Jay Hoffmann
15 Years of WordPress
It was January of 2003, and 19 year old blogger and amateur programmer Matt Mullenweg was distraught. In a post on his blog titled The Blogging Software Dilemma, Mullenweg wrote: My logging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay. Mullenweg’s “logging software” was… Continue reading
A Short History of WaSP and Why Web Standards Matter
This article was originally published in CSS-Tricks. In August of 2013, Aaron Gustafson posted to the WaSP blog. He had a bittersweet message for a community that he had helped lead: Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal… Continue reading
Almost (Standards) Doesn’t Count
In 2008, the team at Microsoft found themselves in quite the pickle. Let me back up. In 2002, the team at Mozilla found themselves in quite the pickle. Mozilla was the team inside of Netscape that had been spun out as a non-profit to work on Netscape’s browser. Netscape was, in turn, acquired by AOL… Continue reading
The Day(s) The Web Fought Back
February 1, 1996 was an absolutely terrible day for Shabbir J. Safdar. Safdar believed deeply in the open web, so much so that he started the non-profit organization Voter Telecommunications Watch (VTW) so that he could help protect it. That day, the first of February, the United States Congress decided to dismantle a part of… Continue reading
The (Mostly) Complete History of Layout on the Web and Responsive Design
The web, as a visual and interactive medium, is still pretty new. Designing for the web has always meant striking a balance between influence from other mediums like print and brand new attitudes. The most revolutionary techniques in web design managed to find that balance, and pushed the web forward in leaps and bounds. Little… Continue reading
Plagued by Ads
Here’s a message from the creator of the first-ever pop-up ad: It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble. It was my intention to take a look at the history of ads to see how we ended up in… Continue reading
How Dreamweaver Got Its Name
When Kevin Lynch started going around and talking to web designers, he wrote everything down. He was interested in the hurdles that designers and developers had to overcome, but he was particularly drawn to what they envisioned as the perfect web editing tool. What features, specifically, were they looking for? After a few months of collecting data,… Continue reading
An Ode to Geocities
Geocities is likely a site you’ve heard of. It may even have been a site that you used. It’s origin, and the movement it later inspired, is an incredible story of self-expression and serendipity. Continue reading
What Happens When Yahoo Acquires You
I could have titled this “A Tale of Two Acquisitions,” but I already used that one. Still, we’re going to take a look at two hugely successful platforms that rapidly rose to the top of their game, only to come crashing back down after their acquisition. An acquisition, I might add, by the same company.… Continue reading
A Look Back at the History of CSS
When you think of HTML and CSS, you probably imagine them as a package deal. But for years after Tim Berners-Lee first created the World Wide Web in 1989, there was no such thing as CSS. The original plan for the web offered no way to style a website at all. There’s a now-infamous post… Continue reading
Archiving the Web
Archiving the web is an important mission and the resources it requires is immense. It is thanks to a select few that it gets done at all. Continue reading
The Power of the Pixel
A lot can be done with each pixel on a website, but only a few people have tried creating websites one pixel at a time. Continue reading
