saturday Links: Design Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our design department. Thanks to Matt Quintanilla .

• Podcast #23: The DNA of NDAs Jul 25, 2016

  Podcast #23: The DNA of NDAs Do we need so many NDAs? This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss the proliferation of the non-disclosure agreement in the tech world and beyond, and hammer out what’s really necessary in a business contract.

• Welp, it happened, Verizon bought Yahoo, and now we must live with the consequences Jul 24, 2016

  Welp, it happened, Verizon bought Yahoo, and now we must live with the consequences By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight WAIT! FIRST!

• Friday Links: Product Edition Jul 21, 2016

  Friday Links: Product Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our product department. Thanks to Tyler Strand .

• “We all feel like idiots now, Feynman. Nice work.” Jul 19, 2016

  “We all feel like idiots now, Feynman. Nice work.

• Podcast #22: Karen McGrane — Content and discontent Jul 18, 2016

  Podcast #22: Karen McGrane — Content and discontent Photograph: Erik Westra How does a content strategist see the web? This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to Karen McGrane , a user-experience expert who writes books, gives speeches, leads workshops, and takes on a variety of web projects with her agency Bond Art + Science.

• NYC tech, part ∞ Jul 17, 2016

  NYC tech, part ∞ Debby Wong / Shutterstock. com Two articles about NYC tech showed up recently—the first by Matt Turck, a VC—“ The NYC Tech Ecosystem: Catching Up to the Hype ” [O]n the one hand, NYC has become the clear Number 2 to the Bay Area; on the other hand, it’s hard not to notice that things have gone a bit quiet — at a minimum, we seem to be past the stage of unbridled enthusiasm….

• Friday* Links: Engineering Edition Jul 15, 2016

  Friday* Links: Engineering Edition * Thanks for Medium for help with a glitch. It’s Saturday but here we are, with some links from our engineering department.

• Updates from our accidental network Jul 13, 2016

  Updates from our accidental network What’s better than stock art? NOTHING.

• Gina Trapani talks about Black Girls CODE with NYC Chapter Lead Onyi Nwosu Jul 12, 2016

  Gina Trapani talks about Black Girls CODE with NYC Chapter Lead Onyi Nwosu Image courtesy of Onyi Nwosu’s Instagram Postlight’s Director of Engineering Gina Trapani writes : This past weekend here at Postlight, we had the chance to host an event for Black Girls CODE’s NYC chapter. The Black Futures STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Panel featured six young women of color sharing their experiences in science, technology, engineering, and math with an audience of middle- to high- school girls and their parents.

• Podcast #21: Mayer Lemons — a chat about Yahoo’s recent acquisitions Jul 11, 2016

  Podcast #21: Mayer Lemons — a chat about Yahoo’s recent acquisitions Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo acquisitions: this week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade start the discussion with a recent Gizmodo article by the very talented Sophie Kleeman about the fate of all 53 companies Yahoo has purchased under Mayer’s leadership. Topics covered include acqui-hires, managing up v.

• Too many wires at once! Jul 10, 2016

  Too many wires at once! The news What do you even say?

• tiny typo—“all” instead of “at” here? Jul 10, 2016

  tiny typo—“all” instead of “at” here? This piece is brilliant and I loved all of it.

• Friday Links: Design Edition Jul 7, 2016

  Friday Links: Design Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our design department. Thanks to Matt Quintanilla .

• Friday Links: Product Edition Jun 30, 2016

  Friday Links: Product Edition Here are the most interesting links this week from our product department. Thanks to Tyler Strand .

• Guest Post: Middle Pages, by Josephine Livingstone Jun 28, 2016

  Guest Post: Middle Pages, by Josephine Livingstone One of the great things about having a corporate newsletter is that you can write whatever the hell you want. You’re editor, publisher, and sponsor.

• Podcast #19: The Silence of the Cams Jun 27, 2016

  Podcast #19: The Silence of the Cams Who will hear the brands when Facebook mutes their videos? Your silent Facebook feed: this week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk about how video has taken over Facebook — and about how, according to Digiday , 85% of those videos are viewed silently.

• Cutting Ship Risk Jun 26, 2016

  The most monosyllabic way to summarize the job of software product management is: “cut ship risk.” Software projects all start as golden towers of dreams ...

• Risks, Digested Jun 26, 2016

  Risks, Digested Everything is fine. Don’t look at the earth.

• Just…curious. Interested. Jun 25, 2016

  Just…curious. Interested.

• Friday Links: Engineering Edition Jun 23, 2016

  Friday Links: Engineering Edition Image by Pretty Vectors/Shutterstock. Here are the five most interesting links this week from our engineering department.

• The world’s best sleepy-time media Jun 22, 2016

  The world’s best sleepy-time media In 2016 it is a normal thing to go to bed with earphones in your ears and your phone playing something soothing. Washes of noise are never far away—for example, you can listen to crashing waves on Spotify (that track I just linked has nearly 14 million listens).

• Reboot the World Jun 21, 2016
• Podcast #18: Virginia Heffernan — Magic, Loss, and Mercy-killing Horses Jun 20, 2016

  Podcast #18: Virginia Heffernan — Magic, Loss, and Mercy-killing Horses Aesthetics and digital technology: this week Paul and Rich talk to writer Virginia Heffernan about her new book, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art . The conversation covers Buddhism, Angry Birds (my babies ), The 4-Hour Workweek , nuclear war, ancient philosophy, Bay Ridge, and wild horses.

• Some Useful-ish Internet-ish Glossaries Jun 19, 2016

  Some Useful-ish Internet-ish Glossaries By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight Image by aekikuis /Shutterstock I’ve always found that when you get thrown into a new situation that glossaries and dictionaries are useful tools. Most things aren’t that hard to understand if you know the words.

• We didn’t go the last four years—it was fun to see. Jun 18, 2016

  We didn’t go the last four years—it was fun to see. It doesn’t change at all, really.

• Pattern Jun 17, 2016

  Pattern This afternoon I was coming back from the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island. Near my apartment building I saw two people helping an old lady who fell down in the street.

• Friday Links: Design Edition Jun 16, 2016

  Friday Links: Design Edition Here are the five most interesting links this week from the Postlight Design team’s chat logs. Thanks to Matt Quintanilla .

• Gina Trapani on the software we use every day at Postlight Jun 14, 2016

  Gina Trapani on the software we use every day at Postlight Image by Iconic Bestiary . When we hired Gina Trapani as a Director of Engineering at Postlight we knew, of course, that she’d founded Lifehacker many years ago.

• Podcast #17: Paul and Rich Exchange Frank Views Jun 13, 2016

  Podcast #17: Paul and Rich Exchange Frank Views This week Paul and Rich set out to ostensibly talk about the ongoing saga of Gawker vs Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel (recorded just days before the Gawker bankruptcy announcement ). Instead, they find themselves debating about the ethics of media and business, free-market capitalism, surge pricing, universal basic income, the ethos of the Valley — and Rich promises Paul that he will never read The Fountainhead .

• 9 Things Microsoft Could Do With LinkedIn Jun 12, 2016

  9 Things Microsoft Could Do With LinkedIn By Paul Ford, Co-founder, Postlight LinkedIn Image (c) Asif Islam/Shutterstock//Microsoft Image (c) Pabkov / Shutterstoc k Microsoft Corp. said it will buy LinkedIn Corp.

• I…agree! I can definitely see that the current problems are the artifacts of some pretty big… Jun 12, 2016

  I…agree! I can definitely see that the current problems are the artifacts of some pretty big structural issues around product management.

• 9 Things Microsoft Could Do With LinkedIn Jun 12, 2016

  Microsoft Corp. said it will buy LinkedIn Corp. in a deal valued at $26.2 billion, giving the world’s biggest software provider access to a virtual ...

• Friday Links: Product edition Jun 9, 2016

  Friday Links: Product edition Postlight is now paying a subscription fee for stock art! Comin’ up in the world!

• Open-source Geo Is Really Something Right Now Jun 8, 2016

  In March a helpful Internet person named Michal Migurski tweeted: Want to help @openaddr derive a parcel dataset for the US? I know of funding for a quick ...

• Open-source geo is really something right now Jun 8, 2016

  Open-source geo is really something right now In March a helpful Internet person named Michal Migurski tweeted : Want to help @openaddr derive a parcel dataset for the US? I know of funding for a quick development project.

• Podcast #16: Khoi Vinh—From Subtraction to Adobe Jun 6, 2016

  Podcast #16: Khoi Vinh—From Subtraction to Adobe Khoi! Paul Ford and Rich Ziade sit down with designer Khoi Vinh , who is currently the director of product design for mobile at Adobe.

