on the whole I really dislike Clients from Hell, because as much fun as it must be to bash on people that you feel are below you, it puts the blame in the wrong place. It’s not their fault that they’re not as smart as you about things related to the Interwebs; it’s your fault for not treating them with the respect they deserve. Either by not hiring them in the first place, or by realizing that part of your job is to help make them better. They’re your clients. If they’re not treating you well or they’re not smart enough for you, that’s your fault...not theirs.

As far as company blogs go, @Typekit's is exemplary. Came across their contribution guidelines today. This is progress!

Moral of the story: putting similar cool things together without something to say makes them boring.

Starkers is a bare-bones WordPress theme created to act as a starting point for the theme designer.

Free of all style, presentational elements, and non-semantic markup, Starkers is the perfect ‘blank slate’ for your projects, as it’s a stripped-back version of the ‘Twenty Ten’ theme that ships with WordPress.

The Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) is an O'Reilly experiment that tries to bridge the gap between private manuscripts and public blogs. Following on the let-them-comment-on-everything model established by the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others), OFPS allows readers to read in-progress O'Reilly manuscripts, communicate suggestions with the authors, follow others' comments, and directly participate in the development of new books.

Manuscripts developed with OFPS sites allow the authors to publish the in-progress work as whenever they think it's ready for public comment and then update the site with new versions as the text is improved. Authors note sections of the text that they'd like comments on (potentially down to an individual paragraph) and that allows readers on the site to comment on that particular section.

Publish quickly, edit at leisure, make the first version coherent.

Day One encourages writing through quick Menu Bar entry, a Reminder system and inspirational messages.Support for Dropbox allows easy backup and syncing with the Day One iPhone application.

Like this mission statement:
"An idea can be bound between covers, bound by convention, or bound for the dustbin of history. The ideas of Cato Unbound, we hope, are none of these.

Cato Unbound is a state-of-the-art virtual trading floor in the intellectual marketplace, specializing in the exchange of big ideas. To be sure, there is no shortage these days of online forums for hashing out the issues of the day. All too often, however, the advantages of instant analysis and communication are compromised by obsession with the trivial and ephemeral. Here at Cato Unbound we try to step back, take a deep breath, and focus on the larger picture.

Each month, Cato Unbound will present an essay on a big-picture topic by one of the world’s leading thinkers. The ideas in that essay will then be tested by the comments and criticism of equally eminent thinkers, each of whom will respond to the month’s lead essay and then to one another. The idea is to create a hub for wide-ranging, open-ended conversation, where ideas will be advanced, challenged, and refined in public view.

But the discussion only begins at Cato Unbound. It ends, if it ends at all, with you. Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes, and enter into the conversation on their own websites, blogs, and even in good old-fashioned bound publications. Trackbacks will be enabled. Cato Unbound will scour the web for the best commentary on our monthly topic, and, with permission, may publish it alongside our invited contributors. We also welcome your letters. (Send them to JKuznicki@cato.org.)

“Protection . . . against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough,” wrote John Stuart Mill; “there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.” Here at Cato Unbound, we aim to do our part.

Welcome. All you have to lose are your preconceptions!"

Open source archive software!

Create complex narratives and share rich collections, adhering to Dublin Core standards with Omeka on your server, designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts.

From the wonderful FAQ on UbuWeb

Quaquaversal:

Q: When did UbuWeb Start?
A: UbuWeb was founded in November of 1996, initially as a repository for visual, concrete and, later, sound poetry. Over the years, UbuWeb has embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.

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There is no giftshop:

Q: How do I purchase something from your site?
A: You can't. Nothing is for sale on UbuWeb. It's all free. We know it's a hard idea to get used to, but there's no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum.

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Stance on copyright:

Q: What is your policy concerning posting copyrighted material?
A: If it's out of print, we feel it's fair game. Or if something is in print, yet absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure, we'll take a chance on it. But if it's in print and available to all, we won't touch it. The last thing we'd want to do is to take the meager amount of money out of the pockets of those releasing generally poorly-selling materials of the avant-garde. UbuWeb functions as a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, transferred digitally to the web. Our scanning, say, an historical concrete poem in no way detracts from the physical value of that object in the real world; in fact, it probably enhances it. Either way, we don't care: Ebay is full of wonderful physical artifacts, most of them worth a lot of money.

Should something return to print, we will remove it from our site immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from existing artists on site.

Let's face it, if we had to get permission from everyone on UbuWeb, there would be no UbuWeb.

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We're not here for that:

Q: How do I download MP3s?
A: There are thousands of resources on the web to learn how to do this. That's not what we're here for.

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An archive not a blog:

Q: Why isn't new content posted every day?
A: UbuWeb is an archive, not a blog. It has accumulated slowly and steadily and shall continue to far into the future.

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As if to say, "you come to us:"

Q: I'd like to receive notices of UbuWeb updates. How do I do this?
A: UbuWeb refuses to advertise or promote itself. Most of all, we detest the idea of filling inboxes with more unwanted material. A few times a year, we post our updates to select mailing lists; that's what they're for, aren't they? For UbuWeb updates, best to just keep checking back on the homepage, where notices of all new content appears.

When I first started blogging, I told myself it was ok to post half-formed thoughts; a blog was ephemeral, reactive—the medium cared not so much about completeness as about timeliness. I still believe that to be true, but with one important modification: it’s not that a blog post has permission to be rough so much as that roughness is its natural state. Meaning, blogging encourages exploration and experimentation. In this way, blogging is the kind of writing authors have done for centuries but which usually remained hidden away.
On the contrary, a book is the culmination of this writing: it’s what emerges after years of scratching around the same topic, when all the little pieces start to come together. Where the blog suggests paths, the book draws conclusions. Neither is superior to the other; rather, they represent different modes of writing—the first expansive, the latter convergent. Each mode suggests and learns from the other. And this is why, even if the form of the book perishes, the writing therein may survive—even if it happens on a blog.