Substantial, excellent talk by Vimeo developer Jon Rohan on steps Github took to dramatically improve their CSS performance site wide. One thing Jon stresses that I’ve found has a huge impact is just the sheer number of HTML elements on screen. People spend so much time optimizing their Javascript and CSS selectors, when sometimes the root problem is just having way too many divs.
Jason gives a nice talk here regarding how and when to say ‘no’ to clients. The content is simplistic but given through the lens of the speaker’s diverse experiences it says a lot.
The always dependable Karina Longworth outdoes herself on this extended Village Voice piece. Before it closed, its gigantic collection VHS taps and DVDs shipped overseas, Kim’s Video was a fixture of the NY film scene. Before torrents went mainstream, these guys had basically everything you wanted, especially for cult and foreign film selections. I remember hearing about the now famous South Korean film Oldboy playing over at Cannes…and two days later spotting it on the shelf under new releases at Kim’s (some clever attendant got a universal DVD overseas.)
Now that I’m teaching a front end web development class over at General Assembly, I’ve been researching HTML and CSS tutorial sites to get ideas for class. Most are pretty bad, but Don’t Fear the Internet stood out. Lots of really simple, well done videos to get web newbies on the right track. Love their intro:
Are you a print designer, photographer, fine-artist, or general creative person? Do you have a shitty website that you slapped together yourself in Dreamweaver in that ONE web design class that you took in college? Do you not have a site at all because you’ve been waiting two years for your cousin to put it together for you? Well, we’re here to help.
Wonderful Press Play video essay that breaks down the brilliance of Quintin Tarantino’s first feature, Reservoir Dogs. We’re now twenty years past that influential release, but having revisited the film fairly recently, it’s still as shocking and strong a film as a I remember first watching it back in the late 90s.
I’m very, very late to the party on this one, but this is a great jQuery plugin from CSS guru Chris Coyier and the web design shop Paravel. If you dig fluid width video embeds – something becoming fairly essential with modern responsive design – it’s worth giving this plugin a look. I recently incorporated FitVids.js into an experimental Tumblr theme I’m working on as a side project. Worked great and implementation was straightforward.
I started listening to the excellent Battleship Pretension film podcast a few months ago. Hosts Tyler Smith and David Bax are really solid and go deep on movies in a way I rarely see elsewhere. They’ve now expanded their reach to videos as well over at Youtube. Nice discussion topics here averaging no more than ten minutes along with good production values.
The Denzel Washington as Malcom X and Anna Paquin in the club are my favorites of this set.
A three part documentary testing the latest crop of high end digital video cameras. 12 cameras are tested head to head, from the expensive Red One M-X (getting increasingly popular on the indie film circuit) to the well known Canon 5D Mark II and Nikon D7000 DSLRs.
It’s rather technical, but if you want to see where the film and camera industry is moving, this is a good start.
When you see a free, 50 minute set of Vimeo essays on The Wire popup online, it’s pretty much a no brainer.