• Are you my digital product studio? Jun 5, 2016

  Are you my digital product studio? Wikimedia Commons photograph of a restaurant in Jimma, Ethiopia .

• Are You My Digital Product Studio? Jun 5, 2016

  Like any liberal art prone to budget cuts, the advertising industry is autothanatophilic — erotically attracted to its own death. So there’s lots of juicy ...

• Friday Links: Engineering Edition Jun 2, 2016

  Friday Links: Engineering Edition Why is the pentagram upside down? Is graph theory…evil?

• The Whole Spy’s Guide to the Internet Jun 1, 2016

  The Whole Spy’s Guide to the Internet Muckrock requested, via a Freedom of Information act request , a copy of a book called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research , the author of which is, um, Name Redacted — because the book, at 600+ pages, was written for the use of the United States National Security Agency. Muckrock is kind of down on this guide, which came out in 2007.

• Podcast #15: Q&A May 30, 2016

  Podcast #15: Q&A Photo by Flickr user emagic Rich Ziade and Paul Ford answer listener questions and respond to listener comments. Topics discussed include: The abysmal UX of Google’s ad products; Amazon’s strategies for world domination; the digital technologies in today’s elementary schools; and what exactly Spotify’s Discover Weekly thinks of Paul and Rich.

• Friday Links: Design Edition May 26, 2016

  Friday Links: Design Edition Five links from our ongoing office chat thread on design, as compiled by Chloe Olewitz with snarky edits by Paul Ford. 4 1/Draplin Design Co.

• Automatic for the Sheeple May 25, 2016

  The famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel further sealed his identity as a Silicon Valley supervillain by revealing that, yes, as had been reported, he ...

• Automatic for the Sheeple May 25, 2016

  Automatic for the Sheeple By Paul Ford, co-founder, Postlight How to react to a nuclear explosion, from EPA. gov The famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel further sealed his identity as a Silicon Valley supervillain by revealing that, yes, as had been reported, he funded the lawsuit that wrestler Hulk Hogan successfully pursued against media company Gawker.

• Podcast #14: Natalie Podrazik—iOS developer and user-research spy May 23, 2016

  Podcast #14: Natalie Podrazik—iOS developer and user-research spy Photo courtesy Natalie Podrazik Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk to Natalie Podrazik about, in Paul’s words, “the gestalt of iOS programming. ” Natalie traces her journey from studying comp-sci to backend programming to developing for Apple devices, where the title “engineer” often encompasses design and user experience alongside writing code.

• What Giants Can’t See May 22, 2016

  Sculpture, “Riese” by Ervin Hervé-Lóránth, 2015, Berlin-Mitte, Germany CC BY-SA 3.0 The web platform has entered a period of relative stability — HTML5 ...

• What Giants Can’t See May 22, 2016

  What Giants Can’t See Sculpture, “ Riese ” by Ervin Hervé-Lóránth , 2015, Berlin-Mitte , Germany CC BY-SA 3. 0 The web platform has entered a period of relative stability — HTML5 and similar technologies are here to stay.

• Podcast #13: Introducing Postlight Mercury, an easy, free AMP converter May 17, 2016

  Podcast #13: Introducing Postlight Mercury, an easy, free AMP converter This week Rich and Paul unveil Mercury , Postlight’s new AMP-conversion tool. As they break down Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages format, they talk about why they built Mercury — and how web publishers can use it.

• Two quick advertisements + something about demos May 16, 2016

  “Hold-And-Modify” Two quick advertisements + something about demos First advertisement The Postlight newsletter has been a little sporadic these last two weeks. That’s because we’re busy—and growing.

• Simulations! May 10, 2016

  Simulations! Bottling plant, the most boring game in the world Computers can be programmed to simulate aspects of physical and cultural reality.

• Podcast #12: A little chat about terrible failure May 9, 2016

  Podcast #12: A little chat about terrible failure Click the exploding rocket to hear the podcast ►iTunes / ►SoundCloud / ►Overcast / ►Stitcher / ►WWW(MP3) / ►RSS This week, Paul and Rich try to define success and failure in business, the tech industry, and their lives. The result is part topical conversation (Apple, Yahoo, the penetrating gaze of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes) and part therapy session.

• Not OK, Computer May 6, 2016

  The middle-aged band Radiohead has mostly erased its Internet presence—Twitter, Facebook, website, etc. Here’s the news (breathless!) from Pitchfork: ...

• Not OK, Computer May 5, 2016

  Not OK, Computer How great is Google Image search? The middle-aged band Radiohead has mostly erased its Internet presence —Twitter, Facebook, website, etc.

• Things breaking and changing May 4, 2016

  Things breaking and changing US Navy Photograph “Software error doomed Japanese Hitomi spacecraft,” Nature : The spacecraft then automatically switched into a safe mode and, at about 4:10 a. m.

• Podcast #11: Gina Trapani—coder to lifehacker and back again May 2, 2016

  Podcast #11: Gina Trapani—coder to lifehacker and back again Photo from Flickr, some rights reserved . This week Paul and Rich talk with Gina Trapani , a programmer, the founder of Lifehacker, and one of their newest employees.

• Khoi Vinh is going to swing by Postlight tonight at 6:30PM Apr 27, 2016

  Khoi Vinh is going to swing by Postlight tonight at 6:30PM This is what Khoi sees when he looks at things Postlight is going to do a Q&A tonight with Khoi Vinh. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe, Design Chair at Wildcard , and co-founder of Kidpost (Kidpost comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED if you have small children and parents on the Internet).

• Thinking a little differently about Apple TV Apr 26, 2016

  Thinking a little differently about Apple TV Not long ago James Wen , an engineer here at Postlight , took some time to learn his way around Apple TV. He is an experienced iOS developer, writing apps for iPhones and iPads, and he came to Apple TV with that perspective.

• Podcast #10: The Web is Dead? Apr 25, 2016

  Podcast #10: The Web is Dead? Sigh This week Paul and Rich eulogize the web, which has been dying since its inception.

• Consequence Management Systems Apr 24, 2016

  There’s an activist and columnist named Shaun King. He writes from a progressive position about social justice and race, which makes him a target of much ...

• Consequence Management Systems Apr 24, 2016

  Consequence Management Systems CC licensed There’s an activist and columnist named Shaun King . He writes from a progressive position about social justice and race, which makes him a target of much criticism on and off the Internet.

• Finding an old CD-ROM and a terrible Diablo rap Apr 21, 2016

  Finding an old CD-ROM and a terrible Diablo rap No really you want to click here and see this Diablo-based rap Kevin Barrett , a Senior Engineer at Postlight, wrote a short essay about a subject dear to our hearts : Legacy data, when that legacy data is your very own life. There are services (Facebook, TimeHop) that trot out your past, but they show you what you’ve already made public.

• Google image search is the true search Apr 19, 2016

  Google image search is the true search Here’s what happens when you search for “inspirational quote” on Google: Okay, so that links me to a bunch of sites with inspirational quotes, where presumably my inspirational quotes needs would be fully met. But what about when you look at just images?

• Podcast #9: Camille and Kellan are Friends (and CTOs) Apr 18, 2016

  Podcast #9: Camille and Kellan are Friends (and CTOs) This week Paul and Rich talk to two former chief technology officers (CTOs) who are also good friends and frequent collaborators: Camille Fournier , who was previously at Rent the Runway , and Kellan Elliott-McCrea , who was previously at Etsy . They discuss the role of the CTO within a company, share experiences from the trenches, compare their experiences managing engineers versus managing CEOS, and swap stories about the most colossal technical outages that happened on their respective watches (Kellan took down Yahoo Messenger [literally]; Camille ruined everyone’s Thanksgiving [well a network switch was reconfigured, it was a bad day]).

• It’s Hard to Name Web Aesthetic Movements Apr 17, 2016

  There’s a site, Brutalist Web Sites, that aggregates websites that look kind of raw—that show their seams. The citizens of Hacker News, where I (this is ...

• Thanks, that’s good context! Apr 17, 2016

  Thanks, that’s good context!

• It’s Hard to Name Web Aesthetic Movements Apr 17, 2016

  It’s Hard to Name Web Aesthetic Movements There’s a site, Brutalist Web Sites , that aggregates websites that look kind of raw—that show their seams. The citizens of Hacker News, where I (this is Paul) found the link this morning, immediately undertook to argue whether the sites shown are truly Brutalist or not—but of course, as Wikipedia points out (after some arguments of its own ), there is no one clear true definition of Brutalism.

