Tag Archives: read

Brain Candy

As a front-end web developer, it’s my job to keep up on the latest web trends and technologies. It’s one of the reasons I love what I do: there’s a steady stream of new stuff to learn.

Way back in the day, I bookmarked web design & development resources, meticulously dragging sites into skill-specific bookmark folders (CSS, jQuery, Design, etc.), but that quickly became an unmanageable mess, and an impossible way to digest information.

Cue my obsessively curated reading lists in Google Reader. To date, I have 15 folders in my Reader, pulling in everything from fashion to science to web dev blog feeds.

My web folder is a one-stop shop for web resources and inspiration, and provides a breath of fresh air when I need a break from work, or a headful of brain candy.

Here are my favorite web design & development reads:

  • A List Apart
    Cross-disciplinary journal for web people
  • 456 Berea Street
    Great front-end development resource, including a lot of good standards and accessibility tips
  • Atomic Robot Design
    HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery tutorials, along with musings about technology
  • Code as Craft
    Process and tech posts by the ever-growing engineering team at Etsy
  • Codrops
    Web design & dev articles and tutorials about latest technologies
  • CSS Tricks
    HTML,CSS and jQuery tutorials, demos, musings by Chis Coyier
  • Denise Jacobs
    Writings about CSS and web standards by web designer Denise Jacobs
  • Elated
    Web design and development articles and tutorials
  • Inspect Element
    Web design and development blog with articles, tutorials, etc. by Tom Kenny
  • Lea Verou
    Tons of demos, explanations & musings about latest technologies by front-end rockstar Lea Verou
  • Line 25
    Tutorials, design freebies, design showcases
  • Little Big Details
    Users submit examples of creative and innovative UI and UX pieces across the Interwebs
  • NetTutsPlus
    Tutorials and articles on technologies, skills and techniques for developers: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails
  • Noupe
    Tutorials and showcases for designers and developers, everything from Photoshop to Ajax
  • One Extra Pixel
    Inspiration, design and development articles
  • Owltastic
    Meagan Fisher’s blog about life, design, and building web sites
  • Pattern Tap
    UI pattern library
  • Pattenry
    UI pattern library with useful explanations
  • Quirks Mode
    ppk’s blog is chock full of browser compatibility info: browser compatibility tables, CSS and JavaScript, W3C standards assessments
  • Six Revisions
    Tutorials, articles and freebies for designers and developers
  • Slash7
    Blog by Amy Hoy, coder and designer extraordinaire
  • Smashing Magazine
    Huge inventory of coding & UX tutorials and aricles, and design freebies, showcases, inspiration
  • Snook
    Web design and development tips, tricks, bookmarks and musings by Jonathon Snook.
  • Stephanie Hobson
    Posts about CSS, life stuff, and web stuff
  • Stubbornella
    Object-oriented CSS (OOCSS) – among other things – guru Nicole Sullivan’s blog

And look, I made you a bundle! You can subscribe to my favorite web reads! Do you have some faves I didn’t include here? Send them my way!

Winter Pages

Winter Reading

So excited – the rest of my winter reading arrived! Man, I love memoirs. And yeah, the ones I read tend toward the harrowing and tragic, but there is also resilience and hope. So there! :)

I read Lidia Yuknavitch’s amazing amazing amazing The Chronology of Water last week, but I read it on Dan’s Kindle. I needed to get my wrinkly hands on the real, tangible book so I can pore through the prose more easily and cozily. I have to say, even though I’m all for the convenience & immediacy e-book readers offer, I am a lover of art objects.

Nothing beats curling up on the couch with a book: leafing through its pages, the smell of the paper, the sound of the page curl, turning it over in your hands to study the cover and read about the author, the respite you reach with each new chapter – a white expanse with floating words – a moment to breathe, to contemplate the words you just read.

Maybe it’s akin to the difference between owning the print of a beautiful piece of artwork and owning the original. You can see the texture in a print, but you can’t feel it. You can’t smell the paint. You can’t see light react to it.

Sure, I’m never going to own a handwritten book by my favorite author. Or a typed version. Or an original manuscript file. But a book is an entity. A thing in the world. Pages of words you can hold in your hand. Pages you can flag with your thumb, pages with margins you can fill with your own handwritten notes. Pages you can flip to by memory, just by spending time with the weight of the book.

I’m romanticizing, I know… Anyways! Here’s my winter reading list:

Betsy Lam

Welcome to Magicalthinklet!

I'm Betsy. I paint, draw, write, build web sites, swoon over pretty things & rock climb. And I work at The Nerdery as a front-end web developer.

Find me on Society6, Facebook, Pinterest & Twitter. I'm also here but I haven't updated my little site in a bajillion years.

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