🎮 Donut Country — You move a hole around and get things to fall down it. Very satisfying mechanic. The kid and I loved it. Except the story part, which was excruciatingly long and boring. More things falling into holes and puzzles and less talky talky. 📕 The Ninet … | Continue reading
👋 Fellow Webnerds! This is a written version of my talk “Designing DX”. I just want to lollygag about with y’all about this squishy concept of DX. We’ll draw ideas and parallels from the real world (the one with grass, boozy milkshakes, and that glowing orb in the sky tha … | Continue reading
I have a killer business idea. I’m just going to take one penny from every bank account in the world. I’m not going to ask; you can’t say no. It really won’t affect you. You probably won’t even notice, and even if you do, again, it will not affect you. What’s a penny? Nothing. It … | Continue reading
I’m certainly not above government criticism nor do I think lying for political gain is a new trick. I am bummed that a website needs to exist called Hurricane Rumor Response from FEMA in order to combat a barrage of lies accusing them of everything stealing donations to literall … | Continue reading
📺 Presumed Innocent — A pretty fun whodunit ride with twists despite most of the people involved being pretty unlikable. I couldn’t shake the feeling that a lot of these people should be spending way more time and energy on figuring out who did it than worrying about esta … | Continue reading
Jeff Bridgforth: A front-end developer is the one that makes the design come alive. He or she is the person responsible for bringing the creative vision of the designer into being through code and can even push the design further by adding the interactivity or animation layer tha … | Continue reading
It really wasn’t that long ago when the Western U.S. wasn’t absolutely guaranteed to be on fire every summer and into the fall. Now, it’s just what happens. August and September? That’s “smoke season”. What should be absolutely beautiful months to enjoy the outdoors are now when … | Continue reading
I love the product name. Ruby has just learned two-wheel bike riding and is loving it. But we live in a very hilly area. This little tow strap thing is very easy to pop on and off so I can tug her up hills when she needs it, then remove when she doesn’t (it’s kind […] | Continue reading
Maybe you knew Brad Frost played the bass? What you might not know is Brad is a monster on the bass. His love for performing music is off the charts. So for Brad’s 40th birthday he had an idea: throw a concert. It came fully named: Frostapalooza. The way Brad envisioned it, it wa … | Continue reading
WEB UNLEASHED is the ultimate front-end developer conference. Here’s the important details: I’ll be there to give a talk and be around. I’ve decided that it would be fun to talk about DX, Developer Experience that is, as a general topic. I have the pleasure of getting to care abo … | Continue reading
📺 Ren Faire (Max): The very horny and gross 80-something man, “King George”, runs a Renaissance Festival in Texas, and is literally the mayor of the city he incorporated around it. The story is about the succession of the festival, but it felt to me that was the wrong sto … | Continue reading
Not to bury my point: contextual is the normal, good, fair, effective type of advertising. Targeted is the creepy, resource intensive, privacy invading, and, (?!?!?!!) not particularly effective type of advertising. We’ll get there. A billboard is contextual advertising. You’re d … | Continue reading
A week from today is Frostapalooza, Brad’s big show he’s throwing incorporating a ton of friends and family. In addition to the 40 musicians rotating on stage, now there will be visual artists showing off their work as well. Brad writes: Jeff Robbins makes some really amazing mus … | Continue reading
Over the last few months I watched… They were all kinda dark. I’m starting the Bear Season 3 now and we’ll see if I can take it. I might need something a little funnier or lighter or something for a while. | Continue reading
Back in 2016 I wrote a book called Practical SVG. Recently, the publisher, A Book Apart, closed shop. Now you can Read Practical SVG on the web, here on this site, for free. I always like how Mat’s book was online so now mine can join that cool club. I’ll echo what I say on […] | Continue reading
Let’s say you’re on a big mission in the world. You think websites should be more accessible. Websites should work for anyone regardless of their disabilities. You also think the web right now is failing in this regard. There are far too many inaccessible websites existing and be … | Continue reading
I’ve got an eMountain Bike, but I can’t actually ride it on most of the mountain biking trails around here unless I flagrantly flaunt the “law”. I do that, sometimes. I’m not obnoxious about it. It just seems like history hasn’t caught up yet and it’s silly. It’s like if there wa … | Continue reading
Right here! | Continue reading
Super cool zine from Mat. Me, I like HTML, and I wanted to do something with a little texture to it. So I asked a bunch of people way more talented than I am if they were down to contribute to a zine about heading elements—`h1` and company, here with us for as long as […] | Continue reading
Another kid’s device we have that we’ve gotten tons and tons of use out of is the Toniebox. It’s this soft padded box with a speaker on it (or plug in headphones). You place a character on it (a “Tonie”) and it plays the audio associated with that Tonie. It basically tells storie … | Continue reading
Our little family took a quick trip down to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico — meeting my inlaws there for some fun in the sun. We stayed at the Hyatt Ziva. We actually “won” the trip a few years back at a live auction/benefit for the Boys & Girls Club of Bend, so it felt nice to […] | Continue reading
Quick note that I’m totally going to Frostapalooza (and you can too!) Frostapalooza is a giant one-night-only benefit concert-slash-party-slash-happening featuring an amorphous super group of talented musicians from bands like: Brad Frost is turning 40 and throwing this as a mass … | Continue reading
I think it was during the ShopTalk with Blake Watson where “tower defense” games briefly came up and someone recommended Kingdom Rush. It’s not exactly new, coming out in 2011, but it was new to me. I played on iOS. It feels like the total classic of tower defense games. Monsters … | Continue reading
At one time I got interested in the “eye contact”, or lack of it, on video calls. I was going to present at an online conference, and I wanted people watching to have it look like I was looking right at them. Plus, possibly even more importantly, one-on-one calls with people. I e … | Continue reading