• Meet the Lux Framework! Apr 14, 2016

  Meet the Lux Framework! Some nice timber framing to get across the idea that this is a framework If you program you know what a framework is—a set of pre-coded utilities and routines that make it easy for programmers to attack a certain problem in a consistent manner.

• Meet the Lux Framework! Apr 14, 2016

  A few years ago I was working for a very lean web startup. The team consisted of myself and my father and neither of us could write code. Sure I dabbled a ...

• Today’s Postlight newsletter is simply a screenshot of an article from Re/Code Apr 13, 2016

  Today’s Postlight newsletter is simply a screenshot of an article from Re/Code We’re going to come back tomorrow and hopefully there’ll be a new Internet by then.

• Some interesting patterns Apr 12, 2016

  Some interesting patterns Because I (Paul) am a huge nerd this newsletter often talks more about engineering and product development. Postlight is, however, just as dedicated to design as engineering.

• Podcast #8: Takin’ it Meta Apr 11, 2016

  Podcast #8: Takin’ it Meta An exceptionally meta keyboard for the Symbolics LISP machine This week Paul and Rich make a podcast about making a podcast — or more specifically, about the difficulties of publishing content on disparate platforms across the web. They discuss native advertising versus more traditional marketing, and Rich asks for clarification: “I just need to know Paul Ford hasn’t whored himself out.

• Between a double and the deep blue sea Apr 10, 2016

  Between a double and the deep blue sea Things were much easier then There’s this company called MaxMind. If you were a web nerd in the early 2000s you probably know them: Since around 2000 they’ve released software that turns Internet addresses into geographic locations.

• Between a Double and the Deep Blue Sea Apr 10, 2016

  Things were much easier then There’s this company called MaxMind. If you were a web nerd in the early 2000s you probably know them: Since around 2000 ...

• ASMR as a Platform Apr 7, 2016

  ASMR as a Platform Today’s newsletter topic comes from Kevin Barrett , a senior software engineer at Postlight. In a post here on Track Changes he wrote about ASMR—“a silly medicalish retronym that some clever pseudoscientist coined to diagnose — and keep in mind that ASMR is nothing if not hand-wavey — that tingly feeling in the back of your head .

• Commenting on leaks Apr 5, 2016

  Commenting on leaks Still life with Leeks (Carl Schuch) Have you heard about the Panama Papers ? Or seen the Panama Papers website ?

• What Should We Do About Big Data Leaks? Apr 5, 2016
• No, that is not my point. This is a corporate newsletter. I’m not lecturing anyone on purity. Apr 5, 2016

  No, that is not my point. This is a corporate newsletter.

• I’m okay with you not understanding. Apr 5, 2016

  I’m okay with you not understanding.

• Commenting on Data Leaks Apr 5, 2016

  Still life with Leeks (Carl Schuch) Have you heard about the Panama Papers? Or seen the Panama Papers website? Or seen the #panamapapers hashtag? Or read ...

• Also of course I’m ambivalent. What the hell is wrong with ambivalence? Apr 5, 2016

  Also of course I’m ambivalent. What the hell is wrong with ambivalence?

• Yeah that’s good feedback — I’m actually making this point when I say it’s “latent” but I could… Apr 5, 2016

  Yeah that’s good feedback — I’m actually making this point when I say it’s “latent” but I could have been more clear. We agree completely.

• Right! And I mean, at some level they absolutely should be doing this. Apr 5, 2016

  Right! And I mean, at some level they absolutely should be doing this.

• Podcast #7: The Man Who Killed Clippy, Part 2 Apr 4, 2016

  Podcast #7: The Man Who Killed Clippy, Part 2 Click on this to hear the podcast We finish our conversation with Dean Hachamovitch, and while we start out making fun of Clippy, we end up discussing conversational interfaces, security and privacy, and the responsibilities of software development. As Rich puts it, “I just want to congratulate everyone here for smoothly weaving Clippy into some NPR-ish conversation.

• Laughter Doesn’t Scale Mar 31, 2016

  Laughter Doesn’t Scale A woman diagnosed as suffering from hilarious mania. Color lithograph, 1892, after J.

• Laughter Doesn’t Scale Mar 31, 2016

  It’s April Fools’ Day on the Internet! Once, years ago, this was a fun day when people made stupid, nerdy jokes. Take, for example, “A Standard for the ...

• Culturally—Star Wars, action movies in general, simple stories of redemption, romantic comedies… Mar 31, 2016

  Culturally—Star Wars, action movies in general, simple stories of redemption, romantic comedies, pornography, political news and arguments, anything related to sports, especially soccer, etc. Apple and Microsoft’s brands.

• Bots won’t stop Mar 30, 2016

  Bots won’t stop He’s right. It’s a lot.

• Podcast #6: The Man Who Killed Clippy, Part 1 Mar 28, 2016

  Podcast #6: The Man Who Killed Clippy, Part 1 ►iTunes /► SoundCloud / ►Overcast / ►Stitcher / ►WWW / ►RSS / ►MP3 In the first of a two-part episode, Paul and Rich talk to Dean Hachamovitch, the former corporate vice president for Internet Explorer at Microsoft. In this installment, we talk about what that job is like on day one, and how to motivate a large team working on a massive scale.

• Meet Tay Mar 24, 2016

  It’s a big time for bots, as readers of this blog know. They’re in our Twitter and our Slacks. Never one to lag too far behind, Microsoft released to ...

• Tay, this week's “It” bot Mar 24, 2016

  Tay, this week's “It” bot A commercial bot from the 1980s. It’s been a big time for bots , as readers of this newsletter know .

• Lessons learned: Ember to React Mar 22, 2016

  Lessons learned: Ember to React Aaron Ortbals is a Senior Engineer at Postlight who recently wrote a very interesting essay about learning React . React is a toolkit/framework that makes it easier to build web applications (i.

• Podcast #5: Add Me to Your Professional Network Mar 21, 2016

  Podcast #5: Add Me to Your Professional Network The things this pen has written. Photo by Sheila Scarborough, some rights reserved .

• Some (other) interesting newsletters Mar 20, 2016

  Some (other) interesting newsletters If you like Postlight’s newsletter, you may enjoy these: Image from “The Above Chart Manifesto" Scott Klein, “Above Chart ” Brand new! Just started!

• Technology in distress Mar 17, 2016

  Technology in distress A small collection of interesting images. This has been the Track Changes newsletter for Friday, March 18, 2016, brought to you by Postlight , a web-and-app product shop in NYC.

• Interfaces over time Mar 16, 2016

  Interfaces over time On Tuesday night at our Postlight session Dean Hachamovitch talked about his decades building software like MSWord and Internet Explorer. He also explained the origin of the keyboard shortcut “Control-K” to insert a hyperlink—it was a reference to the final “k” in hyperlin K.

• Podcast #4: Anil Dash, Entrepreneur to Activist Mar 14, 2016

  Podcast #4: Anil Dash, Entrepreneur to Activist Paul and Rich talk to entrepreneur-turned-activist Anil Dash about the early days of the web, access and inclusivity, and the ethical responsibilities of the people who build digital technologies. Plus we try to settle how much you should tip on a New York City cab ride — no matter what the interface.

• The Life and Death of Clippy Mar 13, 2016

  The Life and Death of Clippy Tomorrow night, at 6:30PM, Dean Hachamovitch will come by Postlight and talk about his work over several decades at Microsoft. You’re invited!

• Star Profile: Photos by Darrell Hanley Mar 10, 2016

  Star Profile: Photos by Darrell Hanley Every two weeks at Postlight one employee is named “Star of the Week. ” They are granted certain playlist and food-ordering privileges, given a balloon, toasted at a happy hour, and sort of generally appreciated for their contributions.

• I Miss Staging Mar 9, 2016

  Photo by Струјајое The days of setting up your own CMS and publishing all your stuff on your own site are, for now at least, over. Your CMS isn’t social, ...

• I think that’s what I keep coming back to—the fantasy that it “just works” and then the inevitable… Mar 9, 2016

  I think that’s what I keep coming back to—the fantasy that it “just works” and then the inevitable appearance of an actual new job or ten for people just to manage the integration between all the platforms. The jobs you described are pretty noodgy and there are so many things humans could be doing to make things better aside from trying to bend to the will of software.

• I miss staging Mar 9, 2016

  I miss staging Something important has gone missing from our magical multi-platform content distribution future Photo by Струјајое The days of setting up your own CMS and publishing all your stuff on your own site are, for now at least, over. Your CMS isn’t social, is the problem.

