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Moving to Tokyo!
In July last year the FT was acquired by Nikkei, the largest business news publisher in Japan. Several FT employees are temporarily relocating to Tokyo to share some knowledge with our new Japanese colleagues, and I’m extremely excited to be one of them.
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Helllllooo TAG
Last April I unsuccessfully ran for election to the W3C Technical Architecture Group, because I believed that the web standards community needed more outsiders’ voices. The web needs to evolve to support ever increasing diversity of use cases and developer skills, and as a basic necessity and enabler of modern life, its role goes beyond technology platforms. I didn’t win in April, but I tried again in the December 2015 election and today I am incredibly proud to be the newest member of the TAG.
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A better paywall ecosystem with content passes
Paywalled news sites like the FT typically allow search crawlers such as Googlebot to see premium content, but don’t want to allow everyone to see it for free otherwise we wouldn’t make any money. Search engines created first click free to demand a good experience for their users, but for lots of reasons, first click free sucks. Here’s a better solution.
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“Progressive apps” are a bag of carrots
The desire among those who like the web for it to do everything native apps can do has recently led to the idea of progressive apps, but I’m not convinced this does anything except further overload two terms that are already dangerously ambiguous.
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Crisis at Christmas
Over Christmas, I volunteered for Crisis at Christmas, a massive charity operation to feed and house homeless people in London over the Christmas period. It prompted predictably mixed feelings of guilt and pride, shame and satisfaction.
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Progressive enhancement for everyone
One of the key benefits ascribed to progressive enhancement is that your site works for everyone. That is almost true. But we need to be clear what we mean by “everyone”.