Web Excursions are select bookmarks from my travels around the interwebs, because I'm always thinking about you while discovering other people's cool stuff. You mean that much to me. You can see all of my (public) bookmarks on Pinboard, and visit the bookmarks archive for curated lists across the last few years.

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I took this week off. I didn’t record a Systematic. I didn’t record an Overtired. I didn’t write any blog posts. I didn’t book any sponsors for the aforementioned reasons.

I did do some hiking, some coding, some movie watching, some playing with dogs, and some dealing with yet another change of my meds (more of this, sadly) that resulted in uncharacteristic depression.

I also managed to find some cool links.

Urthecast - See the planet. Open the world.
Images of Earth captured from the International Space Station, with a very intriguing API. I’ve requested access to the developer tools, and am looking forward to something potentially awesome here.
sift - a fast and powerful open source alternative to grep
“A fast and powerful open source alternative to grep.” I’m currently (still) a Silver Surfer (ag) fan, but this offers some enticing flexibility.
jsoma/tabletop
I mentioned Sheetsu recently (which is still a great solution for this. For a more ground-up approach, Tabletop.js makes JSON access to Google Spreadsheets via JavaScript simple. Integrates with Backbone.js, Handlebars, and other frameworks/tools.
Computing CSS matrix3d transforms
Some advanced tricks with CSS transforms. Between this and Franklin’s followup article on diffing images with CSS, I have a new rabbit hole.
Pintsize
Generate a frontend markup template from Sass variables.

By the way, I’m planning to offer a special sponsorship of the Web Excursions posts in month-or-longer packages, so if you’re an indie/small developer looking for good exposure with frequent repetition at a budget-friendly rate, contact me and we can talk details.

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