• Tracking down a cat GIF Mar 8, 2016

  Tracking down a cat GIF I was struck by the level of detail in this amazing GIF of a cat destroying everything, forever: I saw the image first on Mlkshk . Curious, I looked the image up on the “reverse image search” service TinEye , and that led me to a page for the artist Oleg Beresnev on CreativeMarket.

• Tracking Down a Cat GIF Mar 8, 2016

  I was struck by the level of detail in this amazing GIF of a cat destroying everything, forever: I saw the image first on Mlkshk. Curious, I looked the ...

• Fun Photoshop File Format Facts Mar 7, 2016

  Fun Photoshop File Format Facts The way we used to be Originally published at posts. postlight.

• “Postlight Posts” is no more Mar 7, 2016

  “Postlight Posts” is no more We renamed this newsletter to Track Changes , like our podcast. Then we moved everything over to a new Medium collection .

• Bot thoughts Mar 7, 2016

  Bot thoughts Originally published on posts. postlight.

• Caricatures Mar 7, 2016

  Caricatures Originally published at posts. postlight.

• Global App Madness Mar 7, 2016

  Global App Madness Executive summary: App economies Originally published at posts. postlight.

• Maximalism, Digital Mar 7, 2016

  Maximalism, Digital Oh hell yes. Originally published at posts.

• Meet our new podcast, Track Changes Mar 7, 2016

  Meet our new podcast, Track Changes Originally published on posts. postlight.

• More bot thoughts & more Mar 7, 2016

  More bot thoughts & more Originally published on posts. postlight.

• Nine Fine Vines Mar 7, 2016

  Nine Fine Vines Originally published on posts. postlight.

• Oh my lord. Wow. Mar 7, 2016

  Oh my lord. Wow.

• Podcast #2: Apple vs. the FBI and Paul vs. Rich Mar 7, 2016

  Podcast #2: Apple vs. the FBI and Paul vs.

• Risks We Accept Mar 7, 2016

  Risks We Accept Originally published on posts. postlight.

• Track Changes Podcast #3: Make HTML Great Again (Transcript) Mar 7, 2016

  Track Changes Podcast #3: Make HTML Great Again (Transcript) The transcript for Track Changes #3 , a comparison of presidential websites Paul Ford: Hi and welcome to Track Changes, the official podcast of the Postlight Agency. We’re a product shop in New York City.

• Track Changes Podcast #3: Make HTML Great Again Mar 7, 2016

  Track Changes Podcast #3: Make HTML Great Again Which candidate has the best web platform? To find out, we viewed source.

• Usable Data Mar 7, 2016

  Usable Data Alexandria on a bad day Originally published to posts. postlight.

• When the chips are up Mar 7, 2016

  When the chips are up The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle (from the Unicorn Tapestries) Originally published on posts. postlight.

• Executives around the fire Mar 7, 2016

  Executives around the fire Originally published on posts. postlight.

• When the Chips Are Up Mar 7, 2016

  Bloomberg Businessweek has a profile of the executive manager who oversees Apple’s secretive microchip development wing. He’s an Israeli Arab Christian ...

• Global App Madness Mar 7, 2016

  Executive summary: App economies This article in The Verge by Casey Newton is a useful primer on where apps are now. It tells the story of a small company ...

• Executive Summary Mar 7, 2016

  Executive Summary https://commons. wikimedia.

• When the Internet Asks You to Fill Out A Form, Do It Mar 6, 2016
• They are! I think it’s a real mix where self-published authors who succeed are adopted and promoted… Mar 6, 2016

  They are! I think it’s a real mix where self-published authors who succeed are adopted and promoted by large publishers after finding success— Wool , or 50 Shades of Gray as an example.

• Global App Madness Mar 6, 2016

  Global App Madness Executive summary: App economies This article in The Verge by Casey Newton is a useful primer on where apps are now. It tells the story of a small company called Pixite that makes mobile apps, and is facing declining revenues from the Apple app store.

• Whoops (Was: Executive Summary) Mar 3, 2016

  Whoops (Was: Executive Summary) I published this in the wrong place. The post is over here.

• Executive Summary Mar 3, 2016

  Executive Summary https://commons. wikimedia.

• Caricatures Mar 2, 2016

  Caricatures Some nights I can’t sleep after a long day building digital platforms for large or growing organizations. A good insomniac activity is searching through texts, organized in reverse chronological order , on Archive.

• Fun Photoshop File Format Facts Mar 1, 2016

  Fun Photoshop File Format Facts The way we used to be A typical computer file has some kind of format—a set of rules for how it should open, what can be changed, and what data gets saved. For example, HTML is a kind of file format.

• Fun Photoshop File Format Facts Mar 1, 2016

  The way we used to be A typical computer file has some kind of format — a set of rules for how it should open, what can be changed, and what data gets ...

• Track Changes: Apple vs. the FBI and Paul vs. Rich Feb 29, 2016

  Track Changes: Apple vs. the FBI and Paul vs.

• Track Changes Podcast #2—The FBI vs. Apple and Rich vs. Paul (Transcript) Feb 29, 2016

  Track Changes Podcast #2—The FBI vs. Apple and Rich vs.

• This is very helpful context. Thank you! Feb 28, 2016

  This is very helpful context. Thank you!

• Risks We Accept Feb 28, 2016

  Risks We Accept Could a content management system help you avoid retractions? Welcome to the Postlight Newsletter for February 29th, 2016.

• Just a regular Saturday with my social graph, you know? Feb 27, 2016

  Just a regular Saturday with my social graph, you know?

• this is very plausible! Feb 27, 2016

  this is very plausible!

• Risks We Accept Feb 27, 2016

  On February 17th, SB Nation, which is part of Vox Media , published a 12,000-word story that was bizarrely sympathetic to the convicted rapist Daniel ...

• Nine fine vines Feb 25, 2016

  Nine Fine Vines Podcast Thanks for the feedback (praise and criticism), for our new podcast, TRACK CHANGES. To answer some questions: RSS is here: http://trackchanges.

• ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS — EXCEPT EUROPA Feb 24, 2016
• Meet our new podcast, Track Changes Feb 24, 2016

  Meet our new podcast, Track Changes INSIDE: We’re launching a podcast, and this is the first one. Plus a short note.

• Track Changes Podcast #1: Deep inside Facebook and Silicon Valley with Jon Lax (Transcript) Feb 24, 2016

  Track Changes Podcast #1: Deep inside Facebook and Silicon Valley with Jon Lax (Transcript) This is an unedited transcript. Paul Ford : Hello and welcome to the first ever episode of the podcast Track Changes brought to you by the web and app agency Postlight in New York City.

• More bot thoughts & more Feb 23, 2016

  More bot thoughts & more INSIDE: A leading question, more bot thoughts, a podcast teaser, GIF Battle links, random web links, and that’s actually it. It’s the Postlight Newsletter for Wednesday, February 24, 2016 — Subscribe here .

• Executives around the fire Feb 22, 2016

  Executives around the fire Once a year the executives hold an offsite. When the 360-degree evaluations are done they gather by firelight, and tell stories about their email inboxes.

• Bot thoughts Feb 21, 2016

  Bot thoughts Thoughts on an old bot and a column written by a new one. It’s the Postlight Newsletter for Monday, February 22, 2016 — Subscribe here .

• Maximalism, Digital Feb 18, 2016

  Maximalism, Digital Postlight Newsletter for Friday, February 19, 2016 — Subscribe here Oh hell yes. It’s Friday!

• When the chips are up Feb 17, 2016

  When the chips are up Postlight Newsletter for Thursday, February 18, 2016 — Subscribe here The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle (from the Unicorn Tapestries) Bloomberg Businessweek has a profile of the executive manager who oversees Apple’s secretive microchip development wing . He’s an Israeli Arab Christian named Johny Srouji from Haifa.

• Can we meet about the right formatting for the list? Are you free Wednesday at 2PM EST? Feb 17, 2016

  Can we meet about the right formatting for the list? Are you free Wednesday at 2PM EST?

• Does Amazon’s Data Speak for Itself? Feb 16, 2016
• Usable Data Feb 16, 2016

  Usable Data Alexandria on a bad day Corpora time! Here’s an article about processing 3.

• TMZ.com in terms of corn yield Feb 15, 2016

  TMZ. com in terms of corn yield Postlight Newsletter for Thursday, February 11, 2016.

• TMZ.com in terms of corn yield Feb 15, 2016

  TMZ. com in terms of corn yield Postlight Newsletter for Thursday, February 11, 2016.

