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Yesterday I stumbled across the wogrammer project by Erin Summers and Zainab Ghadiyali, which will hopefully seed the media—and our collective perception—with real images and stories of women in tech.
Check out their Instagram feed for more stellar photos. And for more odds and ends the ALA staff dug up on the internet this week, read on. —Lisa Maria Martin, issues editor
Your weekend reading
- In The Pastry Box this week, Eric Meyer reminds us: “In every heart, a secret calendar.” As more and more of our lives are recorded on the web, we have to build better, more human, tools that help us remember (and forget) our secret calendars on our own terms. —Marie Connelly, blog editor
- Luke Wroblewski adds another layer to the “fold or no fold” debate. What make this worth checking out is that he’s looking at the issue of the fold from a position of metrics and data, which provides a bit more context to the debate. —Erin Lynch, production manager
- Last week Mozilla announced that it is “setting a date after which all new features [in Firefox] will be available only to secure websites”—that is, those that use https instead of http. Mozilla’s heart is in the right place: it wants to minimize security threats to users and the web. But we wonder what impact this will have on sites that can’t, won’t, or don’t know to convert to https—especially if other browsers follow suit. A low barrier is what keeps the open web open. —Jeffrey Zeldman, founder and publisher
- Reverse OCR is Darius Kazemi’s ace record of what happens when a young bot tries to write words; “stunted chicken scratch” is pretty generous. Or, try your own hand at static bots—built in Google Sheets with no programming. Allison Parrish gives the rundown. Let’s make some toys. —Tina Lee, contributing editor
- “But no one really needs an Apple Watch!” Or do they? Deafblind advocate Molly Watts’s detailed account of her first five days with an Apple Watch will challenge your assumptions about why, how, and when people use all kinds of devices. —Sara Wachter-Boettcher, editor-in-chief
Overheard in ALA Slack
“It is all about ‘me’ for that generation. Unlike those other generations. Where individuals were primarily concerned with people named ‘Steve.’”
Your Friday gif
Fine post. Interesting to read.