July 2012
22 posts
1 tag
Kara Rota
Kara Rota is Director of Editorial & Partnerships for Cookstr, a technology company dedicated to recipes and nutrition and co-founded by Tipping Point Partners, a New York City-based “institutional entrepreneur.” She is also a freelance food writer who studied writing and food politics at Sarah Lawrence College, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on technoethics, posthumanism,...
5 tags
Progressive Enhancement
Progressive enhancement is the practice of making websites fancier if your computer or phone can handle it, and making ‘em less fancy if it can’t!
We techies take for granted that we update our browsers, computers, and phones almost as frequently as we change our underwear. But for many people in the world, a computer they bought three years ago and a web browser they updated two years ago feel...
1 tag
In honor of Sally Ride: Never limit yourself!
“Never limit yourself because of othersâ limited imagination;
never limit others because of your own limited imagination.”
- Mae Jemison, Astronaut
Today we celebrate two people: Astronaut Sally Ride and you.
Yesterday we were saddened to learn that Sally Ride had died after a long fight with cancer.
In 1983, Sally Ride broke a major barrier in becoming the first American...
daniel sinker: OpenNews: Why Develop in the... →
sinker:
As the deadline to apply to become a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow approaches, there’s one question often comes up: Why would I want to work as a developer in the newsroom?
There are all sorts of reasons—from being in the room when news breaks, to working with a community of people creating…
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jQuery
jQuery is a library of preset JavaScript tasks that makes it easy and fast to make your site interactive and fun.
JavaScript is a web programming language that allows you to make your website interactive. Do you want to put a photo slideshow on your website? How about a pop-up that invites users to sign up for your newsletter? What about putting an ad on your blog? Yep, you are gonna have to use...
6 tags
Tracking Pixel
Tracking pixels are little 1x1 pixel images that allow you to keep track of how many users visit your website or see your advertisement.
Look, here is a tracking pixel for you to see:
Ooooh! Isn’t she just the cutest little tracking pixel you have ever seen?!
When you open this email and read about tracking pixels, one of the ways that we will know that you did so is that you will ask our...
1 tag
Marissa Mayer for President
We, at Skillcrush, salute the inimitable Marissa Mayer as she takes on her new role as CEO of Yahoo! We canât think of a better, more fierce, and overall awesome lady to take hold of the reins. She not only has some serious experience in engineering and operations; but also excels at design and product, and has deep domain expertise in location based services and mobile. All skills that make her...
9 tags
FTP & SFTP
FTP & SFTP are two common ways to put your website files on a web server so that they can be accessed via the internet.
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and SFTP stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol. The only difference is that the secure one encrypts your files, username and password for greater security. If possible, we recommend that you use SFTP.
You can use FTP & SFTP for...
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Instinct
Today we are debuting a new series we are calling Anatomy of an App. In this column, we plan to highlight sites that we love and interview the makers, hackers, and designers of these sites about their process. The goal is to help people more easily make the connection between a site’s functionality and the technology that was used to create that functionality.
Got any apps you would love...
6 tags
Node.js
Node.js is a JavaScript framework that makes it possible to use JavaScript for backend development.
Once upon a time we told you that there are frontend and backend languages and that JavaScript was a frontend programming language that does all of its work in the browser, right?
Well today we have a new thing to tell you: in the world of the web, things are always cha-cha-changing.
Everything...
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REST
REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer, is a set of guidelines for how to transmit information on the web in a way that can handle all of the trillions of variations in a clean, organized way.
By clearly defining what each piece of information on the web is, establishing a limited set of actions that can be taken, and dictating what technology can be used, REST creates a...
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Money, Money, Honey
The past few years have seen seismic shifts in the world’s economic system. Banks who presided over Wall Street for decades crumbled and blew away in the wind, economies known for decades of year-over-year growth ground to a halt, and the unemployment rate skyrocketed.
Turns out that there is nothing like economic upheaval to spur a bunch of money-savvy entrepreneurs into action. Everyone knows...
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CPM, CPC, and CPA
CPM stands for cost-per-mille, mille being Latin for one thousand. In the land of online media, media companies charge advertisers for impressions, which are counted in 1000s.
Let’s say you want to charge $10 per 1000 impressions on your blog, that means that you will charge $10 for every 1000 people who see an advertisement. The way that online advertisers count impressions is by page views, so...
1 tag
Can women in tech have it all?
There has been a great deal of discussion around women and work in the aftermath of Anne Marie Slaughterâs piece for the Atlantic, Why Women Still Canât Have It All.
The article ignited a firestorm of discussion about the status of women in the workplace and given our focus on women and tech, we thought that it was time to weigh in on the idea of women in tech having it all.
Do women in tech...
9 tags
Python
To create a “Hello, World!” app using Python, all you need to write is:
print “Hello, World!”
Quite a bit more straightforward than some of these other examples, we think! Web applications like YouTube, Reddit, Dropbox, and Yelp are all powered by Python.
Pythoners, like Rubyists, believe in writing code that is simple, direct, and easy to understand, meaning that even people new to...
4 tags
API
When you visit a friend’s Facebook profile, it’s designed for a person to look at. Nice fonts, pretty images, plenty of links, lots of eye candy.
Computers are pretty bad at clicking around on websites and looking at images, though. As a result, they get a special way to interact with the site: an API.
An API lets computers and web sites talk to each other without all those links and...
“To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic...”
– Grace Hopper via About
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Admiral Grace Hopper visits David Letterman
Loving this vintage video of Admiral Grace Hopper, the feisty grandmama of ALL women in tech, AKA Queen of Software, giving it to David Lettermen.
“A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. That didn’t make any sense to me! So I called up Engineering and I said, I need you to cut me off one of those nanoseconds and send it on over here.”
Who said women in tech aren’t...
2 tags
Web Server
When you visit Amazon.com or do a Google search, 3 things happen:
Your browser sends out a request for a web page
A web server receives your request and puts together the right parts
The web server sends you back a web page
It’s a lot like ordering a pizza. You call in, they make it, and then deliver it right back to you.
Most any computer can be a web server - even your own computer....
3 tags
IP Address
Every time you visit a site on the internet, your computer is asking another computer for the web page. How does that other computer get the web page back to you? It sends it right to your IP address.
We’ve all seen those WARNING YOU ARE BROADCASTING YOUR IP popups. They’re pretty goofy scams; of course you’re giving out your IP address, you need those web pages to get sent back...
“If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?”
– Rumi
Rumi was a 13th Century Sufi Mystic, via The Daily Love
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Semantic Web
If I tell you my name is Sammy and that I like to write about technology, you’ll understand. But when a computer stumbles onto “My name is Sammy, and I like to write about technology” it doesn’t know what to think. Most of the Web, according to computers, is a bunch of indistinguishable gibberish. All they can do is present us with some files and text and leave us to make...