• Deep Valley Thoughts & GIF Battle Updates Feb 10, 2016

  Deep Valley Thoughts & GIF Battle Updates Postlight Newsletter for Thursday, February 11, 2016 — Subscribe here Journalist Chris Perkins reported on GIF Battle, a Postlight Experiment, for Mashable . He wrote: GIF Battle is the perfect game to play with your Internet friends when you’re procrastinating at work, thanks to its relatively short length.

• Technology Intern Salaries, Considered Feb 9, 2016

  A tweet by Tiffany Zhong, a VC, recently made the rounds and generated a great deal of discussion; it was even aggresplained (or exgragated) by Vox. An ...

• Technology Internship Salaries Considered Feb 9, 2016

  Technology Internship Salaries Considered Postlight Newsletter for Wednesday, February 10, 2016 — Subscribe here A tweet by Tiffany Zhong , a VC, recently made the rounds and generated a great deal of discussion; it was even aggresplained (or exgragated) by Vox . An image attached to the tweet purported to show the monthly compensation of interns at large tech companies.

• A tiny essay on Twitter changing its feed algorithm Feb 8, 2016

  A tiny essay on Twitter changing its feed algorithm Postlight Newsletter for Tuesday, February 9, 2016 — Subscribe here Source: Twitter brand assets “Twitter went into an uproar Friday after a BuzzFeed report that the social network was on the brink introducing an algorithmic, more Facebook-style feed…. Spend an entire day away from Twitter, and when you open the app again, you’ll see highlights from the day.

• Tech Ads @ Super Bowls Feb 7, 2016

  Tech Ads @ Super Bowls Postlight Newsletter for Monday, February 8, 2016— Subscribe here I’m assembling this newsletter on Sunday morning before Super Bowl 50, and I have no idea what will happen when the Carolina Panthers face the Denver Broncos. I’m the co-founder (this is Paul ) who watches the game for the commercials; co-founder Rich , however, will be holed up in front of a large TV gritting his teeth and shaking his head.

• Enter the GIFBattle.zone! Jan 26, 2016

  Two months ago the engineers, designers, and product managers at Postlight (our web-and-app agency in NYC) had a conversation about how the best part of ...

• blurg Jan 26, 2016
• Enter the GIFBattle.zone! Jan 26, 2016

  Enter the GIFBattle. zone!

• I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Jan 14, 2016

  I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

• Beautiful Dec 28, 2015

  Beautiful by Paul Ford I used to tutor this guy, I’ll call him James. I was about twenty, and this was twenty years ago.

• Submission. Dec 27, 2015

  Submission.

• What Paul Ford Wrote/Said in 2015 Dec 21, 2015

  What Paul Ford Wrote/Said in 2015 That’s me! This too.

• Yes—we want people pinning! Dec 12, 2015

  Yes—we want people pinning!

• Unsolicited Rejection Dec 12, 2015

  Unsolicited Rejection “Our organization holds a conference every year. We use a wiki to make a list of the people we’d like to see speak.

• Stick a pin in it! Dec 6, 2015

  Stick a pin in it! Pinterest is placing promotional ads for itself onto web pages, via its Chrome plugin.

• I Dreamed of a Perfect Database Dec 1, 2015
• Helpful talk tips! Nov 23, 2015

  Helpful talk tips! I’ve been giving many talks, so I decided to write down some of what I’ve been learning here on the Official Postlight Corporate Blog.

• Helpful Talk Tips! Nov 23, 2015

  Right now I give a lot of short speeches and presentations, meaning that I stand in front of an audience with a clicker in hand and speak to slides. I ...

• Hmm. At first when I read this, I was like, “yeah!” Nov 22, 2015

  Hmm. At first when I read this, I was like, “yeah!

• LOL Nothing Matters: A Defense of the Internet’s Absence of Meaning Nov 3, 2015
• An EdTech Buzzword Bingo Card Oct 14, 2015
• Hey, Ev Williams. This is all good and interesting news. Oct 7, 2015

  Hey, Ev Williams . This is all good and interesting news.

• cool tags Oct 7, 2015
• Associate project manager Dash helped manage that scope creep. Oct 7, 2015

  Associate project manager Dash helped manage that scope creep.

• The Chaotic Wisdom of Wikipedia Paragraphs Oct 6, 2015
• The Internet of Parents Is Miserable and I Love It Sep 30, 2015
• Here Is Postlight Sep 22, 2015

  Postlight was founded by Richard Ziade and me, Paul Ford. We’re a big company — nearly 40 people — for our age (zero years old). We are a team of ...

• Here Is Postlight Sep 22, 2015

  Our identity was created by Mike Ciarlo and Darren Hoyt of Postlight. Here Is Postlight Great web platforms, great experiences P ostlight was founded by Richard Ziade and me, Paul Ford.

• Data Helped Me Lose 100 Pounds Sep 13, 2015
• Saving for a Daughter but Not a Son: This Father Is Starting a Fund to Combat the Wage Gap Sep 7, 2015
• It’s a response, which is kind of a story. Aug 22, 2015

  It’s a response, which is kind of a story.

• In practice it means I compose posts on Desktop and respond on mobile. Aug 22, 2015

  In practice it means I compose posts on Desktop and respond on mobile. It keeps people interacting and engaged, I think.

• I like the way this is sponsored by Adobe. Aug 15, 2015

  I like the way this is sponsored by Adobe.

• Where Does Our Information Go After We Die? Aug 13, 2015
• The Final File Aug 12, 2015
• Correspondence Jul 22, 2015

  Correspondence I have 1,200 emails to answer right now about things I’ve written. They are making me nervous so I’ll write about them.

• From Manhattan, walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn. Jul 22, 2015

  From Manhattan, walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn. Take a right, then a right through the park, then get on the A train to go back to Manhattan.

• Fairly Random Thoughts on Ashley Madison & the Swiftly Moving Line Jul 19, 2015

  Fairly Random Thoughts on Ashley Madison & the Swiftly Moving Line This photo was super-generously licensed by Michael Vroegop and made available on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution 2. 0 generic license .

• Pax Google Jun 21, 2015
• #NPRreads: Love, Coding, Yuccies, And The 'NPR Sound' Jun 11, 2015
• Paul Ford on ‘What Is Code?’ and why we should care Jun 11, 2015
• A “No to” Poem May 18, 2015

  Not long ago the poet Anne Boyer tweeted a link to a poem. I went and read the poem, which was on page 221 of this PDF published by the Chicago Review , and I went, whoa.

• Other People’s Playlists May 16, 2015
• The Media Industry Prefers Penis (SFW!) Apr 26, 2015

  The Media Industry Prefers Penis A not-totally serious look at how The Verge, BuzzFeed, and the New York Times use words like “penis” and “vagina” (and “cat” and “dog”) 1. P v.

• My Quantified Email Self Experiment: A failure Mar 30, 2015

  The sun/moon calendar 2006–2017, by Lê Trọng Lục on Wikipedia My Quantified Email Self Experiment: A failure I have an archive of my own email going back 18 years, containing 450,000 messages. One day I decided to make it searchable.

• Hello! Mar 18, 2015

  Hello I am teaching my class. My wife found this.

• Revisiting an Old Piece Mar 10, 2015

  Revisiting an Old Piece Plus a Postscript Sometimes I like to revisit statistics and links. I like to do this months after something is in the world.

• Apple WATCH Liveblog Mar 8, 2015

  t Apple WATCH Liveblog Anil Dash and Paul Ford return (see previous efforts ) to liveblog Apple’s latest special event , with Al Rotches creating images on the fly. If Apple can keep rehashing the same old shit, so can we (we even rehashed this intro).

• Notifications & Alerts Mar 6, 2015

  Notifications & Alerts I realized that my digital life was getting too complex, so I turned off chat. Then I removed myself from a bunch of Slacks.

• Busy social settings Mar 3, 2015

  “…busy social settings…“ I am going to cut and paste my portion from an email discussion about overcoming party shyness and call that my daily post. But let’s see if I can keep posting every day.

• WhiskerNet Mar 2, 2015

  WhiskerNet I’m quoted in an article : “I was 22 and the Internet was new and everyone was sitting around a table chatting and laughing,” Ford told me. “Who went to parties where no one knew each other?

• The first thing I do when I wake up and get the children dressed—which, my God. Getting the… Mar 1, 2015

  The first thing I do when I wake up and get the children dressed—which, my God. Getting the children dressed.

• Yes to the Dress? Feb 26, 2015

  Yes to the Dress? Right now people in my professional world (content platform pontificators) are avidly discussing the traffic garnered by a single picture of a blue-and-black dress that could also—depending on how your neurons are firing—look white-and-gold.

