This website allows visitors to comment on posts. For a year or so, this sorcery was powered by a combination of Netlify Forms, Zapier and Airtable. And it worked well, until new comments suddenly stopped appearing. I’d hit a snag with Airtable, which is where the comments were s … | Continue reading
I have spent way too much of my two weeks’ leave trying to redo my comments system – simply because Airtable makes paginating through query results really difficult. It really is time to move on, I think. I could have migrated to WordPress in that time. | Continue reading
(Big Tech’s Algorithms Are Built With Invisible Labor by Rob Larson. Originally published 3 Nov, 2022.) While the mystique of tech in the United States has made most people content to believe algorithms train themselves to find our dinner reservations and sort our pictures, Jone … | Continue reading
Realised Airtable only displays a max of 100 records on each API request page, which means some comments weren’t appearing. Fixed (or cludged, rather) by creating a Jekyll collection for each page and concating them into one comments array. Not a longterm solution, but then it to … | Continue reading
(Minimal Dark Mode by Jens Meiert. Originally published 4 Nov, 2022.)I’ve been looking for a way to invert colours for a while, and here it is. Currently using and it appears to work perfectly. | Continue reading
Not sure about going ahead and using Mastodon in the same way I used Twitter. It looks really nice and all that, but I managed to get out of the checking-my-stream-and-posting-something-every-few-minutes cycle, which was one of the main reasons I “went indieweb”. | Continue reading
(Programming Portals by Maggie Appleton. Originally published 23 Oct, 2022.)This is a great piece that reminded me of my own programming history, which was, with the exception of learning Pascal in A level Computer Science for a few months, limited to these simpler languages. Thi … | Continue reading
Not only did we get a Jekyll update last week, but there’s a version 5 on the horizon. I was thinking of Jekyll as “complete” software that did all it needed to. The roadmap looks a little unexciting, but let’s see. | Continue reading
My Netlify _redirects file didn’t appear to be working, even though it was processed at build time and outputted to the _site directory. There’s a good support page on this problem. After trying a few of these fixes, I finally found the right one. TLDR: I put my 404 redirect rule … | Continue reading
On leave for a couple of weeks. Do I: completely reorganise the whole posts/notes/links taxonomy on TDP (and possibly leonpaternoster.com) or rewrite TDP so it has no classes and uses custom elements? | Continue reading
I have a Fostodon account so I’m going to test whether I can autopost to it from my website. | Continue reading
We sometimes just want to look at and appreciate our websites. Sometimes we want to make them as minimal as possible. It’s all part of the same narcisstic urge, and it’s probably quite healthy to indulge it. It would be easier to design a rather beautiful website if I didn’t feel … | Continue reading
Carl asks several interesting questions about minimalism. As with all these discussions (cf brutalism on the web) we need to establish what we’re actually talking about. So the question I want to consider is At what point does minimalism become detrimental to a brand or user expe … | Continue reading
(Building the main navigation for a website by Manuel Matuzović. Originally published 7 Sep, 2022.)This is a really clear article on marking up a website navigation menu. Got me using a ul again. | Continue reading
I periodically validate my HTML, because validated HTML should be more robust and accessible than unvalidated. It’s also an indicator of competence. (Note to self: I should include validation in my build process.) This time round I discovered some new errors, which proved easy to … | Continue reading
Slightly disconcerting seeing a few of my international RSS feeds popping up with Sorry to see what’s happening to the UK posts. Does it look that bad from outside? Are we that much of a basket case? We’re OK! Think of this as the end-game of Thatcherism – a parody; neoliberalism … | Continue reading
Raindrop looks good, and I have a self-hosted Wallabag instance, but the fact the Kobo comes with Pocket built-in means I’m sticking with that. | Continue reading
I use the excellent Stylus add-on to fix a lot of broken websites, and by far the most common single line of text I enter is body {font-weight: normal;}, because someone, somewhere has declared body {font-weight: 300;}, thereby making all elements render with a lighter font weigh … | Continue reading
We are being “invited” (by whom?) to observe a minute’s silence at 8pm this evening to honour the queen, who died over a week ago at the (too young, it seems) age of 96. Is it possible to grieve for someone you don’t know? I was sad when Mark died, but then The Fall had a profoun … | Continue reading
Skinny Guardian was initially an experiment in getting Jekyll to publish a static site using external data, while producing a paper that I would find easy to read online. As I’m not particularly interested in US or Australian articles, I filtered them out. However, it’s easy to g … | Continue reading
I’m currently researching something for work (i.e. actually using the web rather than creating pages) and my number one gripe is huge hero images on content-heavy pages. I now automatically scroll past them with a little tsk. | Continue reading
I’ve filtered out all monarchy articles from Skinny Guardian. So if you want to read The Guardian with no royal content at all, it’s Skinny Guardian. | Continue reading
(CSS Classes considered harmful by Keith Cirkel. Originally published 25 Aug, 2022.)I’ve read this a first time, and it’s very interesting. I like the idea of ...; it feels like less brain work (which, for me, was the appeal of atomic CSS back in the day). | Continue reading
(Arts funding in England is a thin gruel that organisations are forced to beg for by Charlotte Higgins. Originally published 2 Sep, 2022.)This doesn’t just apply to the arts: any divested service has to beg just to maintain its existing funding, framing what it does in terms of w … | Continue reading
Noted in the field, this site working on a Nokia 225: (Many thanks to Gary for photo.) | Continue reading
Skinny Guardian is a minimal website that lists the 50 most recent Guardian articles three times a day (roughly around breakfast, lunch and at 5pm: it’s traditional in that way). It’s fast, mobile-first and strips out extraneous content and styling. There are no pop-overs or cook … | Continue reading
Looks like extractive capitalism isn’t as robust a model for football club ownership as murderous petro-chemical state sportswashing or oligarchical money laundering after all. Nice to have a choice, though. | Continue reading
I started work as ARU’s web manager on the last day of May. Since then I’ve gone through the usual round of introductions and getting to know the structure of a large organisation. It’s been fun – and hard work. I’ve identified performance as the most important area to improve on … | Continue reading
Planning a series of articles on designing work sites for mobiles — 1. Set up a local server and view the site on a phone rather than your desktop, 2. Avoid complex, resource-heavy UI (carousels!), 3. Avoid stuff like box-shadow 4. Don’t be afraid to put things next to each other … | Continue reading
Downside to my new(ish) job: using a Windows laptop. I know there’s a feeling Macos quality is declining, but the sheer bugginess of Outlook, Teams etc. on Windows — my god! And you have to press 50 keys to get a proper apostrophe. Amid the joylessness, Segoe UI is quite nice tho … | Continue reading
I know one of the downsides of SPAs is managing stuff like retaining your position on visited pages, but is there any particular reason why Twitter is so bad at it? Or for the random page reloads? | Continue reading