The Notebook · Sidebar
The reading list
The studio's sidebar linked to twenty-one sites under “Resources.” Together they are a fair map of where a small web studio learned its trade in 2007.
- 37Signals — Basecamp's makers. Their Signal vs. Noise blog was required reading.
- 456 Berea St. — A long-running web standards and accessibility blog from Sweden.
- A List Apart — The web standards magazine. Still publishing.
- Aarron Walter — A designer who wrote about findability and, later, emotional design.
- Cameron Moll — Designer, author of Mobile Web Design (2007).
- CSS Import — A CSS gallery. The address now forwards to an unrelated site.
- CSS Remix — A CSS gallery of the period.
- DA Font — Free fonts, and still very much there.
- Devlounge — A design and development blog; the address no longer answers.
- Digg — The social news site, many times reinvented since.
- Digital Web Magazine — A web design magazine that stopped publishing in 2009.
- Jonathan Snook — CSS and JavaScript writing, from the same Ottawa address since the mid-2000s.
- Mootools — The JavaScript framework this site's sidebar ran on in 2007.
- Simple Bits — Dan Cederholm's studio, home of Bulletproof Web Design.
- SitePoint — Books, articles and forums for web developers.
- Tech Crunch — Startup news. The 2007 link was missing its http://, which is why it once pointed at a page on this domain.
- Textpattern — The CMS this site and its clients' sites ran on. Still maintained.
- Txpmag.com — A Textpattern community magazine that once featured the studio.
- Vitamin — Carsonified's web design magazine, long closed.
- W3C — The standards body. The 2007 link went to w3c.org.
- Web Standards Org. — The Web Standards Project, which wound down in 2013. Its site remains as an archive.
Why the list matters
Most of these were blogs by working designers and developers who published what they learned as they learned it. A two-person studio in South Carolina could keep up with the best practice in the field by reading them every morning, and the Notebook's posts on Firebug, MooTools, sIFR and feeds came straight out of that habit.
Several of the sites are still there. The habit is harder to find now, when the same people are more likely to post on a social platform than on a site of their own.