Links feed / Cory Dransfeldt

This site is a digital garden. Hopefully someday that term will need as little explanation as ‘blog’ does today, but at time of writing it’s still a relatively unfamiliar concept to most, so here are my thoughts on it.

the last few months, there's been a lot of conversation around the "Department" of Government Efficiency, which is ostensibly an effort at improving government efficency, with a primary narrative being around government spending. This is not the actual purpose of DOGE, and it's worth explaining what's going on here, but first we have to cover a...

Jon Udell is blogging less. Gosh, so am I. There are loads of ways to talk to the world, new alternatives every day it seems. Is this thing, you know, over?

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail. These companies are profoundly overvalued, don't care about permalinks, don't make your content portable, and have terms of...

A few years back, back when I was rebuilding the Science On a Sphere website, I had the idea that you could use a static site generator (SSG) like Eleventy to write out PHP instead of HTML. I had been eying Eleventy’s edge plugin and wishing it was available for hosts other than Netlify when it occurred to me that the edge plugin really isn’t...

More than twenty years ago, Web feeds were all the rage. Not proprietary news feeds on Facebook or ‘X’ – openly defined, direct producer-to-user feeds of information that you had total control over. Without ads. ‘Syndication’ meant that publishers could reach wider audiences without intermediaries; ‘aggregation’ meant that you could get updates...

I've been thinking a lot about how social networks die, these past two years. It's an unusually personal topic. In 2009, I picked up my life to move to San Francisco and work for Twitter. I joined a startup you could fit around a giant lunch table, and left a corporation with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of users.

The open social web puts control back in your hands. Unlike big social media platforms, it’s not run by a single company — it’s made up of independent, connected communities where you decide how and with whom you interact. It respects your privacy, avoids intrusive ads, and gives you the freedom to truly own your online experience. It’s like the...

Yesterday marked the “public release” of Sora, OpenAI’s video generator. Of course they had to almost immediately shutdown signups so was it released? We’ll need a team of philosophers to weigh in on that.

I’m not a programmer. Plug me into a terminal and likely the only thing that you could wrench out of me is hello world. I can hack things together in the browser and I can certainly mask my contempt for Typescript for a day or two but there’s a hard limit for sure.

There are countless articles why developers should not focus on Frameworks too much and instead learn to understand the underlying languages. But I think rarely we can find good reasons except that Frameworks come and go. To me, the main reason is different: You won’t be a master at frontend development if you don’t understand underlying...

Alex Russell wrote a four-part series a couple weeks ago arguing that modern JavaScript-first framework-focused front-end development is costing the industry and users.

There is something you can do to help the open web. Put yourself on it. I started this newsletter in 2017, shortly after an election that has now played out a second time, and with the same result. The idea for something like this had been echoing through my head, but the creative restlessness I felt during that time pushed me to finally put it...

I know. You already have a social media account. But you should also have a personal website. Here's why.

CSS custom properties are AMAZING. I'm going to attempt to name and roundup all the categories and strategies of custom props that I've come across.

Omnivore is a read-later app. You know, one of those things that lets you save interesting articles you encounter throughout the day and the service will go crawl the page and download the content in a nice readable format and zap it to whatever device you wanted to zap it to, so that later when you’re not anxiously toggling between the same...

Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a...

Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at Hugging Face, took a million Bluesky posts and turned them into a dataset expressly for training AI models.

The overflow CSS property is common when building a website. It’s used for different purposes:

You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of bad news issuing from nearly every newsroom has left people understandably despairing about what’s going to happen next.