If you long for a web of yore were things were better, somehow: The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the … | Continue reading
I mostly play old time and bluegrass music. Particularly in old time and fiddle songs, the songs have a fairly rigid and repetitious structure. That’s not to say players don’t do interesting things with it, but unless a song is intentionally crooked, the structure of the song rem … | Continue reading
Malcolm Coles: 10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence. Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’ … | Continue reading
Feedbin has custom email addresses now so you can use a unique email address for each newsletter and not worry about a spam leak. | Continue reading
In Bend, you can’t miss the illustration work of Megan Marie Myers. It’s absolutely everywhere. There are murals. There are calendars for sale everywhere. Prints are hung up at coffeeshops, sometimes as whole exhibitions. She’s got books, stickers, hats, postcards, notecards, and … | Continue reading
Most internet travels by wire. Straight through the dang ocean. Josh Dzieza in a feature for The Verge: These fragile wires are constantly breaking — a precarious system on which everything from banks to governments to TikTok depends. But thanks to a secretive global network of s … | Continue reading
You’re doing yourself a grave disservice if your writing opens with something boring or banal. You’re going to lose me, at least. I’ve got a list of stuff to read and watch as long as your arm. Maggie really digs into this, in an effort to get better. Your challenge is finding th … | Continue reading
I’ve heard the new cooperative version of Scrabble made fun of a few times. These pansy youths just wanna hold hands, drink warm milk, and avoid any conflict. Whatever. Nobody is threatening the value of competition. Me, I think cooperative games are awesome. There are still chal … | Continue reading
The best bit of kids technology that we have, and this has been true from say age three to now six, is the Amazon Fire HD Kids. The operating system on it is fine. It loads up decently quickly. It’s locked down to only kids stuff. It’s not upselling stuff for the most part, there … | Continue reading
This popup that 1Password does by default isn’t my jam: My problem with it is that it isn’t actually helpful. If you do use the feature and save the login, instead of that popup you just get another one that looks essentially the same that you can click to log in. That’s no bette … | Continue reading
I just heard about GitButler from a Discord friend. I’m kind of ripe for toying with Git clients I use, as I just switched to GitHub Desktop. I don’t regret the switch, but I don’t love GitHub Desktop so much I couldn’t imagine another switch. Little stuff bugs me. GitButler is f … | Continue reading
(For clarity, this isn’t sponsored, even though Automattic did sponsor me in the past for quite a long time. I just find it fascinating following the products they put out.) For a long time, the message and branding for WordPress.com was “this is the one you use if you want to us … | Continue reading
Dave mentioned in Discord the other day that he listened to a podcast called Finding Drago. He said: It was recommended to me by a vagrant on the beaches of Chala and it changed my life. I powered through it and it’s a hell of a strange journey. Strongly recommended, if you feel … | Continue reading
That was the joke the camel guy made when we went camel riding in Cabo San Lucas on our vacation. The actual camel ride was about 250 seconds long and not something I’d go out of the way to do again, but the dad jokes were impressively thick. Yep — we went to Cabo again! […] | Continue reading
Updated my robots.txt file to what looks like the latest list of User-agents to block. Not that I have any faith that it’s actually going to help prevent my writing from getting into a model without my permission. All it takes is one scraper website that republishes the content a … | Continue reading
I signed up for the paid version of PJ Vogt’s Search Engine show. One of the latest (free) episodes, Who’s behind these scammy text messages we’ve all been getting?, was fascinated and very effecting. I’ve always liked the idea of good, paid media. Sometimes it’s hard to know wha … | Continue reading
I’m super close to getting productivity-sniped by Godspeed. It appears there is quite a few cool features. I like the focus on speed. I like the file attachments to individual to-dos. I like that recurring to-dos seem like first-class citizens. I like the commitment to keyboard-f … | Continue reading
We’re all familiar with processes like “write a weekly status update” that start strong and eventually fade out to low participation, engineers automating their updates, and gibberish. When you ask people why participation faded you hear the same thing over and over, “It didn’t f … | Continue reading
The glider was a sister to the lilac and the bee, the slime mold and the earthworm, blossoming forth, bubbling up from the generative froth of the universe, its spontaneous complexity cascading from page to page, filling the grid with evidence for a theory that could not be artic … | Continue reading
Shaw with some helpful advice on live audio: A friend explained it to me like water. Gain is controlling how much water to let in, and Level is controlling how much water to let out. Lower gain means less sound picked up overall (which helps with feedback) and the level will cont … | Continue reading
This all started here. Where that ended was ordering new gear that seemed better suited to this recurring gig than what I was doing. All that gear has arrived and I’ve used it now, and I’m happy to report it was a good improvement. The setup is: Those five inputs to to a Mackie P … | Continue reading
Brad follows up on some some of the chatter and happenings since the big Global Design System concept dropped. In addition to many of the positive responses, I heard plenty of skepticism, open questions, and apprehension. So much of it is valid and shared by me! Chris Coyier publ … | Continue reading
Great story from Chris Zacharias about slipping a browser support banner into production on YouTube that probably did more to drive down usage of that browser than the collective public whining of web developers at conferences. Instead of outright dropping IE6 support, what if we … | Continue reading
I’m going to leave the title off this post and see what happens. Titles are a lot of pressure! I think there is a reason that the big text-based social networking sites (Mastodon, X, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, etc.) don’t have titles. Especially for short posts, the ti … | Continue reading