Many who use Tailwind never want to go back; many who don’t never want to. How could we possibly disagree so sharply? After using Tailwind for a good while now—both professionally and on a few small personal projects—I’ve come to what might just be the most unpopular opinion of a … | Continue reading
I’ve just heard of Triode, just gone v2, which is Iconfactory’s app for listening to “internet” radio. I’m playing with it, and it’s fun! I guess I never really thought about how there are an absolute shitload of constantly broadcasting radio stations over the internet you can li … | Continue reading
A couple of re-aligns ago on this website, my “biography” (a bit of text about myself) had some interactive controls on it. You could swap it between: The big idea was to make it self-serve when someone asked me for this, say to accompany and interview or for an introduction at a … | Continue reading
My grandfather and great-grandfather were plumbers, and my uncles on that side grew up working for the family plumbing shop. One of my uncles took over that business and runs it to this day. I came across this letter that one of those uncles wrote when they came by my parents hou … | Continue reading
Check out this layout I wanted to pull off on the current design of this site: See how just the first two boxes in the “sidebar” of the homepage are set side-by-side on narrow (mobile) layouts. One way I could have done that is to target the sidebar, and turn it into a grid at [… … | Continue reading
I tried to get into Glass, but it didn’t stick for me. It’s partially because I don’t have many friends on it, and the fact that it’s paid-only means I probably never will. But also because it seems like the community spirit there is: only post really excellent photos. That’s nea … | Continue reading
Listen to Jim: Get a personal domain and start all your side projects as a subdomain of that top-level domain. Do not buy a custom domain for every little idea you have. Save your money, give your project the longevity it deserves, and show off who made the dang thing implicitly. … | Continue reading
I posted these to my Instagram, but they could (should) be here. I’m trying to get my “music room” at home in good order and learn to use recording equipment and software. These ones are very rough. Not only am I just not very good, but all I did was turn on Quicktime Player and … | Continue reading
The Breeders! The “30th Anniversary Edition” makes me feel as old as I am. But check this out. You could have fond memories of the cool megaphone voice check-check intro: Then it’s all like a-ooooo-ooo a-ooooo-ooo which is just unforgettable: Then the drummer is like this is actu … | Continue reading
Two people have reached out thoughtfully to ask me about where they should host a WordPress site. They just kinda vaguely wanted it to be good (like a nice dashboard, at least), and not break the bank. The answer is… c’mon I’m just one dude! 😵💫 I’ve never done an … | Continue reading
I’m still on that 100 years thing and how it connects to free hosting, and now thanks to a conversation I peeped in on how it relates to the websites of people who have passed and the memorial sites to them. I helped with a memorial site to Christopher Schmitt that I very much ho … | Continue reading
I think it was a month or two ago when OpenAI published docs on how you can tell their “web crawler” (scraper) to not scrape your site, following a similar syntax to Google’s: The instant I saw it I put it in my sites robots.txt file. I wanted to see how it felt and see […] | Continue reading
Sometimes you need to be doing that. LucidChart When I was in the process of selling CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean, they wanted to understand the stack and basic architecture of the site. I was like: it’s a pretty basic WordPress deal: PHP, MySQL. Wait but there is a bit more to it. … | Continue reading
I keep thinking about that 100 years of hosting thing. Without some fancy setup like that, this is how it normally works: You pay your hosting bill, you pay to renew your domains, and you stay up to date on the shifting tides of technology well enough that your site doesn’t break … | Continue reading
There is little fresh coat of paint around here. It’s not a million miles different from before, just some new aesthetic choices for fun. I went for a high-information-density look. I liked what Robin said in his recent redesign notes, so I kinda copied that. The goal here was to … | Continue reading
Just an old bluegrass song I like. And what popped to mind when I sat down to continue my journey of learning that absolute friggin basics of how to record something. I have all the stuff from years of podcasting you’d think I’d know now to use it by now, but I really don’t. Appa … | Continue reading
We only just recently lived through the blockchain and crypto hype. We’re currently living through the AI hype. There is some (anonymous?) person who writes at Bite code! in the first person who remembered a hype cycle I’m too young to remember: When I started programming, XML wa … | Continue reading
If you need a good full-throated argument against this practice, read Garrett Dimon’s Live Coding Interviews. They exist because companies need to know if you can actually code, but as Garrett says: At best, they serve as a tolerable de-risking filter for a company that needs an … | Continue reading
Some A+ journalism from Anne Dingus [sic] in TexasMonthly in… 1994. I think it’s smart for long-standing publications to make sure their old gold is properly published online. The clear winners: There was some fine ones in The Fox and the Hound 2 also. | Continue reading
The Paravel boys just launched Luro publically. 🍾 I suspect it will be an app that means different things to different people and helps teams differently. But brass tacks, it’s a dashboard of meta-information about your website. “Track your components” is just one of many … | Continue reading
Chris Brandrick asked me, for Frontend Focus, “to share a few of his favorite tools and services” which of course I’m happy to. Here are my (somewhat random) picks: I’ve seen a couple of these lists recently, like Michelle Barker’s Cool Tools, Christian Heilmann’s The 10 tools I … | Continue reading
I saw this new app for note-taking the other day: Capacities. Looks pretty neat to me. In the vein of Notion, a block-based document-making machine kind of thing. But with a twist or two, like it doesn’t lean into databases as much but elevates other content types like links and … | Continue reading
This February, I half-joked: Waiting for headlines about how web searches are now sent through so many AI models the energy consumption is worse than crypto. Mastodon I was hoping that wasn’t true, but the data is starting to come in. Here’s one I saw (via Ethan): In a paper due … | Continue reading
