Links from July 2011 (Phil Gyford’s website)

Nicky Wire on Lipstick Traces : The Thought Fox: A new introduction by Nicky Wire to a new edition of Greil Marcus's 'Lipstick Traces' which I owe another read. (via Alan Connor)

Spotibot.com - Generate Spotify Playlists powered by Lastfm!: Makes Spotify playlists based on the name of a music artist or your Last.fm favorites/recommendations.
Groovify your music tweets - Denoiser the better: Tweet a song and @groovify generates a Spotify or Grooveshark playlist based on it.
Django Authentication using an Email Address: I've read a lot of half-thought-through explanations for how to let users of a Django site log in with email address rather than username. This seems to be the only one that covers all the bases. Still, it shouldn't be this hard.

Carbonmade : Your online portfolio.: Quite fun looking, free portfolio websites.
The best intro book for any topic | BestIntroBook.com: Suggesting the best book to start learning about many topics. Needs more context and justification, but an interesting thing to browse. (via Kottke)
The Technium: Corporate Long-term-ism: "There is a strong anti-government attitude at loose in the world (not just in the US) that believes that government can only screw things up. And at the same time, a belief that corporations are the prime engines of all that is socially good."
The Online Photographer: What I Would Get If I Were Starting Now: I like this guide to how to start out in photography, particularly the bit about buying initial equipment and then not even looking at possible new kit for five years. Just do photography, don't shop.
‪The Grand Rapids LipDub (New World Record)‬‏ - YouTube: I've watched this through twice now. It's so happy-making and nicely done. (via Kottke)

Smithsonian Institution Archives - Digitization Standards for Images: The Smithsonian's rough guide for scanning and archiving photos. (via Digital Beyond)
Personal Archiving - Digital Preservation (Library of Congress): A rough guide for individuals who want to archive their digital photos, email, social media, etc. Doesn't mention file formats at all. Maybe that's not as important as doing this at all? (via Digital Beyond)

Pelme/django-compress - GitHub: Looks good: a tool for automatically (or only when asked) compressing and combining CSS and JavaScript files used on a Django project.

Are you listening, Steve Jobs? « BirdAbroad: Wow - almost entirely convincing fake Apple Stores in China. So convincing (unless you're a bit too obsessed with Apple's typography etc) even the employees think they work for Apple. (via Haddock)

Stewart Lee: What I really think about Michael McIntyre : Features 2011 : Chortle : The UK Comedy Guide: On, you know, all that stupid stuff. Very good. Also, it ends with a joke. (via Alan Connor)
Oslo attacks: Why did so many experts blame Islamic terrorists? - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine: I liked this, simply because of its description of the many varying angles of extremism and how the things they hate contrast and overlap. (Also Slate's automatic iPad web display is rather nice.) (via Great Dismal)

The End of the Open University As We Know It Â« The Thought Stash: Ugh, the OU is increasing its course fees by around 3.5 times. I only studied with them for a term but would have considered it again. Much. much less sure about that now. (via Preoccupations)
Backspace: Lovely blast from the past, the website of Backspace (a cybercafe on Clink Street, now a Starbucks) is still (or once again?) online, from 1997 by the looks of it. (via @cakemix)
Designing a big news site is about more than beauty » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Good thoughts on why designing news websites is hard. Maybe it's impossible with one design: too many competing stakeholders and use cases. (via Daring Fireball)
Redesigning And Re-Thinking The News | Drawar: More new stuff on redesigning news websites. This is all part of a good discussion, but it doesn't feel like we've moved on much. Yet. (via Daring Fireball)
Design View / Andy Rutledge - News Redux: For completeness, I might as well link to the post that started this flurry of digital news design posts, Andy Rutledge's attempt to redesign a page of the New York Times.
4 key pieces of audience engagement missing from Andy Rutledge’s news redux: Also, Martin Belam's good critique of Andy Rutledge's unofficial redesign of a New York Times page.

Chosen - a JavaScript plugin for jQuery and Prototype - makes select boxes better: That's a lovely, nicely done thing. (via Infovore)

A Billion Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Basic Human Decency (TechCrunch): Yes, good, read. Just because dotcom folks might be lovely, and their site may, on balance, be a good thing, they're still a business trying to raise as much money as possible, not a charity trying to make the world a better place.

Links from July 2011