President Whitmore is speaking. He’s in a tiny box in the corner of the TV screen and the chyron reads “President tries to put mishandling of alien invasion behind him, outline new focus.”

“… vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on, we’re going to survive. Today we celebrate our independence day!”

Cutaway to the studio as Whitmore finishes and before crowd’s cheers begin

Wolf Blitzer President Whitmore has just made another attempt to revive his failed plan to save humanity. Will his speech change opinions of a skeptical, war-weary public? Is it too little, too late?... More

I spent the holiday around my 3-year-old nephew.

While he is very cute, with sandy brown hair and vivid blue eyes, he’s also like all children, a child. That means that he’s entirely at the sway of his emotions. One morning he said he wanted yogurt for breakfast. My brother didn’t have any.

What followed was a slow-motion deterioration over about a half hour that led into a full tantrum. It’s said we grow out of this.

Maybe, in the sense that we generally don’t throw tantrums, but the underlying pattern is there. We dress it up in reason and... More

As part of the Davidputney.com policy of constantly updating the site, we have updated the site.

• We have completely rewritten the site’s JavaScript. For the less tech-oriented out there, JavaScript is the code that among other things controls the performance-sapping, battery-draining, processor hogging animations we have gratuitously sprinkled throughout the site to surprise and delight our readers. The code is much better from a purely academic best-practices standpoint, and it’s more efficient.
• We once again rewrote the site headers and navigation so that the animations will be smoother, and as a side benefit, the HTML code at... More

I work many mornings from a coffee shop near my apartment before heading into the office.

When people come in for coffee, being Americans, they politely form a rigidly hierarchical queue. And being Americans in 2016, they almost immediately pull out their phone and start fiddling with it.

We’re less than a decade into the smartphone era, and the device has become so ingrained in our lives that spending a few minutes with our own thoughts is less compelling than what’s on our magic internet-connected pocket computer.

I mention this not to judge my fellow humans (for a... More

On a lovely early fall day in 1992, I was walking across campus.

It was move-in day at Eastern Illinois University. I’d just unloaded my meager possessions from the back of my aging beige hatchback and was wandering around taking in the sights.

The day was warm and the leaves had not yet started to change. Dozens of students were wandering around. Families were disgorging belongings from the backs of minivans and trucks.

Posters and fliers covered buildings and bulletin boards. The ‘92 election was a couple months away, so Bill Clinton placards were up all over.

The opening notes... More

Twenty-five years ago right around the time I write this I was sitting in my first college class.

Turns out, it was a key moment of my life.

It’s not often that something like this can be so easily pegged to a particular date. In this case I can recall it because bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughn had died the night before.

A quote from Vaughn was written across the blackboard of my Journalism 121 class. The professor, a blues fan, was especially hit. “Awful,” he said to the class. “And right after he’d cleaned up.”

Indeed.

The untimely death of... More

It was supposed to just be a tech revision, a release I’d dubbed Davidputney.com Snow Leopard.

But my penchant for tinkering has once again outrun my good sense. So this site also has a visual refresh, too. In fact, Davidputney.com has been visually refreshed more times than Katherine Helmond in Brazil. it’s more of ship of Theseus in that it isn’t the same site any more.

Here was what it looked like when I launched it last fall. Since then a bunch of it has been rewritten to take advantage of modern browser technologies.¹ I’ve changed... More

My friend Eric went viral this week.

That’s not a euphemism for some sort of dread disease. His Millennials to Snake People Chrome plugin became fodder for the Viral Internet Journalism Industrial Complex.

In reality, it’s actually pretty cool to suddenly see something you made referred to and linked all over the place. I was minorly internet famous because of UX from hell, a piece I did about bad UX on news sites. But it was but a mere fraction of the scale of his plugin fame.

His creation is a Chrome plugin that converts “millennials” and variations... More

The Apple Watch is very nice.

It’s nice to use. It feels nice on your arm. It looks nice, too, and is quite nicely built. It’s surprisingly nice to make phone calls from, and it’s a nice way to get notifications on the go.

The haptic feedback buzz feels nice when a new push alert pops in. The alert sounds are nice, and the digital crown has a nice smooth, precision feel when rotated. The inductive charger that effortlessly drops into place is very nice compared with the fiddly plug on a cell phone.

Even the packaging is nice. All... More

I’ve become Internet famous in the past few days.

I’d always hoped it would be because I pulled a really good internet prank. Turns out it was because I wrote a blog post.

So far, it’s be tweeted out or linked from Harvard’s Nieman Lab and included in their e mail newsletter, it made Neiman Labs’ Fuego, and has been shared by Commarts.com, NewsWhip, PBS Idea Lab, PBS Mediashift and by countless editors and designers. Tweets about the post have been linked to, favorited and retweeted more times than I can count. As of this... More