For the first time since buying the damn thing, it started on my first try at the beginning of the season. Just so I don’t forget why: I ran it completely out of gas at the end of last season. No more gas getting gummed up in the system while it’s in storage in the […] | Continue reading
I like Cloudflare technology. I think they do a great job of building things that are very useful, very innovative, and very reliable. That’s no easy task, especially while shipping pretty regularly as they do. I’ve been known to do pretty glowing podcasts about them, unsponsored … | Continue reading
Every Old-Time music jam I’ve ever been a part of does one thing the same: they don’t change keys very often. If you’re playing in D, you stay in D for a while. Maybe for an hour, maybe two, maybe the whole dang day if you’re at a festival. Then you move. Probably to G […] | Continue reading
I recently wrote about one of the ironies of a Jamstack approach recently. Yes, rendering static content from the edge is fantastic, but only when the content is actually there. If you need to hit an API with client-side JavaScript to actually get the content, you aren’t benefiti … | Continue reading
There is a line of thinking that goes: WordPress is fairly complicated. I only need to do something fairly simple. Thus, there should be a simpler version of WordPress to do that simple thing. A WordPress Lite, if you will. The trouble is, which simple thing do you focus around? … | Continue reading
jQuery is 32 Kb compressed and minified. Pretty small, really. I’d say heck, a hero image might be 10× that size alone!, but as we know, all bytes are not equal in web performance. JavaScript needs to be parsed and executed, and might even be a blocking resource depending on wher … | Continue reading
You should wear your seatbelt. I should wear my seatbelt. No argument there, but my new Tundra has the most annoying seatbelt alarm I’ve ever experienced. It’s loud and it literally never stops. There are, sometimes, legit reasons to silence an alarm like that, like putting groce … | Continue reading
I had a three-year lease on a Toyota Tundra and had the 2020 model. It came due and I had to make a decision on what to do next. Maybe Rivian? I only like the R1S and it’s not shipping until late 2023. Also worry about repairs and such in our fairly remote town. Probably […] | Continue reading
Papa bear’s porridge: The self-fulfilling prophecy of React. React isn’t great at anything except being popular. Mama bear’s porridge: Get in Zoomer, We’re Saving React Most next-gen React spin-offs strike me as universally regressive, not progressive. Baby bear? It’s a trick: bo … | Continue reading
Almost anything in life, you could always have a little better. Your car could be fancier, your sheets could be softer, your boat could be longer, your TV could be brighter, and your whiskey could be older. But there are some things where an upgrade just isn’t possible. If you’re … | Continue reading
It was at WWDC22 that Apple talked about adding support for passkeys. They seem like a Very Big Deal because they literally replace passwords for login and are better in every way. And crucially, it’s not some Apple-only thing, but an open standard (FIDO). I only bring up Apple f … | Continue reading
Ethan was digging around trying to find the origin of the term breakpoint as it relates to media queries in web design. It’s such a classic term now, it’s weird the term never appeared in Ethan’s first article or talk on the subject of Responsive Web Design. I showed the article … | Continue reading
Austin Kleon: Comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do. I know I need to work, but I don’t know what I should be working on, or I can’t work on the thing I should be working on because I’m too tired or depressed or otherwise unmotivated. Comfort […] | Continue reading
Miranda had it custom-made by a local fella named Tristan who runs a nice woodshop here in Bend. His video as he completed it: | Continue reading
Websites tend to fall apart over time. Which is weird, because as Dave put it in a recent ShopTalk Show… “they are saved to disk as 1’s and 0’s”. One way they fall apart is going offline, which happens to dare I say most websites. The design of this very website has a “random” bu … | Continue reading
I’ve been eyeing up the The Shared Element Transition API 👀 because it looks tremendously cool. With it, you can animate individual elements across different pages even when the browser does an entirely fresh page load. Sweet. I suppose I should say “MPA” (Multi-Page App) … | Continue reading
