“Side Two” LP in progress. At 14 songs, it is nearly complete. I expect to release it before the year’s end. The post Another Saturday, Another Song. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

I. In the early 2000s, an old friend with a new business wanted me to design his website, but his partner balked: “I can get two websites made in India for half the price,” the partner said. “Sounds like you should do that,” I replied, ending the negotiation. Rude fools were not clients I chose to pursue. The rude, cheap partner was later part of the self-selected posse of suck-ups and hangers-on who advised Elon M*sk on his invasion purchase of Twitter. It was the rude, cheap partner’s idea to strip Twitter users of note of their blue verification badges and sell meaningless blue verification badges to anybody willing to pay $8/month for the privilege. So, no blue verification mark or algorithmic support for the tweets of Stephen King, but blue “verification” and an algorithmic boost for Joey Knuckles, First of His Mother’s Basement. M*sk must have dug the idea, because he implemented it immediately—proving, as if we weren’t already drowning in evidence, that people with bad taste run in packs. The instant my old friend told me his former partner was responsible for the “pay for blue marks that mean nothing” plan, I recalled our abortive design negotiation from years before and was like, Yup, that tracks. At the time of the initial conversation, I believed most people involved in the creation of websites were motivated by altruism, aesthetics, and the desire to create a fairer world. And of course many are. Many, but far from all. I did not see how quickly fascism was infiltrating our trade. Perhaps infiltrating is the wrong word. Perhaps there had always been a Dark Side. II. In the 2010s, I co-founded a traveling web design conference with Eric Meyer, an internationally respected CSS expert, author, and lecturer, and founding member of The Web Standards Project’s CSS Samurai. Together, we crafted a single-track, holistic web design conference peopled by charismatic speakers who had made major contributions to the industry. Our events sold out immediately, without advertising. One night when our event was playing in a U.S. city, we held a party for attendees, and I invited a friend who lived in that town to join as our guest. I had known this man since his early 20s, and watched him grow into an industry-leading design consultant who was just then transitioning his business from a services to a product company. As his plus-one, he brought a young partner. The young partner did not know from Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, any of our speakers, or any of the community projects to which we (including our speakers) devoted so much of our work and time. His first and only words to me were “Who are you?” He didn’t add a popular expletive to the question, but it was implied. As I began to answer his question, I watched his eyes wander. He was clearly scouting for somebody cooler to talk to. So I smiled, stopped talking, and, with a wave, invited him to sample the buffet and drinks. If he’d noticed that I’d stopped talking before finishing, it didn’t bother him. Off he ran. I am still friends with the man I’d invited to the party, although we haven’t spoken for a few years (from lack of opportunity, not lack of interest), and I have watched with happiness over the years as he has moved from success to success. Alas, he is still partners with the punk who came to our party to paint the roses black, and the punk has become even more famous (and more of a cult figure) than my friend. That’s fine, except that the punk has since blossomed into a fascist and racist with money and power; his latest project, although it comes cloaked in tech, is about removing brown people from Europe, I kid you not. I’m not saying every rude and entitled young man in tech grows up to be a fascist, but politeness or lack of it is a signifier, and maybe if you take an instant dislike to someone who acts like a jerk, you should trust that instinct. The post Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

WordPress.com maker Automattic is expanding into education with a new, free product designed for teachers and their classes called WordPress.com Education. The suite for classrooms includes a full WordPress.com domain for each student, plus free domain names (on the .blog or .art domains) and plug-in support. Teachers can provide students with access to the program for free for the first year, without having to put a credit card down or enter a trial. This allows teachers to use the technology in courses that teach students how to build websites, or for other classroom needs such as group projects that incorporate website-building. Unveiling the product at its annual WordCamp US conference on Monday, the company noted that the new Student plan isn’t a stripped-down version of its product. It includes 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support for plugins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. — TechCrunch: WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan The post For students who make websites appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

SNOW WHITE is my jailer. She reclines near me while I work, watching closely for the moment I stand up. The instant I leave my desk, she directs me to her feeding area so I can open another can of cat food and arrange its contents neatly on a plate. She’ll eat a few bites, then walk away and resume her post by my desk. She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance. The uneaten remainder dries out on the floor; two hours from now, I’ll throw it away and open a new can with a different flavor. I’m vegetarian because I love animals. But as Snow White’s feeder, I’m responsible for the useless deaths of countless chickens, cows, and fish whose pulverized remains I’ve offered to Snow White and she has nibbled, then ostentatiously wasted, to prove to me over and over which one of us is in control. The post She’s the Boss. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.