Links

Obviously the edges of these categories are a little fuzzy.

Editorial/political

• Wordiness is Jake Walsh Morrissey's weblog/photo album/general experiments site.
• Textism is why Jake Walsh Morrissey decided to make Wordiness.

Arty

• Han Hoogebrugge, creator of "Modern Living". A little angsty but very good with the sound and sparse design in Flash.
• Nobody Here: tons of little interactive Web vignettes strung together with random and deterministic links. "Bear" and "Superman" are some of my favourites.
• Flip Flop Flyin': Craig and FFF boy share their lives in prose and tiny little animated GIFs. Lots of user participation for the adventurous: previous activities have included "Colour-ins" and "Mums and Dads".
• EELS have been providing large chunks of soundtrack for my life for a while now, and their website is nicely put together with all the official band site stuff.

Technical

• TidBITS: news, tips and opinions on all things even vaguely Mac-ish.
• Ars Technica: more technically involved and much less Mac-centric than TidBITS.
• John McCarthy of the Formal Reasoning group at Stanford is part of the reason we have the LISP programming language today, and writes extensively on computing, formal logic and anything else he finds interesting (including the sustainability of human progress, ideologies he doesn't like [e.g. activist environmentalism] and things to put on the inventors' to-do lists).

Books

These are books I keep close by and refer to often. The links point to a listing on Amazon.ca for those of you who would like to take my recommendations. I do get referral credit from Amazon.ca if you decide to buy them from them (as an Associate of theirs) but I've been recommending them long before I knew it could help defray server costs! The bibliographic information should also be complete enough to make finding them locally in a library fairly simple.

Moock, Colin. ActionScript: the Definitive Guide. Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly and Associates, 2001.

This was the textbook in 2001-02 of COMS 490 and may well be this year as well. The content is pretty densely packed, but it's all presented in a logical order, from programming fundamentals to OOP. It starts from an assumption of zero programming knowledge but includes enough details that just aren't spelled out in the official documentation that it's also enlightening for people with Flash or other programming experience. In particular, it spells out quite a bit about parsing and how Flash stores all that dynamically-typed data, and prvoides return values for everything. There is a dictionary of methods and functions in the back that could easily replace Macromedia's (already pretty good) ActionScript reference.

Web authors!

Help make the Web faster, spiffier and more accessible --
validate your code!