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
I friggin’ love Avatar: The Last Airbender, the classic three-season Nickelodeon cartoon. I watched it only by chance. I had found out one of my uncle’s was called on to create some of the prop stone weaponry for the M. Night live-action movie version. When I found that out, the … | Continue reading
It was March 2022 when I sold CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean. So it’s been just about 2 years now. This was me and my wife’s thinking: After the sale, things seemed kinda fine for a bit, and that was encouraging. It was cool seeing new voices publishing new work I had nothing to do w … | Continue reading
I watched the Netflix Documentary American Nightmare. It feels like standard fare at this point, where we dip back a decade or two to some crime story that had a few twists and turns in it and make it freshly popcorn worthy again. This was the “is this the real life Gone Girl?” c … | Continue reading
I have the opportunity to play out at our friends Bar Rio here in Bend, Oregon somewhat regularly. I’ve got one gig in the bag already. It went OK, but I’ve got a lot to learn and improve about handling the live audio sound situation. Here’s that story so far. At this particular … | Continue reading
I’m still a Dropbox user, and a small feature I like on their mobile app is the Scan document option. You press the big blue + icon and it’s one of the options there. It opens the camera, you point it at a document and hold steady, and it takes a scan of the document. […] | Continue reading
Dave and I just had Brad on ShopTalk Show to talk about his idea for a Global Design System. I love Brad’s optimism on all this. From Brad’s perspective, he’s seen, and helped build, the same set of components over and over over (and over) for design systems. On a very profession … | Continue reading
Gerrymandering is a political technique where voting districts are drawn to advantage one group over another. In practice, it looks incredibly silly. There are geographical districts that make no sense whatsover, snaking through territory with no other purpose than to bring power … | Continue reading
My favorite TV show, Northern Exposure (1990-1995) was entirely unavailable on any streaming service since streaming services existed. If you wanted to watch it, you had to get your hands on the DVDs. I totally have them. The first two seasons came in a little cute parka around t … | Continue reading
New-to-me, a site from Philip Kiely: Who Pays Technical Writers. Shout out Paul Esch-Laurent for suggesting Boost and it getting added. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I don’t see robots being able to craft the kind of technical writing I like. It’s that kind that clearly comes … | Continue reading
It took Dave and me 12 years to get to 600 episodes of ShopTalk Show. For that episode, we asked you what the web would be like in another 12 years. | Continue reading
I just want to echo Josh’s sentiment: In a way, it’s hard to blame companies because they honestly want to know and, in the best-case scenario, actually use what they get to make things better. But it’s oh-so-overwhelming. Just constantly about every single little thing. One of m … | Continue reading
I was pretty hot on it for a minute. I wanted it to succeed and thought it had the bones to make it. Coil was the main startup trying to push it. They did the right thing by just making it work first, showing there is interest, then pushing to get it standardized. But Coil […] | Continue reading
Stephen Hackett with a bit that resonates: There are all sorts of things that can end the career of a professional creators, including burnout, financial pressures, losing relevance and more. These are things I would like to avoid so I can keep writing and podcasting about the to … | Continue reading
This tweet went around: To which Jason Velazquez says: I have good news and bad news. The good news is that websites didn’t go anywhere. […] the bad news— we are the ones who vanished, and I suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery. There has been a real uptick in I … | Continue reading
A biting first sentence from Robin Berjon: No one can explain what you do. Let’s face it, you don’t do a great job explaining it either. The Chimeralogists I’ve always wanted to be good at answering this question. My default answer is “web design and development”, but I find 90% … | Continue reading
Maggie Appleton thinks there should be Speculative Calendar Events. I don’t want to add them as real events. Because they are not real events. They are speculative possibilities of events. The majority of them won’t be filled, and having both speculative and real events looking a … | Continue reading
I live in the Awbrey Butte neighborhood of Bend, Oregon. Say I was going to move to Butte, Montana. I could plug those into this app and get neighborhood comparisons. Much like Awbrey Butte in Bend with its hillside views and upscale homes, Butte’s Uptown also features prominent … | Continue reading
Robin: A writing tip for myself in the future, if I may (and I do): delete every use of “…for me…,” “in my opinion,” “some might disagree,” “I think,” etc. etc. These snippets are a bad habit and make your writing fragile, lacking any conviction, with one eye always over your sho … | Continue reading
Just finished Fractal Noise. There was a bunch of controversy about that cover, apparently, which I was only aware of now in Googling around about the book to find the image. I don’t know what to say about all that, but I can say that the cover is extremely distracting. The entir … | Continue reading
I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I get it. Maybe they picked an off-the-shelf theme that doesn’t have that. Maybe they just forgot. Maybe they even don’t want to. I somehow never considered si … | Continue reading
I originally blogged this on CodePen back in 2014 when I must have been feeling a little spicy. | Continue reading
Say you were getting into web design and development right now. What’s the best way to get going? Dave and I talked about that on the last ShopTalk Show. My best advice: give yourself some stakes. Build something that matters to you, at least a little bit. The classic is to make … | Continue reading