Got a little Saturday morning, slightly bleary blogging tradition developing here. Football this afternoon too. These rituals make us. | Continue reading
There’s some interesting stuff on Britain’s demographic development here. The percentage of us living in towns and cities is growing at a similar rate to India and Pakistan. While London is growing, it’s the smaller cities and towns that are growing more quickly – Cambridge’s pop … | Continue reading
I really love this idea – the great public keenly awaiting the next morsel – and it translates well to a newsletter or RSS feed. Dickens serialised Bleak House. Imagine the excitement of receiving Chapter 48 in your feed or inbox. Through the stir and motion of the commoner stree … | Continue reading
I’m using grid for the sidebar layout on this site, and this guide was very good. | Continue reading
This is fairly similar to my experience of AI in a university. There’s the academic response – lots of events and papers that broadly support the “this is the future” idea – and the professional – “we should be using this in some way”. I’m the weird guy at school who isn’t exci … | Continue reading
…not in 10,000 years. However, any alternative to the PLP is a good thing. | Continue reading
Bit of a work one, really, but interesting nonetheless. Solves the eternal we want the website to look engaging by making it an usable mess conundrum. (Also, feel I need to publish something in order to take my mind off a weekend-ruining ITFC result.) The UI layer is not where … | Continue reading
We win away at Plymouth, Leicester lose and Southampton and Leeds draw. Five wins in a row. We are going to win the Championship #itfc | Continue reading
The venerable Kottke has redesigned and I very much like it. I mean, it’s all blogs and RSS these days, so why not a sidebar with a ton of links as well? I’ve been thinking about shifting things around here having come across a few sites still using my Scherzo WordPress theme. Sc … | Continue reading
At the risk of [insert It’s Always Sunny post room conspiracy theory meme] reading too much into things, it’s quite interesting digging into Arc’s staff and VC investors. There’s quite a Thrive Capital presence in its management team. | Continue reading
This is good on how Arc’s push to present the web through AI hasn’t been thought through and is, of course, a profoundly bad idea. “The best thing about the internet is that somebody super passionate about something makes a website about the thing that they love,” tech entrepre … | Continue reading
This is very good on how Tailwind marketed itself in order to become the de facto way of doing CSS for a lot of developers. Tailwind is, if you’re not aware, a “utility first” approach to CSS which rejects “semantic” class names such as introduction, entry-title or even card in f … | Continue reading
Been using text-wrap: balance with headings. Not sure I actually like it: with a wide measure it can look weird. Upping the font size seems to help alleviate the problem. | Continue reading
This is good on Musk and Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson. A couple of things worth noting. Firstly, the intellectual world Musk inhabits: It’s [Roko’s Basilisk, the subject of a thought experiment] a friendly AI, in the future, that has used its godlike powers to solve all hu … | Continue reading
Hatherley’s melancholy genius lies in uncovering meaning in these unglamorous, non-Ackroydian parts of the city – this “almost Baltic… peculiar dockside enclave” – while at the same time mourning the loss they represent. Among the reasons given by Lambeth Council for demolishin … | Continue reading
A note for my micro.blog followers… I’m now @kjz (look it up) on micro.blog, not @leonp. Because deep (not dark!) web reasons. | Continue reading
Substack-like email newsletters should really be blogs with an email subscription option… One downside of migrating from Substack is that alternative services either a) don’t have RSS or b) don’t host it at the same URL, and fail to redirect it. | Continue reading
Pika came out of beta three days ago, joining the likes of micro.blog, Blot, Bear and write.as among the choice of focused, independent blogging services to choose from. No excuses for not starting a blog these days. I like Pika a lot, and not only for its minimal, native design … | Continue reading
I like a manifesto as much as the next surfer; a statement of what we want the world to be and a willing of that world into being. Of course, not all manifestoes are made equal – some we’ll fundamentally disagree with, while others communicate a mixed message that needs decoding. … | Continue reading
Ah, yes, the Labour Party! Remember them. Had a brief resurgence around 2015-2017, I believe? Still hanging in there, you say? Can’t have that, no, no, no. Expect Lewis will be quietly deselected soon. | Continue reading
While I only change eReaders once every 15 years or so, my choice does affect which read later service I use. I got annoyed at Pocket (or rather Mozilla) making me use a Firefox account, and when I did connect the two, it got into a right mess as it turns out I already had a pre- … | Continue reading
This is exactly what I found: Google traffic is all about how to do something or find the answer to a specific question in a market. Here, I’m not really interested in that. Went a little further and delisted this site from Google entirely | Continue reading
A question for micro.blog @help… If I stop micro.blog from pulling in an RSS feed, should I expect the posts from that feed to disappear from micro.blog? My feeling is they should, at least if they were posted “recently”. | Continue reading
