As Twitter is (far too) slowly falling apart and more and more people are looking for alternatives, Bluesky is enjoying a surge in popularity at the moment. One neat little feature is that you can use your own domain as your handle on Bluesky. In a way, this is the perfect handle … | Continue reading
In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or MacRumors, the official Mastodon app … | Continue reading
The Logitech Spotlight presentation remote is a sleek piece of hardware. It is comparatively small, fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and the buttons come with a very satisfying, albeit for my taste a tiny bit too loud, click. But most importantly, the brushed aluminium desig … | Continue reading
I just published the 11th issue of Own Your Web, my newsletter about designing, building, creating, and publishing on the Web. When I started the newsletter back in autumn of 2023, I didn’t yet know what form the newsletter would take on, if people would like it, and also whether … | Continue reading
Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down an … | Continue reading
Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interest sti … | Continue reading
In the last issue of Own Your Web, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which probably everyone with a p … | Continue reading
For my birthday, I got a new pair of speakers for my home office / home studio. After looking around for quite some time, I settled on the ADAM Audio T5V in the end. The T5Vs are affordable, entry-level studio monitors with a 5“ woofer that are optimized for smaller rooms. And it … | Continue reading
ol { list-style-position: outside; padding-left: 1em; } ol li { margin-bottom: 0.5em; } I’m turning 42 today and yes, I am as surprised about that number as you are. If 42 really is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, then maybe it makes sense to lo … | Continue reading
Whether you are running online workshops, hosting a live stream, or recording audio or video content, optimal audio quality is absolutely essential. People in your audience might tolerate if your video is noisy or not perfectly sharp. But if your audio quality is poor, for exampl … | Continue reading
The web platform is changing rapidly these days. With every major browser release, more and more powerful features get added, many of which are based on previous input about what web developers need to build better for the web. One way for browser vendors and developer advocates … | Continue reading
Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, recently sat down with Tim Ferriss to talk about a bunch of different things. One of those things: blogging. It might not come as a surprise, but Matt described blogging as one of the most rewarding things he did last … | Continue reading
At the beginning of 2023, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website: In the search for a permanent home on the web, more and more people are now rediscovering the personal website as a place to share and document their thoughts and publish thei … | Continue reading
It’s not going well. After all-time heat records were shattered worldwide during heat waves across all continents and ongoing wildfires eradicated 5 % of the entire forest area of Canada, 2023 will be the hottest year ever recorded (1.43°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial aver … | Continue reading
Where were you in 2013 and what were you doing back then? What have you done over those last ten years? How have the last ten years changed your life, your work, or what’s important to you? I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t often pause to reflect about the past decad … | Continue reading
I just sent out the first issue of my new newsletter Own Your Web. Own Your Web is a newsletter for anyone who wants to design, build, create, and publish on the Web. Every other week, I’ll send out an email full of actionable insights, best practices, hacks, links, books, tools … | Continue reading
h3 a {text-decoration: underline} After three years, I finally replaced my old Intel MacBook Pro – and its cracked screen – with a new machine. I’m still holding back a bit with my excitement for this 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro, just because I was really disappointed … | Continue reading
In a recent project, the web fonts I bought and downloaded were only available as WOFF2 files. Staring in disbelief at the unpacked folder full of WOFF2 files, I wondered: Why did they not include WOFF files as well? Isn’t WOFF still needed? Or is it finally time to ditch WOFF? A … | Continue reading
Don’t use your finger!” Regardless of which country and school system you grew up in, chances are you have heard this sentence at least once from one of your teachers. I, for one, remember my elementary school teacher rebuking pupils who were pointing at the lines … | Continue reading
Just like Google is constantly indexing the Web, OpenAI is crawling the open Web to scrape content from websites for free to train their LLM (lucrative language model) “AI” products. But, as I learned from a post by Ethan on Mastodon, you can disallow GPTBot to get its tiny robot … | Continue reading
Alright, let’s write more about CSS! CSS! CSS! Change I’ve been writing CSS since the early 2000s, shortly after we ditched building web layouts with tables and spacer GIFs in favor of hacking our designs together with floats. CSS has since become my favorite programming language … | Continue reading
This piece by Cory Doctorow about blogging, which I read a few days ago, is exceptional. Why? I already knew that blogging – and having a personal website in general – is a superpower. I had heard before of Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking essay “As We May Think” that directly insp … | Continue reading
Nobody knows you. You are not entitled to anyone’s attention. Be respectful, be helpful, be kind. Your personal website isn’t a replacement for social media. It’s much more than that. Who is your site for? Document your life. Your perspective matters. Capture your thoughts. Shar … | Continue reading
Manuel asked: Is there a good reason why we’re defining global custom properties on :root/html and not on body?” It’s a great question: Everybody just seems to define most of their global custom properties (aka CSS variables) on the :root selector without gi … | Continue reading
Today, I started a new project with Kirby CMS. (No, it’s not my personal site. That one’s still brewing…) Kirby is a lightweight, no-fuzz content management system (CMS) created by Bastian Allgeier, which works well for projects of any size. It is easy to install and amazing to w … | Continue reading
