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Showing posts from November, 2014

Mobile-friendly web pages

Google has announced that they are marking web pages as “mobile-friendly” in their search results . I was initially worried about this, because many websites have mobile-specific versions that are worse than their desktop versions on mobile devices. I also don’t like being auto-forwarded to mobile locations (e.g. from www.example.com to m.example.com ), because it prevents URLs from being universal. However, Google’s criteria for mobile-friendliness are reasonable: Pages must… Avoid software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash Use text that is readable without zooming Size content to the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or zoom Place links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped Google’s blog post gives tips for ensuring that your page is recognized as mobile-friendly. It seems like a similar approach could be used for checking whether pages are accessible.

The 50 Year Argument

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Editor Robert B. Silvers in the offices of The New York Review of Books For more than fifty years now, The New York Review of Books has had its finger on the zeitgeist of American letters publishing every two weeks to a circulation of 135,000 subscribers.   On the occasion of its fiftieth year, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi have put together a riveting documentary entitled, The 50 Year Argument (HBO, 2014) about the life of this enterprise and the editors, writers, and artists who contribute to its pages.   Robert B. Silvers , the journal’s long-serving editor, describes how he edits his writers as well as his method for deciding what are the most important and interesting books of the season.   At one point in the film, Silvers reads from the review’s first and only editorial :   “ The New York Review of Books does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones.   Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books...