• Sausage streams! Feb 26, 2015

  Medium really wants us to use these little empty spaces to capture thoughts. It’s positively eager for us to jam some thoughts in its thought-capturing machine so that it can grind them into thotstreams.

• When The Goal Of An Email Is To Stir A Sense Of Dread Feb 23, 2015

  Virginia Heffernan and Paul Ford have never met but they have crossed paths, and they've been sending fake work emails to see who most horrifies the other.

• Just Checking In Feb 22, 2015

  Just Checking In By Virginia Heffernan and Paul Ford Virginia Heffernan and Paul Ford have never met, but have often crossed paths—we live in New York City; were editors at Harper’s Magazine ; write about technology; and write for The Message on Medium. For no particular reason we’ve started sending emails to see who can make the other person experience the most profound sense of dread and panic.

• It’s Kind of Cheesy Being Green Feb 10, 2015

  It’s Kind of Cheesy Being Green Apple is petty sometimes A few months ago my friend Edd Dumbill shared a discovery. He pointed out that if you search Twitter for the words “ green bubbles ” you’ll find very consistent results.

• How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled Kim Kardashian’s back-end (SFW) Jan 20, 2015

  How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled their back-end for Kim Kardashian (SFW) #BreakTheInternet? On November 11th 2014, the art-and-nightlife magazine PAPER “broke the Internet” when it put a Jean-Paul Goude photograph of a well-oiled, mostly-nude Kim Kardashian on its cover and posted the same nude photos of Kim Kardashian to its website (NSFW).

• An email I sent about the Chinese Room in 2003 Jan 3, 2015

  An email I sent about the Chinese Room in 2003 I have 420,000 messages in my mail archive (many of those are from mailing lists, though) and I made them searchable. I keep finding crazy things.

• 1. You Will Build Your Own Google Dec 28, 2014

  1. You Will Build Your Own Google Or maybe map a genome.

• Dear Kids Dec 22, 2014

  Dear Kids by Paul Ford I went digging around tonight to find a quote from the preface to a Barbara Tuchman book. I tried to step gingerly around the apartment–you guys are three years old now, and you’re asleep and both have colds–but I kept knocking books off the shelves, because there are too many books, photos, toys, miscellany.

• My daughter, the user Dec 17, 2014

  My daughter, the user What my toddler told me about making websites And yes I know that sounds like clickbait but it really is the subject of the essay Typical outfit I have toddler twins. Dressing my son in the morning is easy, save for some fidgeting.

• The Birth of Kitty Litter Dec 4, 2014
• How to Email with an Old Friend After Falling Out of Touch Dec 3, 2014

  Young woman reading a letter in a garden, 1900–1910 ( http://bit. ly/1yWXHiR ) How to Email with an Old Friend After Falling Out of Touch An old friend of mine was on the Internet and came across an article that I had written, so she emailed to say hello.

• How to get through painful family conversations this Thanksgiving Nov 25, 2014

  How to get through painful family conversations this Thanksgiving Listen to what the people in your family have to say. Don’t say anything right away.

• The Group That Rules the Web Nov 19, 2014
• The Sixth Stage of Grief is Retro-Computing Nov 4, 2014

  The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing Networks Without Networks 1/10 Emulation Fever Over the last few days I’ve been crazy for emulation—that is, simulating old, busted computers on my sweet modern laptop. I’ve been booting up fake machines and tearing them down, one after the other, and not doing much besides.

• Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds Oct 8, 2014

  F rom ~butts I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds The story of Tilde. Club Stevie Nicks This is the story of an accidental network of hundreds of people all (sort of) working toward a vague common goal on a ridiculous project that did not exist two weeks ago.

• The Perfect Writer Sep 22, 2014

  Letters from a Cat, 1879. The Perfect Writer Someone once asked me what made for a perfect writer.

• Apple Liveblog, September 9, 2014 Sep 8, 2014

  Liveblog: Apple Live Event, September 9, 2014 Anil Dash and Paul Ford live-blogged the Apple Live Event . Start from the bottom and read up for best effect.

• Wednesday Aug. 20, 2064 Aug 20, 2014

  Wednesday Aug. 20, 2064 A day in the life, imagined 50 years from now Dear Diary: I am going out for ice cream.

• How to Be Polite Aug 12, 2014

  How to Be Polite And why simple manners can transform your relationships The Good Boy, 1837 M ost people don’t notice I’m polite, which is sort of the point. I don’t look polite.

• The American Room Jul 29, 2014

  The American Room Behind the nation’s closed doors, with YouTube. The first time I noticed the room was in the Numa Numa video of 2004, circulated pre-YouTube, in which a New Jersey man named Gary Brolsma danced in his chair to a Moldovan pop song called “Dragostea din tei.

• Doomed to Repeat It Jul 13, 2014

  Doomed to Repeat It Learning from the things we make over and over ThisNerd Merit Badge #2: Inbox Zero, as sold at http://www. nerdmeritbadges.

• A Delightful and Curious Book About Borders, Boundaries, Fences, and Lines Jul 9, 2014
• New York City After Global Warming Jun 29, 2014

  New York City After Global Warming A scrapbook From some movie (possibly A. I.?

• Important kitty litter questions answered Jun 11, 2014

  Important kitty litter questions answered It is a kind of clay and it is directly responsible for Internet culture Investigating a nuclear leak in New Mexico, via http://www. wipp.

• 10 Timeframes May 30, 2014

  10 Timeframes From the May 12, 2012 closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival , a full-day event held to celebrate the work of the 2012 graduating class of the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where I teach a course called “Content Strategies. ” This speech was also reprinted in Contents Magazine .

• It Is Impossible to Believe How Mindblowing These Amazing New Jobs Are May 28, 2014

  It Is Impossible to Believe How Mindblowing These Amazing New Jobs Are Is this you? It might be you.

• The Case for Scrubbing Search Results May 21, 2014
• UnGoogle Me: The Case for Scrubbing Search Results May 15, 2014
• Amazing Military Infographics May 13, 2014

  Amazing Military Infographics An appreciation Some nights I like to get the kids to bed, pour a drink, and search the web for military-produced PDFs in order to look at the amazing graphics within them. I’d thought I was the only person with this hobby, but a few weeks ago my friend Finn Smith told me that he, too, likes military PDF graphics.

• The Great Works of Software Apr 29, 2014

  The Great Works of Software A DEC PDP-11 computer, from Wikipedia Commons. Photo by “Shieldforyoureyes Dave Fischer” under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.

• Our Routers, Ourselves Mar 29, 2014
• Death in a Crowd Feb 3, 2014
• Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present Feb 2, 2014
• When you see someone and think they need help, you can press help into their hand. Jan 23, 2014

  When you see someone and think they need help, you can press help into their hand. When I was fifteen my family went through a difficult era.

• Live Blogging CES East: The Best (Fake) Gadget Show Ever Jan 6, 2014
• SP 1/1/14 Dec 31, 2013

  SP 1/1/14 I met women all over, on the train, at bars and in parties, over Twitter, made a point to talk to them, hear their stories, respond to their texts, read the books they recommended, the documentaries on Vimeo that they hyped up. When I visited my family in Virginia, I tracked down my seventh grade best friend and sat in TGIFridays near a mall for hours, laughing while her daughter took insane-looking selfies on my phone.

• What I’ve learned from fatherhood Dec 1, 2013

  The author reads a book about nicholas who is a bunny who lives in a hollow tree What I’ve learned from fatherhood From my twins who are now two Learning Small human beings learn how to live in the world by mimicking other human beings. Power over another human being, as a parent has over a child, does not mean that you are obeyed as much as that you are mimicked.

• The Hidden Technology That Makes Twitter Huge Nov 7, 2013
• The Cost of Everything Oct 22, 2013

  The Cost of Everything Selected New York Times Headlines from the last 20 years Balloon Ride to Offer Expansive View, for a Price Health-Centric Homes, for a Price A Chinese Education, for a Price Access to the Car Pool Lane, for a Price A Gofer at Your Service, for a Price Overseas Internships Can Benefit, for a Price The Speek Offers Rare Music Videos for a Price Undoing Your Daily Damage to the Earth, for a Price Have Your Very Own Species, for a Price Keep Your Shoes On, for a Price For a Price, a Faster Way Through Local Airports Fast Action On Passports, But for a Price Fancy Wheels, For a Price Trying to Roll Back the Biological Clock, for a Price Free Online Services, for a Price Mrs. Clinton Is Forgiven, But for a Price Glenn Beck Soon Available Online, For a Price Sitting With Coco Chanel, For a Price Matching Congressmen and Executives, for a Price The Fine Art of Keeping Still, for a Price How to Regain a Mouthful of Luster, for a Price Source : Search for “for a price” on NYTimes.

