1. Erin Jo Richey: This is relevant to my interests. "Share: the icon no one agrees on." https://bold.pixelapse.com/minming/share-the-icon-no-one-agrees-on

    @erinjo perhaps the difficulty in creating an effective icon stems from the fact that the physical metaphors associated with “share” do not map well to the online behaviour associated with the term, allowing the word to be used successfully but making giving it an image a challenge.

    My theory: the most basic usage of “share” generally refers to organising mutual access to some resource between pre-determined, consenting participants (he shared his food with him, she shared her connection with her coworkers, the schools shared a playing field). This holds for more abstract non-physical use of “share”, as in “she shared her story”, ”they shared a secret”.

    In some cases (e.g. private messaging [where the verb “message” or “send” would more often be used] or posting to a group) the “known participants” facet holds up, but not so much the pre-determination and/or mutual consent/awareness present in the physical examples — unless for example the context is an online group set up explicitly for the sharing of links to resources about a topic.

    In the common case of “sharing” as it’s characterised online (posting a short text post containing a link and optionally some comment, typically with a link preview, broadcast to a wide audience on a whim with no mutual pre-determination), not much of the original metaphor holds up, and I’d argue that “post” is a more suitable term (“publish” less so as its use connotes posting of a thought-out original work).

    None of this is backed up by actual data though — I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

  2. Turns out that performing a GET request on a data URI from PHP works if file_get_contents is used, not if cURL is used. I wonder what support is like for other server side languages — using data URIs in with could be the basis of some interesting .

  3. Kyle Weems: Trying out Twitter in the browser only. Because sooner or later that's all we'll have.

    cssquirrel I much prefer twitter in the browser because I can get rid of ads and promoted tweets, and customise the UI so I reply, retweet and favourite on my site instead. Pity I can't so easily on mobile — perhaps an ios app which is just a web view with some custom JS…