Smartphones are emotive devices. They are extensions of ourselves. Your online services need to play nicely with them or you will offend me.

When I initially proposed the idea of Mobile First over three years ago, there were a lot of skeptics. The situation today has a lot more people convinced that taking mobile seriously matters. But just in case some people remain unconvinced, here's a really vivid way of explaining the situation.

Google Analytics Tracking for Mobile Sites is different than Tracking your Website. After all, the entire purpose of a Mobile Site is for quick, easy access for Mobile Customers. 99.9% of that traffic is looking for your Phone Number or Your Location, the customer has either already done a Google Search to find you or they are a direct visit.

So let’s track Clicks on Phone Numbers and Maps using Google Analytics.

”Best practices” is a loaded term when it comes to creating mobile web experiences. It’s a unique context with it’s own challenges and opportunities. While there’s no silver bullet, this site will help you ask the right questions and help solve problems so you can start creating future-friendly web experiences.

Cathy Davidson has been arguing recently that we should teach a 4th ‘R’, algorithms, on par with literacy and math.  To my delight, what she talks about is not just teaching existing algorithms to kids (“first we’re gonna memorize bubble sort, then on to merge sort“), but rather teaching them how to think about the world algorithmically.

The distinction is an important one.  As Cathy says:

Algorithmic thinking is less about “learning code” than “learning to code.”

A nice write-up of Kelly’s session for SXSW.

We researched existing JavaScript libraries and found a ton of great stuff. But none focused on micro-typography as a whole. When we started the project, we laid out five clear goals:
Correct micro-typography, including as many of the elements in the list above as possible;
Degrades so that devices without @font-face or JavaScript support are not negatively affected;
OS independence;
Browser independence;
Correct markup;

Converts navigation to a select dropdown on small screen. We’ve done this before.

Great take on this important legislation.

This is vitally important people so listen up. The web now connects a third of our planet. Over 1.2 billion people [1] use the web on devices, and this number is rising fast. Mobile already amounts to close to 6.5% of web traffic worldwide, and large sites such as Facebook and YouTube routinely report mobile traffic of at least 30%. By 2015, the ITU predicts mobile traffic will exceed desktop traffic and the ‘mobile-mostly’ group already make up a staggering 20% of users in the US and UK.

Great insights here from Paul Krugman.

If you haven't whipped your Web site into shape for easy viewing on small-screen devices, you'd better get cracking.

A great post from Brad Frost.

Stephanie Rieger provides a little insight.

HTML5 over drinks

Export your social data with ease.

Another mention… this time in the Wall Street Journal!

I was mentioned in the article.

A great summary of my feelings on JS dependence.

A very helpful overview of jQuery (and JavaScript) best practices.

Great post from Mark Boulton.

A great preso from Luca Salvini.

AWD takes the #1 spot. Awesome!

Jeremy makes an important argument for semantics (and the use of the div element).

A nice resource for seeing how a site looks at different sizes.

If you read one summary of mobile challenges and changes this year, it should be this post from @LukeW.

An alternative mapping library.

Remote debugging with JavaScript

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | IEVMS_VERSIONS="7 9" bash

The Heads-Up Grid is an overlay grid for in-browser website development, built with HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

This worked for me.

HTML5 & CSS3 oh my.

An interesting technique, but I’d love to see it flipped on it’s head to be mobile-first.

I’ve used a few different techniques for this over the years, but this is a pretty decent one.

Awesome stuff!

Networking must change if it's going to keep up with what businesses want to accomplish. Imagine networks that support both lots of live streaming video as well as financial and healthcare transactions at the core. For video, if a network gets congested, the thing to do is drop frames at the source. There's no point in delivering voice or video data late. Meanwhile, the network never should drop packets of financial data. A smarter high-level policy might be to define separate paths through the network for the two different types of data. In regulated industries, network designers may want to set policies that make it impossible for certain types of data to hit various parts of the network, or ensure that security appliances always look at some flows of sensitive data. Simultaneously, and possibly separately, IT architects will want to create policies to ensure that certain essential services are highly available and protected with a disaster recovery plan.

Now available for free in HTML5.

Great work from Roger!

This includes a nice little write-up on AWD.

A great round-up from @dstorey.

Zoe rounds up some great screencasts of ARIA usage (including 2 of mine).

Some great thinking here, showing refactoring code for efficiency and portability.

Very cool stuff!

An amazing tribute to Kelly from Steph Toeth.

Awesome presentation from @Brad_Frost!

Wow. Amazing work Simon!

Wow. Congrats @veen, et al!

A really interesting piece from Gilad Avidan at Fireplace.

Web Intents is a framework for client-side service discovery and inter-application communication. Services register their intention to be able to handle an action on the user's behalf. Applications request to start an Action of a certain verb (share, edit, view, pick etc.) and the system will find the appropriate Services for the user to use based on the user's preference.

Web Intents puts the user in control of service integrations and makes the developer's life simple.

The reality of life in America.

A nifty fluid grid that maintains a list of links in equally-sized squares.

An amazingly thorough survey of responsive image techniques. Thank you Jason!

A little background on responsive images and why we need them.

An interesting essay on a very interesting language.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of HTML5 outlines.

Thank you Rachel for breaking this all down for us!

@lukew’s notes from Michael Atherton’s talk at EuroIA

A nice jQuery plugin for helping protect the privacy of your users.

When writing of the hypnotic spiral demo the issue appeared that I wanted to use CSS animation when possible but have a fallback to rotate an element. As I didn’t want to rely on CSS animation I also considered it pointless to write it by hand but instead create it with JavaScript when the browser supports it. Here’s how that is done.

@brucel on the HTML5-Accessibility relationship.

Benjamin Bojko and Dan Mall on their work for ActivateDrinks.com

Yup. That takes some patience.

Wow. Just wow.

It’s become a mantra on Capitol Hill and a rallying cry for industry groups: Get rid of the job-killing regulations. In recent days, with nearly every one of the GOP presidential candidates repeating that refrain, the political echo chamber has grown even louder. Earlier this month, President Obama also asked the Environmental Protection Agency to back off more stringent ozone regulations, citing the "importance of reducing regulatory burdens" during trying economic times.

But is the claim that regulation kills jobs true?

@lukew’s write-up of @scottjehl’s talk from BDConf

Clever: using JavaScript to inject user agent info into data attributes for direct targeting of specific browsers & platforms. Of course, it relies on JavaScript.

Grab an image of Windows 8 so you can see the latest IE10 developments (before they get ported back to Windows 7).

At yesterday's UpdateConf, Jeremy Keith noted that his favourite application on iOS was the browser. He's a proponant of an idea called the 'One Web', which @addyosmani discusses in further detail here.

How brutal has the recession been to U.S. households? Americans are earning even less than they did 13 years ago. That’s according to new Census data released Tuesday, which found that real median income fell to $49,445 in 2010, the lowest number since 1997, and the largest decline in income in a single year of any recession since at least 1967.

Covers iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, iPad and other mobile devices.

An awesome post by Chris Palmieri.

An awesome chart from Mother Jones. Is the “Ma Bell” for banks far behind?

I agree that Google could (in fact) fork the development community.
Could be tumultuous times ahead…

A short file about Swindon-based record collectors. It’s an addiction I've been trying to ween myself off of, but it keeps calling me…

LukeW on the choice to offer separate mobile & desktop web pages on Bagcheck. Personally, I think there is a middle ground.

This sounds incredible!