I woke up a little hungover on Saturday with burgers on the mind. I was inspired after my locally famous breakfast burrito site to do it again, but pick something perhaps even more niche. Smashburgers it is. (Here’s a repo.) I used Astro for this partially because they just went … | Continue reading
I was at a musical performance the other week. A couple of groups playing as a send-off to Fiddle Tunes. Maybe a few hundred people in an old blimp hangar. The audience area was slightly staggered, so there would be like 8 rows of chairs, then a stair, then 8 more, etc. So if you … | Continue reading
You don’t need a special app for YouTube playlists. On any given video, there is a decently easy-to-find “Save” option that allows you to add to a playlist. You can have multiple playlists, and they are also decently easy to find and edit. So it’s an uphill battle for an app like … | Continue reading
I’m always filled with temporary dread when I see a huge semi truck pull up to a busy intersection to turn. How are they going to orchestrate everything to make this turn happen? They must be way to the left in the turning lane, cutting off lanes to their right. They have to swoo … | Continue reading
She writes: myth: everyone should blog I sometimes see advice to the effect of “blogging is great! public speaking is great! everyone should do it! build your Personal Brand!“. That’s me, I say that. I don’t know about personal brands anymore, but I like the idea that it helps yo … | Continue reading
That’s what WordPress.com is asking for web hosting, domain ownership, and support for a hundred years. They are essentially saying they’ll be helping your anointed heir with the /wp-admin/ password after you die. Pretty cool. Mostly, I love the strong marketing play: you can tru … | Continue reading
Baldur wrote up some thoughts about how companies don’t typically reward refactoring code. There isn’t a lot of incentive at many companies for slow work, rewriting old code, refactoring toward better ideas, paying down technical debt, and that kind of thing. I get that impressio … | Continue reading
Keith Grant in Scope vs Shadow DOM: But here’s the thing: CSS @scope and shadow DOM are not competing standards. They’re complementary. They meet different needs entirely — but with enough healthy overlap in functionality so there isn’t a gap. I like that phrase “enough healthy o … | Continue reading
I love the idea of the Bird Buddy. Somebody was like: what if a Ring doorbell camera except a bird feeder? Then totally did it. But they went the extra mile by making the app that shows you visiting birds actually kinda good. It must use some kind of machine learning model to ide … | Continue reading
When I talked about saving links, what was helpful for me is to think about my behavior in terms of when I’m going to need that link, so I broadly bucketed like: I like how Juha-Matti Santala didn’t just think in terms of those categories for themselves but re-bucketed like: If I … | Continue reading
Miranda and I went to Vegas the other week. A bit of a late 6th-anniversary celebration. Miranda had also never been there, despite being a way more accomplished world traveler than I, and it seemed like a place she would enjoy, what with all the dressing up. We left on a Thursda … | Continue reading
Robin, after noticing that most print books are perfectly fine (decent type, decent cover, decent paper), notices that most websites are not fine: The baseline for websites is not great. Okay, fine: most websites are pure, unadulterated, straight-up bad. Bad from top to bottom, b … | Continue reading
When I was looking at what looks like the “official” online personality test for Meyers-Briggs when I was spouting off about personality tests, I noticed that their radio button choices were actually kinda cool: I like how, visually, the larger radio buttons imply “more”. I can’t … | Continue reading
By Zach, named Educational Sensational Inspirational Foundational. I might add Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant. | Continue reading
If you’re blogging like I’m doing here, it’s nice to be able to kick your posts out automatically to social networks (in addition to RSS). A reasonable list right now: There are many more sites we’d consider social networks, but they aren’t as obviously a good fit for sharing blo … | Continue reading
I think there are some personality traits that are pretty damn useful to know about yourself and others. For example: the spectrum between introversion and extroversion is real and has really helped me understand myself. But some personality trait frameworks seem like utter nonse … | Continue reading
I never even ask what the WiFi is at coffee shops and hotels. I have AT&T cell service, and the plan I have includes a “Mobile Hotspot”. I flip that sucker on, and now my phone is my WiFi. I find it’s usually faster and more reliable to use than some arbitrary shared WiFi, and [… … | Continue reading
My birthday! I got to sleep in a bit. 7:30! What! It was even planned that way because we had a big day ahead. 43. Prime number. It’s always easy to remember how old I am since I’m an “eighty baby”, as in, born in 1980. Nice even number. It’s not hard to figure out […] | Continue reading
I saw this funny comic in Outside magazine from Brendan Leonard where he did a one-minute plank every day for four months. Did it turn out to be… good? It sounds like not really. Like possibly, his core is a little stronger, but that’s unclear, and he certainly didn’t develop any … | Continue reading
I got a new bike the other day! The make and model is up in the title there. I was camping up in Port Townsend, and I saw several fellow campers had brought their mountain bikes and I was envious. Ever since breaking my arms mountain biking I haven’t mountain biked. I’ve done ple … | Continue reading
There is a 2015 documentary about the Barkley Marathons. It’s plural because it’s a race that consists of 5 loops, which are all about a marathon long, making for somewhere around 100 miles. There are all sorts of wild details, like running through the night in the woods, finding … | Continue reading
Beeper is a really cool app idea (and name!). The big idea is that it combines all your chat apps into one. I installed it on my Mac and iPhone and configured it to work with: All of them worked. But it supports even more than that! That’s pretty wild to me. It’s kinda surprising … | Continue reading
I’ve always liked tools help me do DevOps-ish stuff but make it easy and have a UI. For example, I used MAMP back in the day because it ran (on my Mac) MySQL, Apache, and PHP, which was the stack for like every CMS. MAMP is still a thing, but I’ve happily moved on to […] | Continue reading
You’d think this would have a simple obvious answer, but in mulling it over recently, how I do this is actually a decent chunk of my internettin’ time and has an algorithm of sorts. When I’ve got a URL on my hands that I need to get back to, there are three broad buckets: Which [ … | Continue reading