I love this story, about a guy who has saved several gigabytes of horrendous banner ads from the early 2000s: motherboard.vice.com/en_us/artic…

I’m sometimes asked if working in Film/TV detracts from my enjoyment of watching shows, b/c I’m aware of what’s going on behind the lens. I tell them that I often appreciate something more knowing the craft that went into it. E.g.: This is some real movie magic shit right here: t.co/7YqYOb9zmV

Thursday snack-time thought: Chunky peanut butter should clearly be cheaper than smooth since they did less work to make it.

🆒

But if you’re using an Amazon Aurora managed database its dead simple to spin up read replicas so your site doesn’t fall over because you have too many bloated SQL queries overwhelming your poor database. So that’s cool.

Cooool so long story short not only does your database need the proper character encoding but the thing talking to your database needs to ask for data using the same character set. I guess that is better than just outright failing…

Our site talking to the database: “Gimmie some of that sweet, sweet UTF8 characters…”
Database: “Ok here ya go, I left out those 4-byte characters for ya since you didn’t ask for them”
Website: **Emojis are displayed as ???**
The Rest of the Internet: “This site sucks”

Our database is set to UTF8mb4 which can handle storing 4-byte characters (aka emojis basically). But clients accessing the database can specify what character set they understand.

One of the most boring topics on earth is design systems.

Rebranding web rings as “the blogchain”. Looking for investors.

The worst is when you need to enter your password to allow a program to do something and then it pops up a confirmation dialog to let you know again.

How do you get design teams to adhere to a style guide? How do you know when to break it? I wrote about a simple solution we created at BuzzFeed:

medium.com/@cap/the-design-syste…

Finally, a Tumblr devoted to control panels.
control--panel.com/

I made a creature. I shall call him Fred.

digitalcultures.pl/hybridizer/me… #digitalcultures

It’s been a hell of a year at @spiritedmediaco, as we’ve launched membership, taken on consulting and platform work and intensified our focus on events. The result is a 70 percent decrease in monthly burn, and a far clearer view of the right path forward. medium.com/billy-penn/spirited-m…

@mattcampux

@round If you’re not benchmarking DNS performance from your own location because computer networks are hard and there is no one size fits all answer then you darn well should be grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

Does anyone even still listen to Pandora? twitter.com/SIRIUSXM/status/1044…

These shoes seem to have a lot in common with the adobe logos. soxy.com

(props @rieglerphoto)