A while ago, I wrote about what you could include in a README file for a project. Based on this post and a few practical examples of READMEs, I created and published a template that I will use in my own projects going forward. It is available on GitHub: https://github.com/matthi … | Continue reading
Manuel shared how he approaches writing and publishing blog posts on his personal site. If you follow him, and especially if his RSS feed is on your list of feeds, you know that Manuel indeed does put out a lot of posts. Just recently, he completed 100 posts about more or less mo … | Continue reading
Solid documentation of a project is important, especially if you’re working in a team. When all information about how to install, deploy, or contribute to a project is buried in only one person’s brain, you’re in trouble once you have to make changes and that person is on vacatio … | Continue reading
Leonie Watson just shared an interesting audio snippet on Mastodon: https://front-end.social/@tink/110007014963441869 What sounds like her speaking about accessibility is actually not Leonie, but an AI-generated synthetic voice, a cloned version of Leonie’s voice based on audio t … | Continue reading
After about a year of living in our new home, after waiting for our neighbors to finish their driveway (life lesson: don’t expect gratitude from strangers), after our wholehearted horticulturist recovered from an acute illness, and after thaw had set in in the southwestern part o … | Continue reading
Dave wrote about what he calls The Feature Work → Maintenance Work Loop: he often finds himself working in cycles of Feature Work and Maintenance Work, “balancing the growth and health of a product with a cycle of building and repairing”. I’ve noticed the same both in design and … | Continue reading
Let’s call it what it is: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were a great idea full of potential but they never really caught on. One reason for that was that although you could add any website to the Home Screen in Apple’s iOS, it always felt like nothing more but a fancy bookmark. You … | Continue reading
As I noted yesterday, screen readers don’t convey the semantics of many HTML elements like strong or em. When I shared my post on Mastodon, Stéphane Deschamps chimed in and pointed to an promising candidate recommendation fresh from the press that might give authors much more con … | Continue reading
I always was under the impression that if I add emphasis to a piece of text in HTML by adding an em or a strong element, this emphasis would also be indicated to screen reader users in some way. For example, by a change of the tone of voice, much like if you are reading a text ou … | Continue reading
CSS Container Queries are now available in all major browsers. 🥳 With the release of Firefox 110 yesterday, the stable versions of Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox all support them. There have been many major additions to CSS in recent years, but this one is definitely o … | Continue reading
I want to start a little experiment: I want to see if I can reduce my TTFB, which is, of course, short for “time to fresh blogpost”. Why? Because I think this is something where I can still improve a lot. Although I am aware that a few of you are indeed reading my posts and that … | Continue reading
Jeremy wrote a little something about streams, in particular about streams on personal websites. His home page actually is like a stream: links, notes, and blog posts all appear underneath each other in chronological order. Many of us are now rediscovering or reviving their perso … | Continue reading
A lot of us are still working from home these days. Many are in meetings every day, more and more people are holding important customer presentations or running workshops from their little home office, and some are even joining podcasts and online meetups as guests, or are starti … | Continue reading
When it comes to tracking and analyzing a website‘s traffic, Google Analytics (GA) seems to be the obvious choice: everyone knows it, it’s powerful, it’s free, it’s used by millions of sites. 53 % of sites worldwide, to be precise. No wonder many clients ask for it and many peopl … | Continue reading
We all want to do our best work. We all want to create something of value. But what if you’re stuck? What if the solution just doesn’t show up, the idea just won’t come, the interesting just doesn’t want to happen? Writers sometimes call it writer’s block, but not only writers ex … | Continue reading
I have a tip for everyone who’s now – or very soon – trying to find out whether a text was written by a human or an AI. Sure, you could train another AI to look for clues and confidently call it a “classifier”. But chances are, your classifier won’t be fully reliable. It might no … | Continue reading
Today, I turned 41. It was a wonderful, relaxed day with my family – and my parents’ dog who is a bit of a maniac… I also got to try out my two “office” birthday presents: a new microphone for voice, the Røde Procaster, and an audio interface, the MOTU M2. The Røde Procaster is … | Continue reading
Alright. Enough talk. Let’s get to it. One of my plans for 2023 is to redesign this website. Here is the thing: it is easy to promise things to yourself. It is much harder to deliver, especially when the project is quite large and you have to do it in your spare time, like the r … | Continue reading
We all know that it is going to happen. It’s not a question of if, but when Twitter will collapse. By the way: one day, Medium will follow. So will Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Or Mastodon. Many people are now desperately waiting for their Twitter archives, hoping that they’ll … | Continue reading
For the last day of this year’s Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar, we’re back in Berlin. NaN is a foundry and type design practice “balancing weirdness and wisdom” that was founded by designer Luke Prowse. In late 2021, Luke was joined by Jean-Baptiste Morizot, who had alr … | Continue reading
Typotheque is a type design studio based in The Hague, Netherlands. Founded in 1999 by Peter Biľak, who also teaches typeface design at the renowned postgraduate course TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the foundry is well-known for the excellent design quality … | Continue reading
205TF is a type foundry based in Lyon, France. It was founded in 2017 by Damien Gautier and Florence Roller who run the foundry together with foundry manager Rémi Forte. Collaborating with many independent type designers, they have built a library of typefaces that is wonderfully … | Continue reading
For day 21, we’re back in Berlin, where a young graphic designer with a love for type decided in 2008 to make his passion his full-time job. Today, Hannes von Döhren’s type foundry called HvD Fonts sells a wide range of typefaces, some of them being hugely popular designs. The ca … | Continue reading