News aggregators

Google's controversial decision to shut down Google Reader on July 1st has left its users searching for a new news-collecting homeland, and we now have an idea of the scale of the RSS diaspora. Feedly has announced that more than half a million Google Reader users have signed up for its RSS service following Google's service termination announcement on Wednesday. Feedly also says it's working to keep up with its growth, increasing bandwidth by 10 times and adding new servers. Moving forward, the developers say its main priorities over the next 30 days are to keep the service running, to solicit suggestions from new users, and to add new features on a weekly basis.

The Google Reader shutdown will force users and developers of third-party...

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Google's sudden decision to sunset Reader — perhaps the best-known RSS reader ever made — has been met with swift reaction from high-profile users across the web. Here's a sampling of people asking to save an RSS service on Google... all coming from the service that probably helped kill it in the first place: Twitter.

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Windows 8 will arrive in consumers’ hands later this week and with it will come the first official release of Internet Explorer 10.

It used to be that a new version of IE meant a new set of headaches for developers, but thankfully that’s no longer the case. In fact, when it comes to web standards support IE 10 stacks up pretty well against the competition.

IE 10 adds support for nearly a dozen new HTML5 APIs like Web Sockets, Web Workers, the History API, the Drag and Drop API and the File API. You can look over a complete list on Microsoft’s IE 10 Guide for Developers. There’s plenty of CSS support in this release as well; Animations, Transitions and Transforms are among the many new CSS tools. IE 10 also has experimental support for next-gen layout tools like CSS Grid Layout, CSS Multi-column Layout and CSS Regions.

For all that is good in IE 10 there are a couple of gotchas web developers should be aware of.

One is that, while IE 10 supports CSS Flexible Box Layout, it appears to support the older, now non-standard version of Flexbox (the documenation still uses the old syntax). Hopefully Microsoft will fix this with an update, but for the time being only Chrome and Opera have implemented the updated Flexbox syntax.

The other quirk of IE 10 is related to how the browser behaves on Windows 8 tablets. There are two “modes” in Windows 8, the classic desktop and the Metro UI. When IE 10 runs in Metro mode (which is the default) there’s a feature that allows you to “snap” a window to the side of the screen so you can have a browser window open alongside other applications. It’s a nice feature for users, but it has one quirk developer should be aware of — when snapped, IE10 ignores the meta viewport tag for any viewport smaller than 400 pixels in width. That means that your responsive layouts for smaller screens won’t trigger in snapped mode and your site will be scaled instead. Luckily there’s a fix. In fact developer Tim Kadlec has two solutions, one that uses pixels and one that does not. See Kadlec’s blog for full details.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft is supporting the @viewport declaration rather than the viewport meta tag (IE 10 uses the prefix: @-ms-viewport). While the viewport meta tag is more widely supported (and used), it’s not currently part of any W3C spec, draft or otherwise. For more on @viewport, see the Opera developer blog. (Opera is currently the only other browser supporting @viewport.)

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About three years ago, I shared 37 data-ish blogs you should know about, but a lot has changed since then. Some blogs are no longer in commission, and lots of new blogs have sprung up (and died).

Today, I went through my feed reader again, and here's what came up. Coincidentally, 37 blogs came up again. (Update: added two I forgot, so 39 now.) I'm subscribed to a lot more than this since I don't unsubscribe to dried up feeds. But this list is restricted to blogs that have updated in the past two months and are at least four months old.

Design and Aesthetics

• information aesthetics — By Andrew Vande Moere, the first blog I found on visualization five something years ago.
• Well-formed data — Another one of the oldies but goodies. The blog of Moritz Stefaner, known for lots of projects around these parts
• blprnt.blg — Blog of Jer Thorp, who has recently been on a github binge. See also blprnt.tmblr
• Fathom — Ben Fry-run studio talks about interesting things
• feltron — Nicholas Felton's tumblr with quick bits of delight
• Tulp Inspiration — Another tumblr, this one run by Jan Willem Tulp

Statistical and Analytical Visualization

• Eager Eyes — I think the second blog I found on visualization. Written by Robert Kosara, research-focused
• Junk Charts — Kaiser Fung finds the not-so-good and explains how to improve them. See also sister blog Numbers Rule Your World
• Visual Business Inteliigence — Stephen Few's business-centric musings
• Visualising Data — Relatively newer
• Data Pointed — Weird and cooky, in a good way
• Effective Graphs — Fundamentals of graph-making
• Jim Vallandingham — Releases good code sometimes
• Excel Charts — Despite the name, provides some useful information for beginners
• Statistical Graphics and more — Through the eyes of a statistician

Journalism

• The Daily Viz — By Matt Stiles, data journalist at NPR
• chartsnthings — Kevin Quealy of The New York Times talks process
• Infographics news — Highlights news graphics
• Matthew Ericson — Deputy graphics director at The New York Times

General Visualization

• Neoformix — Features a variety of his projects
• Datavisualization.ch — Different visualization work, but lately on process of client work
• Periscopic — Information visualization firm, do good with data
• vis4 — Gregor Aisch produces a mix of work
• Chart Porn — Mix of charts and graphs
• Communicating with data — Jerome Cukier from the OECD

Maps

• Stamen — Map-focused design and technology studio, sometimes open source releases
• Cartastrophe — Daniel Huffman talks good maps
• Floatingsheep — Geography hodge podge
• indiemaps — Usually on the how of maps
• Kelso's Corner — Nathaniel Kelso, cartographer at Stamen
• tecznotes — Michal Migurski of Stamen gets into the nitty gritty of online map making
• The Marauding Carto-nerd — Kenneth Field, research cartographer

Data and Statistics

• Datablog — On The Guardian, poster of datasets and graphics
• Juice Analytics — Putting business data to action
• The Numbers Guy — Examines the way numbers are used
• Infochimps — Data supplier and hackers unite
• Civil Statistician — By Census Bureau statistician Jerzy Wieczorek
• Revolutions — Frequent statistics goodies
• Simply Statistics — The title says it all

That's what I read. Your turn.