Growing up, I was a casual viewer of the various Star Trek series, but was never a huge fan. Sure, I had a passing familiarity with LeVar Burton’s character, Geordi La Forge, on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but to me he will always be the host of Reading Rainbow. And I’m no alone. Millions of late GenX-ers (like me) and young Millennials grew up watching and learning from his PBS show.
Dispatches From The Internets
LeVar Burton changes lives, one book at a time
“God” was a complicated man who did some revolutionary things
Before the January 28th episode of The Nod dropped, I’ll be honest, I had absolutely no idea who Father Divine—a Black man who claimed to be God—was. You should definitely listen to the episode—it’s fascinating—but I wanted to take a moment to share a few pieces of Father Divine’s story that really stuck out to me.
Shirley Chisholm was unbought and unbossed
I’ll start by admitting that Shirley Chisholm was not a woman I had much familiarity with growing up. Even though I spent a good portion of my youth in New York, my family (my mother especially) leaned heavily republican when it came to politics. Over the years, her name cropped up, but it wasn’t until Kelly became a recipient of Girls, Inc.’s “Unbought and Unbossed” award that I began to look into her history and appreciate the lasting impact of her life on this earth.
I’ve learned so much from Chenjerai Kumanyika
If you aren’t a podcast nerd like me, you may not be familiar with the name Chenjerai Kumanyika. My first introduction to his thoughtful and matter-of-fact approach to race relations, Black history, and more came when I started listening to the Uncivil podcast.
Why Oscar’s middle name is “Ellison”
I don’t remember the class or the year, but back in high school I remember being asked to choose one from a selection of books to read and write a report on. That was my first exposure to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and my first glimpse into the realities of racism as seen from the perspective of a Black man in America.
Online hate is a deadly threat. When will tech companies finally take it seriously?
I am 100% in favor of social media platforms taking a proactive stance against online harassment, bullying, threats, and the like. Sadly, few are doing much (if anything about it).
Tech companies also need to make their content moderation training materials publicly available so anti-hate advocates and the public can make sure the trainings accurately reflect what we need to feel safe on these platforms. Recent leaks of moderation materials have shown these documents to be woefully inadequate – one leak of a Facebook manual featured passages lifted straight from Wikipedia. When asked for comment by one media outlet, Facebook directed it to the “community standards” document the company released to the public. A $500 billion company such as Facebook should have higher standards than a college freshman rushing to finish a term paper.
Smart Bundling: How To Serve Legacy Code Only To Legacy Browsers
While this approach is total overkill for pretty much anything I build, if you have a lot of JavaScript, especially JavaScript that uses newer language features, you might consider taking an approach like this. IT ensures the broadest level of support for your app without penalizing more modern browsers by making them download polyfills and transpired code they don’t need.
Great work!
Be Better: Website Accessibility and Responsive Web Design
I recently asked a friend who happens to be blind if he’d share some sites that were built really well—sites that were beautifully accessible. You know what he said? “I don’t use the web. Everything is broken.”
Everything is broken. And it’s broken because we broke it.
We need to do better.
Hard Costs of Third-Party Scripts
Dave has an excellent round-up of considerations when looking at your reliance on 3rd party scripts (or any 3rd party resources, for that matter). Most are hidden and all have a serious effect on download performance, UI responsiveness, and, ultimately, user experience.
The Web is an undependable place, so this shouldn’t be very surprising.
The Importance of Heading Levels for Assistive Technology
This is an excellent overview of the importance of heading levels in HTML and how to wrangle them in your styles.