I’m using Transmit now I publish stuff to my site using SFTP. The file sync function is brilliant: instead of uploading and overwriting every single file, it can compare by date and or file size and only overwrite files that have changed. Means the site gets updated in seconds ra … | Continue reading
Possible things to do this weekend: post some links, add tagging to the site, hook up my Beluga feed to create site notes, write something on enclosing your bit of the web through delisting and making your feeds private. | Continue reading
This is really good on that game – my son’s first away match – and crowd dynamics: I would love us to bring that feeling into every moment in every game – hope not expectation, dreams not demands, ambition not anxiety. I know we can’t, context is king for the rhythms of a crow … | Continue reading
Last week I discovered Beluga, a service that does four things: Creates a basic, self-hosted Mastodon like social feed Provides RSS and json feeds Provides an iOS app for posting to your social feed Lets you follow other Beluga feeds This may seem intriguing while begging t … | Continue reading
Eagerly awaiting the VC-funded, West Coast, SaaS eco-hosting service, and its attendant marketing. You can have some names for free: Greenify. Greenly. Green.io. GreenAAs. Ecolify. | Continue reading
My quest for a host has landed at Mythic Beasts, via Fastmail and Render. Funnily enough, I only stumbled across them because they host my favourite website. I did a bit of testing on the Sherlock Holmes subdomain, which went smoothly enough, so I’ve moved this site and my work s … | Continue reading
Impressed myself just now by a) trying a main :not(article, figure, img, video, embed, audio, iframe, div, p:has(img:first-child)) selector without looking anything up and b) it actually fucking working. I love this almost natural language like CSS. (It means select anything with … | Continue reading
Seems to be a lot of redesigning in the air at the moment, and my work site is no exception. What to say? I stuck with Tachyons CSS as it was already using that and I still find it quick to work with on any non-blog site. There is blue, gold and svg. | Continue reading
VC funding will eventually require a return, which means an IPO or acquisition. In lieu of that, investors – who buy a place on the board – need to extract money from the company in ways that the founders may or may not agree with. In time, given more money and more pressure, t … | Continue reading
Hey WordPress, show me all your one column blogging themes… | Continue reading
Note to self: maybe don’t head down the fed.brid.gy rabbit hole, LP. (Checks Bridgy Fed to see whether this appears.) | Continue reading
Beluga is a great idea. It’s an iOS app that creates a social feed on your own cloud object storage hosting (Backblaze offers up to 10GB for free), complete with RSS and json feeds (which means your website could consume it, thereby creating your own site’s iOS app…) My social fe … | Continue reading
Not gonna lie, thought these were UKIP leaflets when they dropped through the door. | Continue reading
A few months ago I moved my hosting from Netlify – which I’d been using since 2016 – to Fastmail’s very basic static hosting. It’s pretty good – fast, reliable and simple: the files you put in a folder are the files it serves to the outside world. It’s included in any paid Fastma … | Continue reading
This is (as ever) really good on when to use a banner (answer: when there’s a societal/organisational level crisis), and setting up a process for publishing them. (Advertising) banner blindness is a thing, but is there hero blindness, where you instinctively scroll past the big p … | Continue reading
Feel a bit foolish publishing this on setting up a POSSE-based email newsletter when you read the heroic lengths some people have to go to in order to leave Substack, or how other services just don’t work as well. Do still question the network benefits of Substack, and if you’re … | Continue reading
This is fairly similar to the extent of my internet, although I subscribe to more feeds. I’ve never pruned them, but probably should – there’s a lot of technical stuff in there I rarely read. I couldn’t forego an adblocker because the Ipswich Town site I visit every day serves mo … | Continue reading
I don’t have any analytics installed on my website, so I don’t know how many people visit or what they read. Actually, that’s not quite true. I did set up a Google Search Console (GSC) account before starting my current job, just to get up to speed. GSC basically tells you: How … | Continue reading
Odd article from The Markup, this. And surprising that it recommends its readers use the Brave browser, rather than at least exploring other options as well, such as Firefox and Librewolf. | Continue reading
The thing about new web services is that they tend to be built by people in the tech bubble. It’s always worth researching the people behind a product as startup world is very individualistic – the link between a product’s success and the benefit to its founder(s) is more direct … | Continue reading
Reading this on how London became Londongrad, and the striking paradoxes of dirty money. It was Gordon Brown and the left’s very own Ken Livingstone who did most to enable City money laundering, not the Tories. Then there’s the need to move wealth from a state that can’t guarante … | Continue reading
The Syllabus is a great source of indepth and academic articles on digital/sociology/politics. You should subscribe. | Continue reading
Been following some links in my RSS feed and various websites today, and it strikes me websites have a smell that you pick up on straight away. Most indieweb sites have a basic, minimal design, or they go full in on a colourful Neocities look. The corporate web is different: smoo … | Continue reading