I have a Specialized Vado right now and I love it! I’ve ridden it for three seasons and I’ll probably hang onto it for quite a while. It’s essentially like this: A handful of things I like about it: It’s just like… a normal bike. It’s only pedal assist, no throttle, so it’s still … | Continue reading
Part of Douglas Bowman’s 20-year retrospective on what is considered to be one of the first major standard-based (no tables, CSS in tow) commercial websites: In HotWired’s early days, many of the network’s pages were coded by hand as static HTML. A simple update to the navigation … | Continue reading
Jim: I think the web is just too big, too diverse, too “world wide” to be so easily circumscribed by our own classifications or definitions. The entities you can access on the web are a lot like us humans: very similar in ways and very different in ways, but never identical. Labe … | Continue reading
I just like this paragraph from Das Surma: The Web Platform is a beautiful mess. It has been expanded and evolved by hundreds (thousands?) of people over the last couple of decades. It evolved from a document platform to an extremely capable app platform. The pace at which it is … | Continue reading
Here’s a neat way of thinking about tech skills from Addy Osmani, putting them all into two big buckets: At a macro level, you learn programming concepts that are largely transferable regardless of language. The syntax may differ, but the core ideas are still the same. This can i … | Continue reading
I enjoyed this post from Keith Cirkel at GitHub. If you’re ever like… progressive enhancement sounds nice, but what major web apps actually do it? Multi-billion dollar GitHub is one example. JavaScript doesn’t get executed on very old browsers when native syntax for new language … | Continue reading
If you publish stuff on the web, you're outputting HTML at URLs for people to read. And it's good form to provide an RSS feed as well (maybe JSON if you're hip). That's 2-3 formats for your content out of the gate, which is effort, but hey, that's the job as a publisher: get your … | Continue reading
Among other good advice from Heinrich Hartmann: The realization that you don’t have the complete message in your head, will often only become apparent while writing. This surfaces as inability to find a good punch-line or to express yourself clearly. It’s fine and normal to be le … | Continue reading
If you publish stuff on the web, you’re outputting HTML at URLs for people to read. And it’s good form to provide an RSS feed as well (maybe JSON if you’re hip). That’s 2-3 formats for your content out of the gate, which is effort, but hey, that’s the job as a publisher: get your … | Continue reading
Jay’s Web Apps, Web Sites, Are they all the Same? starts referencing an ancient poll on CSS-Tricks. Jay writes: That question, circulated in different ways, has become a common refrain. Every few years it re-enters the web development zeitgeist. At the center, however, lies the s … | Continue reading
Allowing people to edit tweets, from a barebones technical perspective, is trivially easy. Actually Implementing editable tweets on Twitter, with the complex social dynamics and scale, surely is anything but. I’m actually rather surprised they did it at all. I wrote 8 years ago: … | Continue reading
A nice juicy paragraph from an AI/ML research engineer on Reddit: Sometimes I wonder what the original pioneers of AI – Turing, Neumann, McCarthy, etc. – would think if they could see the state of AI that we’ve gotten ourselves into. [The PaLM Paper from Google is] 67 authors, 83 … | Continue reading
The CodePen Spark is a fairly big deal for CodePen. It goes out every week to millions of developers. The 2nd most popular email client to open The Spark is Outlook, just behind Gmail. You probably know this: Outlook is the worst. It’s solely the thing that keeps HTML email devel … | Continue reading
These AI image generators are getting weirdly easy to use. Midjourney is just a free Discord server DALL•E doesn’t have a waitlist anymore and works right on the web Stable Diffusion has a installer for my M1 mac now so it’s become trivial to use Speaking of that last one, I love … | Continue reading
I had no idea what we were in for on Monday night when Miranda and I (and friends) went to see Odesza. I just had never listened to them before. All I knew was one of the dude’s name is BeachesBeaches and I think that’s funny. I had heard the opening band, Sylvan Esso, before. [… … | Continue reading