• A Federal IT Contractor Makes the Case Against Open-Source Obamacare Oct 17, 2013
• The Obamacare Website Didn't Have to Fail. How to Do Better Next Time Oct 16, 2013
• The questions to be posed at SxSW Interactive 2014 Oct 15, 2013

  Photo from March 17, 2009. (CC) Randy Stewart, blog.

• Determining the Fate of Frozen Embryos: Do You Know Where Your Children Are? Sep 29, 2013
• A Shit Writing Day Sep 19, 2013

  From an 1870 collection of the handwriting of the insane A Shit Writing Day Self-medicating via self-indulgence I don’t write to attain power. Writing looks like it can bring power, but for the most part power is in inverse proportion to the amount of writing one does.

• [Future Posts] Sep 17, 2013
• Deliverables Sep 17, 2013

  “Historical Essay on the Art of Bookbinding” Deliverables Deliverables are the product of certain kinds of work. When I work for certain companies I produce Deliverables.

• Office Sep 16, 2013

  Office An office is a place where work is done. When I come to the Office I enter into a state of working.

• Bike-Share Programs: The Official Transportation of the Apocalypse Sep 15, 2013
• Darpa Wants to Save Us From Our Own Dangerous Data Aug 21, 2013
• Hedgefox Buys Metayacht Aug 8, 2013

  Admit it you want one Hedgefox Buys Metayacht Many people are trying to figure out why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, so in the same spirit—the spirit of trying to understand the intentions of powerful people willing to pay to maintain the sensory organs of our society—I too will speculate To a reasonable approximation, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos knows everything worth knowing. Bezos can be understood [1] as a 48-year-old human male who is somewhere between puckish and gnomish; and [2] as a massive set of personnel, mechanical, and financial systems connected to [1].

• I Went to That Hershey’s School Don Wishes He Attended Jun 23, 2013
• What Is Pete's Bob Benson Plan? Jun 16, 2013
• Balancing Security and Liberty in the Age of Big Data Jun 12, 2013
• The Days Go By Slowly but the Years Go By Fast. Why? Jun 6, 2013
• The Abiding Mystery of Bob Benson Jun 3, 2013
• Don Really Needs to Go to a Meeting May 31, 2013
• Bob Benson's Secret May 31, 2013
• Don and Betty Go to Camp May 26, 2013
• Don Draper Is Angel from Buffy, but Without the Danger May 12, 2013
• How Bing Crosby and the Nazis Helped to Create Silicon Valley May 7, 2013
• Don Wants to Stand Before Kings May 5, 2013
• Where Are You on the Existential Hierarchy of Mad Men? Apr 30, 2013
• Did You Notice That Grandma Ida Was a Negro? Apr 30, 2013
• Joan's Hug of Dawn Is Her Trying to Be a Person Apr 28, 2013
• Meet the Web's Operating System: HTTP Apr 15, 2013
• Don Is a Rooster, Pete Is a John Apr 14, 2013
• The Premiere With the Hair Apr 7, 2013
• I'd Like to See Don, Obsolete and Lonely in 1983 Apr 4, 2013
• The Lease They Can Do: What the Fight Over 'Used' Music Reveals About Online Media Apr 3, 2013
• At SCDP, the Fear Trickles Down Mar 31, 2013
• Why Bing's Just a Gigolo Was the Perfect Song Mar 31, 2013
• Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven Mar 27, 2013
• The Fog Kingdom Feb 28, 2013
• Six Writers Take Very Short Voyages Feb 27, 2013
• The Internet Raises a Puppy Feb 20, 2013

  From Wikimedia Commons at http://bit. ly/XP1vwj The Internet Raises a Puppy My God look at this.

• Tesla in a Teapot Feb 19, 2013

  Tesla in a Teapot I've been following — as who hasn't been? — the fight between the New York Times and Tesla Motors.

• Old and New Thoughts on “Close to the Machine” Jan 13, 2013

  Old and New Thoughts on “Close to the Machine” From Ftrain. com, my blog, January, 2003 I just finished Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine (City Lights Books, 1997).

• The Lives They Lived Dec 27, 2012
• Crowdsmashed Dec 20, 2012
• D-Day: NBC 2:50–3AM Dec 3, 2012

  nothing is ever again going to be like this D-Day: NBC 2:50–3AM There is a tricky problem about the Internet. I’d love to fix it if I could.

• Sight for Signal Dec 2, 2012

  This aluminum tanenbaum will actually rip your face off if it falls on you Sight for Signal This is our second Christmas in the apartment. The Christmas tree is a damnable bundle of tiny aluminum spikes that cut my arms.

• Our Brands, Ourselves Nov 30, 2012
• Big Problems, Little Solutions: For the New Occupy, Size Is Everything Nov 14, 2012
• I wore stripes and a plaid bow-tie Aug 8, 2012
• Mostly Summer Rolls Aug 7, 2012

  Mostly Summer Rolls Every night at dinner my wife and I each ask what the other learned that day 1. I send a text when I’m on the Manhattan Bridge over the East River, on the train, headed from work in Manhattan to home in Brooklyn.

• Facebook IPO Is Just the Beginning, Says Paul Ford May 14, 2012
• An Imperfect Debut Novel Obsessed With Perfection May 4, 2012
• No, Facebook Has Not Already Peaked May 3, 2012
• Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out Apr 9, 2012
• Two Kids, Two Zygotes, and a Dilemma Mar 2, 2012
• Paul Ford on the Epiphanator and Its Future Jul 21, 2011
• Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings? Jul 17, 2011
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong: An Internet “Off” Switch Jan 26, 2011
• Just like heaven, by Paul Ford Apr 30, 2010
• Just Like Heaven Apr 30, 2010

  May 2010 Issue [Readings] Just like heaven Adjust by Paul Ford , This article is only available as a PDF to subscribers. Preparing PDF… Download PDF Your PDF will load here after we verify access.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 22, 2010
• Two High-Level Departures at Harper’s Mar 17, 2010
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 23, 2009
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Oct 26, 2009
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 31, 2009
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 3, 2009
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jul 13, 2009
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jun 1, 2009
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 4, 2009
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 2, 2009
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Dec 8, 2008
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Oct 13, 2008
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 25, 2008
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jun 30, 2008
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 26, 2008
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 14, 2008
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 3, 2008
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jan 21, 2008
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 19, 2007
• Supreme Court Upholds Appeals Court Decision in Favor of Harper’s Magazine , by Paul Ford Sep 30, 2007
• Supreme Court Upholds Appeals Court Decision in Favor of Harper's Magazine Sep 30, 2007

  [Commentary] Supreme Court Upholds Appeals Court Decision in Favor of Harper’s Magazine Adjust by Paul Ford , October 1, 2007 New York, NY, October 1, 2007 — The United States Supreme Court today upheld the March 23, 2007 decision of the 10th U. S.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Sep 24, 2007
• The Shock Doctrine: A Short Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein Aug 31, 2007

  [Commentary] The Shock Doctrine: A Short Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein Adjust by Paul Ford , September 11, 2007 Alfonso Cuarón, director of Children of Men, and Naomi Klein, author of No Logo , present a short film from Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism . An essay adapted from the book will appear in October’s Harper’s Magazine and is available on the web now .

• The Shock Doctrine: A Short Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein , by Paul Ford Aug 31, 2007
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jul 23, 2007
• Interview: Wyatt Mason on Leonard Michaels May 31, 2007

  [Sentences] Interview: Wyatt Mason on Leonard Michaels Adjust by Paul Ford , June 26, 2007 Contributing Editor Wyatt Mason wrote about the neglected works of author Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) in “The Irresponsibility of Feelings” in the July Harper’s. Subscribers can read his essay now ; non-subscribers can read it in late July.

