OLDaily

Blockbench: a framework for analyzing private blockchains
Adrian Coyler, The Morning Paper, 2017/07/05

This is a daunting post, and the article it summarizes is more daunting still. But don't worry about following all of it. Here are the main things. First, in addition to 'public' blockchain networks, like Bitcoin, there can be 'private' blockchain networks, used (for example) for internal recordkeeping. Blockchain's immutability and transparency make it attractive for this purpose. Second, in non-public settings, you don't need such an elaborate mechanism for adding a block to the bockchain. In public settings, you use something called Proof of Work (PoW), but this "consumes a lot of energy and computing power, as nodes spend their CPU cycles solving puzzles instead of doing otherwise useful work." As a result, third, "Applications for security trading and settlement, asset and finance management, banking and insurance are being built and evaluated." There's also some exposition of the different levels of a blockchain ecosystem.

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Gitter Webapp
GitLab, 2017/07/05

This is the open-sourced code for a service called Gitter. "Gitter is a community for software developers. This project is the main monolith web application." When I had nothing but time I used to study software like this line by line to figure out how the web works. But I have to say, simple discussion boards have become a lot more complex (we have foundation-level functions to write, but many more capabilities have been added).

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A Compilation of the Best Content Creation Strategies from 41 Experts
Christopher Jan Benitez, The Blog Herald, 2017/07/05

This post will either inspire you or make you sad. It made me sad. For the most part these arfe people not creating content because the content needs to be created, but rather, in order to create traffic, create backlinks, or generate sales leads. One person even uses a blog title generator in order to come up with things to post. Another uses We use SEMRush "to help us look for low hanging SEO keyword opportunities." It's all about the hustle. That's what the internet is these days: all about the hustle.

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KineMan
2017/07/05

KineMan is a lovely web-based 3D simulation of a human skeleton. View KineMan from any angle, and manipulate any of the many joints in this body. "You’ll observe biomechanically-realistic behaviors, owing to movement parameters (like ranges of motion) derived from scientific sources." Is it wrong that when I see such a useful animation all I can think of is how this would make great material for videos or animated gifs?

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Making the Web More Human
Creative Commons, Medium, 2017/07/05

Ths article and the associated Creative Commons project address “the abstraction problem.” This problem describes the tendency of digital interaction to depersonalize communications. It's why it's easier for some to say things by email than in person. So Creative Commons is asking, "What can platforms do to make interactions within their communities more human?" So we read a bit from latform representatives talking about how their platform makes the web more human. Creative Commons would do better, I think, to talk to users rather than platform owners.

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The Structure of an Elm Application
James Kolce, CSS-Tricks, 2017/07/05

We habve a number of Javascript and CSS frameworks - JQuery, Angular, Vue, Node, Less, Bootstrap, React - so the case has to be pretty good for adding another one. Though that said, as HTML changes, and as modern HTML is implemented on browsers, the need for various frameworks changes. And each of these does a different thing: one specializes in document manipulation, another creates user interface designs, etc. It's a constantly moving target (disclosure: I am currently working with JQuery and have dropped Bootstrap, which makes me an old fuddy-duddy using 3-year-old technology). Anyhow, this article describes a relatibvely new entrant called Elm in three parts (Part One, Part Two, Part Three). Elm is a bit different in that it is a functional programming language based on static types with output that compiles into HTML, CSS and Javascript. It also promises "a sane package manager" (which would indeed make it unique).

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