Jorge Arango: … notes can also play another essential function: to help you understand and develop ideas by interacting with them. 65% = Chance I share any given page of notes with other people 15% = Chance they actually find it useful 25% = Chance I find it useful later myself 1 … | Continue reading
I appreciate all the research and appropriate nuance Harry brings in Critical CSS? Not So Fast! Not a fan of any performance testing tool that dings the score of a site for not having it implemented. It’s just not a cut-and-dry thing like, say, optimizing an image. Here’s the rub … | Continue reading
That’s what our new Tesla sounds like. They finally… gave in, I’d call it… and gave us our Tesla last Friday. It’s been delay after delay. The actual problem as it turns out is that it emits a tone, to put it mildly. I didn’t notice it at first in the car lot with the […] | Continue reading
Four years ago Phil acted on a silly idea to deploy a Netlify site every single minute such that an entirely static site could do something as notably dynamic as displaying the current time. There is literally no JavaScript on that site. It mostly worked. Aside from a failed depl … | Continue reading
I’ve attempted to wear an Apple Watch a few times in the past. Never took. I’m trying it again with the Ultra. So far (4 days), I think it’s so cool. The watch face I’m showing here is my favorite. It’s got a full-color version but the all-red is just a great look. It’s got […] | Continue reading
There is this buckwild insane thing that when you visit any URL on the internet whatsoever with the in-app browser built into Instagram (and several other apps), it injects JavaScript onto the page, the point of which is extreme tracking of what you are doing. Set my Instagram pr … | Continue reading
Oh nice! Daybreak is a cooperative boardgame about stopping climate change. It is an unapologetically hopeful vision of the near future, where you and your friends get to build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to save the planet. Kinda the opposite of … | Continue reading
It’s my “The Web is Good Now” talk that I updated significantly and smooshed into a 25-minute slot. That was my first post-pandemic talk and it felt good to be back. Now I’ve got to expand it back to 45-50 minutes again for an upcoming conference. So it’ll be totally freshened up … | Continue reading
The word metaverse gets thrown around a lot lately, hasn’t it? I suspect everybody has something a little different in mind when they think about it. Since a lot of the news is around Meta/Facebook, I would guess people think “Facebook, but VR”. Meaning there is one monolithic th … | Continue reading
Because the best Twitter is getting stupid with jokes. I started. These ones get 🏆 gold trophies from me. If your reaction is “that’s not really past tense!!” then, well, you would suck at apples to apples. Aching backbone @hardfire Tenty @toheebdotcom eslent @markpalfree … | Continue reading
(Short story: we don’t even have it yet and it’s annoying.) We ordered a Tesla X back in June sometime. Miranda was visiting her parents in LA (who lived there at the time) and went to a dealership to test drive one. She ordered it right from there. We did everything we needed to … | Continue reading
The Vue 2 docs have it as: That feels pretty good to me, as literally everything else in the file is in service of the final output HTML. Start with the goal and work down. The Vue 3 docs have it has: And that also makes sense, because it puts dependencies (e.g. import stuff) at … | Continue reading
There is lots of interesting bits in the The Secret to Making Friends as an Adult episode of Dr. Laurie Santos’s The Happiness Lab podcast. Here’s one. Vivek Murthy talked about how there are three kinds of loneliness: Intimate loneliness: you lack a close confidant or someone th … | Continue reading
Y’all know the thing: there is no browser choice on iOS, it’s all Safari all the way down. The focal point for opposition against this is Open Web Advocacy. This is news from back in April, but it seems pretty big to me. In Europe, there is the Digital Services Act (DSA) already … | Continue reading
Just some thoughts after looking at TVs at a Best Buy recently. Absolutely bare minimum software. Just the bare minimum to control the least amount of settings possible. Nothing “smart”. No “apps”. Turns on instantly. The boot time for the minimum software is effectively zero. Yo … | Continue reading
To me, a wallet is a great place for an AirTag (or similar help me find this thing device). Once a week, I can’t find it. Is it in the car? My saddle bags? Dresser upstairs? On my desk? In the depths of the couches? Phone! Show me! But the options for an AirTag-compatible wallet … | Continue reading