• Interview: Wyatt Mason on Leonard Michaels, by Paul Ford May 31, 2007
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 21, 2007
• Memory and the Virtual World Dec 25, 2006

  Commentator Paul Ford tried to create a virtual world in his head. But it didn't work out very well.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 20, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 13, 2006
• Internet as Archive, If You Have the Time Oct 9, 2006

  Commentator Paul Ford says that he used to think that the Internet would make everyone a historian -- but he doesn't think so any more.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Oct 9, 2006
• Queasy Rider Sep 23, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Sep 18, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 14, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jul 17, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jun 19, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 29, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 22, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 15, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 8, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 1, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 24, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 17, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 10, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 3, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 27, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 20, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 13, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 6, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Feb 27, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Feb 20, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Feb 13, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Feb 6, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jan 30, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jan 23, 2006
• Privacy in Cyberspace: Is It Possible? Jan 19, 2006

  Commentator Paul Ford is a computer programmer who has spent a lot of time looking at the ways to keep personal information private on the Internet. He says that privacy is technically possible -- but not very likely.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jan 16, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jan 9, 2006
• The Truth About JT Leroy Jan 8, 2006

  JT LeRoy has been a publishing sensation since his first novel came out in 2000. His stories are described as being autobiographical -- which may be a problem as it becomes clearer that LeRoy is a hoax.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jan 2, 2006
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Dec 26, 2005
• Losing My Music, Or When Good Hard Drives Go Bad Dec 22, 2005

  For all of his computer skills and love of music, commentator Paul Ford couldn't stay in control of all the music in his collection. When his hard drive crashed recently, he lost 10,000 songs.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Dec 19, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Dec 12, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Dec 5, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 28, 2005
• Distracted No More: Going Back to Basics Nov 22, 2005

  Commentator Paul Ford has a solution for avoiding the endless distractions a computer provides.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 21, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 14, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 7, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Oct 31, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Oct 24, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Oct 17, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Oct 10, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Oct 3, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Sep 26, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Sep 19, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Sep 12, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Sep 5, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 29, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 22, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 15, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 8, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Aug 1, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jul 25, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jul 18, 2005
• Stealing Identities, and Ideas Jul 13, 2005

  Identity theft is becoming commonplace. But commentator Paul Ford says that the identity thief may not be the clever hacker you suspect.

• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jul 11, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jul 4, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jun 27, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jun 20, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jun 13, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jun 6, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 30, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 23, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 16, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 9, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford May 2, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 25, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 18, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 11, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Apr 4, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 28, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 21, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 14, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Mar 7, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Feb 28, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Feb 21, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Feb 14, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Jan 17, 2005
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Dec 27, 2004
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 22, 2004
• Weekly Review, by Paul Ford Nov 15, 2004
• Of Presidents and Ontologies Nov 2, 2004

  Of Presidents and Ontologies November 3, 2004 Paul Ford As I write this, the outcome of the elections in the United States it entirely uncertain. But, eventually, someone must win.

• Stuck in the Senate Oct 12, 2004

  Stuck in the Senate October 13, 2004 Paul Ford Last month we created an RDF representation of the United States Senate , and this month I was going to do the same for the House of Representatives . But after looking closely at my Senate RDF, and thinking about the sort of queries I wanted to make of it, I realized that it's a mess.

• Uncle Sam's Semantic Web Sep 14, 2004

  Uncle Sam's Semantic Web September 15, 2004 Paul Ford From the EPA to the Navy, the United States government is coming to see the Semantic Web as a solution to huge data-processing problems. XML.

• Screenscraping the Senate Aug 31, 2004

  Screenscraping the Senate September 1, 2004 Paul Ford Note: In this inaugural article of Paul Ford's new column, Hacking Congress, he introduces his plan to create an RDF description of the U. S.

• A First Look at the Kowari Triplestore Jun 22, 2004

  A First Look at the Kowari Triplestore June 23, 2004 Paul Ford Kowari is an open-sourced (Mozilla Public License) triplestore optimized for RDF storage, created by Tucana Technologies , and written entirely in Java 1. 4.

• Commentary: All About Eve, and Other Mothers Jun 21, 2004

  Some scientists believe that all of humanity has a common ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve, who lived 150,000 years ago. Commentator Paul Ford thinks she has something in common with his mother.

• Commentary: Be Proud of Guilty Pleasures Jun 3, 2004

  Commentator Paul Ford believes that everyone has a guilty pleasure they like to read, watch or listen. He thinks that it's time for people to proudly face up to this, and stop ripping the covers off of their fantasy novels.

• WWW2004 Semantic Web Roundup May 25, 2004

  WWW2004 Semantic Web Roundup May 26, 2004 Paul Ford According to Tim Berners-Lee's WWW2004 keynote address , the Semantic Web is entering " phase II ", a time of "less constraint" when Semantic Web developers are encouraged to build upon the foundations of RDF and OWL to create working applications on both the server and the desktop. And while other topics were discussed at WWW2004, such as mixed markup and XForms , this was definitely the Semantic Web's moment in the sun, with academic and corporate presentations alike focusing on the uses of RDF, triple stores, and data sharing.

• Berners-Lee Keeps WWW2004 Focused on Semantic Web May 19, 2004

  Berners-Lee Keeps WWW2004 Focused on Semantic Web May 20, 2004 Paul Ford New York City, May 19 -- A peculiar buzz is back in the halls of WWW2004 -- the mix of hubris and geek name dropping, cheap suits and over-eager handshakes that last prevailed in 2000. "I nearly invented the web," says a fellow with a large stack of promotional postcards advertising new social networking software.

• Commentary: Obsolescence, the Killer App Mar 15, 2004

  For decades, U.S. manufacturing firms have moved factory jobs overseas. Now technology jobs are being sent overseas too. Commentator Paul Ford is struck by the irony that the system built by programmers is the very mechanism that allows these jobs to move overseas.

• Commentary: Tilting for iTunes Mar 8, 2004

  Pepsi is running a promotion that if you get a bottle cap with a code, you can download a free song from Apple's iTunes. Commentator Paul Ford says that this kind of subversion of advertising is what the Internet is really great at.

• Commentary: Age of 'X' Feb 17, 2004

  If there are any future historians in the audience, commentator Paul Ford has a question for you: what age are we living in?

• Commentary: Early Periodicals Go Online Feb 8, 2004

  Commentator Paul Ford spends more time than he'd like to admit browsing the "Making of America" website, put up by Cornell University. Recently, he found Herman Melville's "Bartelby the Scriviner," just sitting there halfway down page 546.

• Commentary: New York Stories Jan 6, 2004

  There's a cliche about how many stories there are in New York. But cliche or not, commentator Paul Ford would like to add a few more.

• Commentary: Decoding the Money Puzzle Nov 23, 2003

  Commentator Paul Ford makes money as a freelance web consultant. Understanding XML and HTML is easy for him. But understanding the making of money is harder.

• Marking Up Bureaucracy Sep 23, 2003

  Marking Up Bureaucracy September 24, 2003 Paul Ford If there is a perfect user of XML, it's the huge, sprawling United States government. With thousands of diverse offices, from the Navy to National Park Service, each federal agency routinely exchanges gigabytes-worths of documents and data with other offices, businesses, and citizens.

• Commentary: A Theory of Time Sep 9, 2003

  Airport waiting areas are often mind-numbing places. The harsh fluorescent lights and not-quite-comfortable chairs aren't exactly conducive to formulating a new theory of time - unless you are commentator Paul Ford.

• Commentary: Web Standards Aug 6, 2003

  Theoretically, pages on the Web are governed by standards. Commentator Paul Ford makes his living developing Web sites, and he says that if the standards were really standard, it would make his job a lot easier.

• Commentary: Software Jun 15, 2003

  Late at night, commentator Paul Ford converses with his computer. It promises him power -- if only he will learn the latest version of Photoshop. Then, he falls asleep and dreams in Photoshop, grabbing chunks of his environment and moving them around.

• Commentary: The Milt May 11, 2003

  The Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Penn., was founded as a boarding school for orphans in 1909. Commentator Paul Ford, who attended The Milt during high school, recalls how one day his roommate rebelled openly and bizarrely: He shaved his eyebrows.

• Berkeley DB XML: An Embedded XML Database May 6, 2003

  Berkeley DB XML: An Embedded XML Database May 7, 2003 Paul Ford Berkeley DB XML is an open source, embedded XML database created by Sleepycat Software . It's built on top of Berkeley DB , a "key-value" database which provides record storage and transaction management.

• Commentary: A Religious Conversion Mar 11, 2003

  Commentator Paul Ford spent his life revering his much older brother from afar. But when Greg called to talk about becoming a Catholic, Paul realized he did not want to witness his brother's conversion -- but he went anyway.

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• Who Made That: Web Page

  For the magazine. I was friendly with the editor. They sent me to <em>BuzzFeeD</em> and I went and talked about traffic at their offices. Many BuzzFeeDs ago. Now this piece is buried so deep in a custom CMS that it's never to be seen again. One of the few times I actually <em>reported</em>—NYT after all, recording, transcribing. A couple whole days and of course it's left on the cutting room floor.

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  Our Mission and Values The Postlight Charter ON THIS PAGE: Who We Are Our Mission Our Values Who We Are Postlight is a premium, full-service ...

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