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Russell Beattie

russellbeattie.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007

Russell Beattie, a former Opera Mini product lead, writes on web technology, mobile browsers, HTML bundling, and tools.

What HN saysHN links it for his post on single-file offline HTML support, which a commenter finds baffling, and for his RSS reader alternatives list.
47HN people shared it
16linked it in comments
43stories submitted
448story points
2 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026

Most-shared posts

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  3. 3
    Why Is Markdown Popular?
    2 people · 107 points · first shared 2022 · 175 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Android tablets: It's the browser
    2 people · 80 points · first shared 2012 · 70 comments on HN
  5. 5
    But how do you keep track of everything?
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    Two letter io domains available
    2 people · first shared 2011
  7. 7
    The zap colors bookmarklet
    2 people · first shared 2009
  8. 8
    Blog 1008770
    2 people · first shared 2014
  9. 9
    Android is splintering, just not how you think it is...
    1 people · 43 points · first shared 2009 · 17 comments on HN
  10. 10
    Russell Beattie ends Mowser
    1 people · 33 points · first shared 2008 · 14 comments on HN
  11. 11
    WIMP UI paradigm won't scale down to touch UIs
    1 people · 33 points · first shared 2010 · 16 comments on HN
  12. 12
    Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls
    1 people · 18 points · first shared 2008 · 4 comments on HN
  13. 13
    H2G2 Is Still Relevant
    1 people · 13 points · first shared 2022 · 10 comments on HN
  14. 14
    When will local truly be on the web?
    1 people · 13 points · first shared 2008 · 9 comments on HN
  15. 15
    Still Struggling with Social Networking
    1 people · 13 points · first shared 2008 · 3 comments on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

BlueTemplar · 2023-12-12
I'm baffled that the support of single file, offline HTML is still so bad today : https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/the-decades-long-html-bundl… (I'm suspecting because this goes against the wants of some of the biggest players who have the incentive of making us leave as many online footprints as possible ?) Even here, Mozilla recommends converting to PDF for easier (?!?) human readability. Except PDF is a very bad format for digital documents, with no support for reflow and very bad support of multimedia. (PDF is perhaps good for archival of offline documents, even despite its other issues).
russellbeattie · 2023-03-31
Mine too! I made this image based on it and my favorite Twain quote from the Innocents Abroad. https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/images/twain.png
johansch · 2014-09-19
I managed the tech/product aspect of Opera Mini and its direction for most of its first decade (we started in late 2004). There's 250+ million monthly active users of it now (most in places like SEA, Russia, India, Africa, South America). Reading stuff like this is quite rewarding. This post somehow made me think of the first English language blog post from early 2006 that really appreciated what we (me and my team) accomplished: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008770 "Opera Mini: Best Mobile Web Browser Bar None Posted Tuesday, January 24, 2006 12:41 pm"
nicholasalias · 2013-06-25
Great list. You missed a few. Feeder.co (my preferred alternative), Stringer, and probably a few more. Check out Russell Beattie's blog post here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/readerpocalypse-the-alternatives
tompark · 2021-08-09
The iPhone was highly, highly anticipated. For years, people were conjecturing about it. In 2006, Dan Lyons, under the pseudonym "Fake Steve Jobs", joked coincidentally that the iPhone would have only one button: "Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less. One."[1] One of the reasons for all this speculation is that smartphones totally sucked back then. Russell Beattie, one of the main mobile/smartphone bloggers at the time, wrote a great piece in 2004: "Steve Jobs has a mobile phone. I'm not sure which mobile phone it is, but he's definltely got one. And he hates it. He curses at it every day. He hates it like he hated the original IBM PC. He hates how hard it is to add contacts and make calls and he cringes at the web experience and the Java games, if he's even bothered to try them. He holds it in his hand during long trips and admires some things about it, but knows he could do it better. He knows that if Apple decided to make a mobile phone, it would be the most intuitive and elegant mobile phone in the world."[2] It's hard to understand how bad the situation was without actually using the mobile computing technology that existed at the time. In the late 90's, I had owned a couple generations of Palm PDAs, which were pretty good, but I stopped carrying a PDA around because I didn't want to fill my pockets with both a Palm and a…
tpmx · 2023-10-15
(russellbeattie... I recognize that name... small world. Sorry for digressing. Russell: I've got to thank you for https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/1008770. We all felt so proud after reading that review! Finally someone who got it. I was the person who led the product design/engineering effort during its first decade.)
euroderf · 2022-12-07
It's not mentioned in his intro post, but I would expect Russell Beattie's proposal for an HTML-based document format to tackle this at some point. https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/we-need-an-html-document-st…
brownbat · 2013-12-14
Huh, go figure. It really took off as the home for artisanal techie websites: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/artisanal-websites-the-rise-of-io-d… (Beattie credits evocative short name, stable British administration, lots of available short and English word domains.)
tux · 2013-10-10
Well yeah big part of is is "Geotargetable domains" > https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en But I was talking about what it means to many and/or me :-) for example, if you're interested read this; http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/artisanal-websites-the-rise-of-io-d…
mmahemoff · 2012-06-28
It's become a standard name for IT products (more so than .it!) due to input/output connnotations, and as the other commenter said, it's especially appropriate for a Google product launched at IO. Also a lot of names sound cool as .io, e.g. cloud.io can be read as "Cloudio". And due to the relatively high cost, a lot of .io names are still available. Just 18 months ago, a ton of 2-letter domains were still going (http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/two-letter-io-domains-available).
zvikara · 2009-02-06
mynameishere · 2007-12-31
Steadily employed for many years: http://www.russellbeattie.com/Russell_Beattie_resume.html ...and he has a kid and can't make car payments after being unemployed since September 2006?
davidw · 2007-11-30
There are two issues, as this guy says: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/irseeking-trouble 1. They didn't ask. 2. While IRC isn't private, you should be made aware if someone's logging it, and frankly I'm not really in favor of logging it in any case, as it detracts from the more informal nature of it.
gustaf · 2007-09-18
Lots of people have high hopes in location based advertising. For no reason, i think. at least not right now. http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/my-thoughts-on-consumer-lbs
petercooper · 2011-02-16
I thought I'd spend a few lines in irb and implement two.io for you right here in a comment ;-) Here are the available two letter io names from /usr/share/dict/words, /usr/bin commands, and bash builtins: ah.io, ay.io, di.io, ea.io, ey.io, fa.io, fc.io, fe.io, fg.io, ha.io, he.io, ju.io, ka.io, oe.io, or.io, ow.io, pu.io, ra.io, te.io, ti.io, tu.io, ut.io, wa.io, wi.io, wu.io, wy.io, ya.io, ym.io, yn.io, yr.io, du.io, ld.io, lp.io, m4.io, nm.io, wc.io UPDATE: It just struck me that two letter domains might be rather hard to register. I'm looking at the T&Cs now. It is notable how many are marked as being registered in the WHOIS though. UPDATE 2: Neither of the third party registrars I tried allowed two letter .io domains but the central nic.io does. UPDATE 3: I visited rb.io (which I wanted ;-)) and found this blog post of just a cpl weeks ago on the same topic: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/two-letter-io-domains-available

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