Didn't get much time for reading on the web yesterday, but I did ship the redesign of the Fresh Comics website and I met with my earliest hero in the comics industry, Jim Lee.
That all said, today's a "mop-up" day for me, so expect a good post as I work through the backlog throughout the day.
Comic Shop Map (Fresh Comics)
While I'm very proud of the new look and feel for Fresh Comics, the bulk of the work was re-theming existing content and testing that visual changes worked. I also introduced a new calendar view to (finally) surface all the convention data I've been gathering for years, but my favorite part of the new site is the new comic shop map.
The map was my first foray into using the Mapbox platform as a replacement for Google Maps, owing to the ability to retheme the maps in ways that can be more brand consistent. (I'm investigating it for this exact use in some other apps as well.) When it came time for me to implement the stores functionality in the new theme, I didn't want to keep a nested hierarchy of pages (country > province > stores) and I wanted to take advantage of the browser location features that were not widely available back during the first iteration of this site in 2011. On a lark, I tried exposing my entire shops database to a clustering plugin for Mapbox, and it worked!
What its great about this isn't just the visualization aspects, but in the future, I can point folks looking for a local comic shop directly to this view instead of doing the lookup myself and e-mailing them what I found. While I'm super proud of this, the true credit goes to the Mapbox team for their good work. They have certainly won me over as a customer moving forward.
I Tried Red Lobster’s Lobster and Cheddar Bay Biscuit Waffles and Lived to Tell About It (The Root)
Added to the bucket list. As a lover of Red Lobster's cheesy biscuits, how can I not?
CEO says Facebook will impose new EU privacy rules "everywhere" (Ars Technica)
While I doubt that Facebook would do this were it not for the existential crisis they are facing due to a mismanagement of passively collected data, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. As a matter of practice, I'm also looking into what I need to do to make the full suite of my own products EU GDPR-compatible to get the experience doing that (most of my stuff is mostly there due to my HIPAA work lately) and to simply do the right thing by the folks generating this valuable data that so many modern enterprises are constructed upon.
The Nightmare Letter: A Subject Access Request under GDPR (Constantine Karbaliotis)
This fellow sees the GDPR as a "nightmare", while I'm looking at it as opportunity. "It's too bad that (insert competitor here) isn't compliant with the EU law. Let me sell you my product that is..."
Don’t Fix Facebook. Replace It. (New York Times)
I should get on that and get back to the Open Web. Oh wait. That was easy. Point your feed readers here.
There Are Almost 200 Stephen King References on This Poster—Can You Name Them All? (io9)
My wall cries out for this poster. Literally. It's kind of annoying after a while.
This post will be updated throughout the day with other links I find interesting.
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