Links feed / Cory Dransfeldt

I'm a software developer in Camarillo, California. I write about software development, technology and music.
https://coryd.dev/ (RSS)
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I want you to do these four things right now via Ben Werdmuller
1 Feb 2025 | original ↗

Okay, friends. Here’s what we’re going to do. It’s not going to take long.

Write it Down via Dan Sinker
1 Feb 2025 | original ↗

The last two weeks have felt surreal. I probably don't need to tell you this. These early days of Trump's second presidency—with their non-stop executive orders, the chaotic and unconstitutional freezing of government funds, the cruel and constant attacks on our trans friends and family, plane crashes, immigrant roundups, an illegal attempt to...

Web Components are not Framework Components — and That’s Okay via Lea Verou
30 Jan 2025 | original ↗

A blog post by Ryan Carniato titled “Web Components Are Not the Future” has recently stirred a lot of controversy. A few other JS framework authors pitched in, expressing frustration and disillusionment around Web Components. Some Web Components folks wrote rebuttals, while others repeatedly tried to get to the bottom of the issues, so they could...

New tech gets chatter (2016) via Metafizzy
30 Jan 2025 | original ↗

My text editor of choice, TextMate, is old. Version 1 was released in 2004. Version 2 was announced in 2009 and has been in alpha & beta release since 2012. TextMate is old enough that a whole new generation of text editors have emerged and eclipsed it, most notably Sublime Text and Atom. They have built upon TextMate's successes and learned from...

CSS nesting: use with caution via Piccalilli
30 Jan 2025 | original ↗

I’ve been doing this CSS thing for over 15 years and I’ve seen a lot of change in that time. A lot of the time, I see a new CSS feature and immediately get excited about how helpful it’s going to be for me and the team in the long term. A good example of that is text-box-trim.

Faster Horses via Max Böck
29 Jan 2025 | original ↗

There's a famous quote that people in tech like to use. It was supposedly said by Henry Ford about the invention of the automobile: If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'. There is no actual evidence that Ford ever said this - regardless, it has become a favorite adage for people talking about...

Why I still like Sublime Text in 2025 via James Doyle
29 Jan 2025 | original ↗

I still get people asking me why I use Sublime Text in 2025 given there are soooo many other great editors out there. My response: there is? Because I still think Sublime Text holds up as a great editor.

Owning my own bookmarks over 20 years via Joe Crawford
28 Jan 2025 | original ↗

When I worked as a respiratory therapist part of my responsibilities was to keep flowsheets for the mechanical ventilators I worked on. That’s a record of what the machine was doing with a time log. And when I gave a breathing treatment to an asthma patient I recorded the details of that treatment, the time, the before, the after, and anything...

Tim Cook Is Failing Us via Joe Steel
28 Jan 2025 | original ↗

I know this is a rather dramatic headline and that some people might incorrectly assume that I’m mad about some particular piece of hardware or software, but it should come as no surprise that I’m hopping mad at Tim Cook for how he’s ingratiating himself to President Trump again.

Hidden Writings via Dan Sinker
23 Jan 2025 | original ↗

A packet of tomato seeds. A booklet extolling the virtues of hand cream. An instruction manual for a camera. A guide for housewives on "the dangers that threaten every household," with an ad for Lysol on the back.

Deleting Commercial Social Media via BinaryDigit
22 Jan 2025 | original ↗

I was reading Cory’s post, Goodbye commercial social media, and that prompted me to write a post that I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. For me, the "banning” of TikTok was the last big eye opener to the oligarchy happening in tech right now.

The Closed Web via Brian Donohue
22 Jan 2025 | original ↗

I’ve been observing a growing shift toward a more Closed Web. At the core of this change appear to be fundamental shifts in the value exchanges between web publishers and technology platforms.

After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won. via Carlos Fenollosa
22 Jan 2025 | original ↗

Many companies have been trying to disrupt email by making it proprietary. So far, they have failed. Email keeps being an open protocol. Hurray? No hurray. Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first-class node of this network.

Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy via 404 Media
21 Jan 2025 | original ↗

If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it...

After Big Social via Dan Phiffer
20 Jan 2025 | original ↗

Last week Meta—the company that operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads—changed their Community Guidelines in a way that’s designed to appease the incoming Trump administration. Rules that guided moderation decisions to remove hate speech based on gender and immigration are now lifted. They changed it for just those two categories of...

What Makes for a Good Blog? (2008) via Merlin Mann
14 Jan 2025 | original ↗

As I think about the blogs I've returned to over the years — and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention — I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here's what I think helps make for a good blog.

The people should own the town square via Mastodon Team
13 Jan 2025 | original ↗

Mastodon was founded on the principles that people should be able to control their social circle online, curate their own timeline, and convene freely with any community of their choosing. We believe social media should help users build bridges, not walls. And we believe this is best achieved through federation.

Building an open web that protects us from harm via Ben Werdmuller
12 Jan 2025 | original ↗

We live in a world where right-wing nationalism is on the rise and many governments, including the incoming Trump administration, are promising mass deportations. Trump in particular has discussed building camps as part of mass deportations. This question used to feel more hypothetical than it does today.

Range via Louie Mantia
12 Jan 2025 | original ↗

Whenever I beat the RSS drum, someone always asks about discoverability, so I want to put this bluntly: it is through algorithmic discoverability features that harmful posts become visible. Whether they are original posts, reposts, or replies, harmful posts are only able to successfully reach their intended audience by depending on those features...

How to Make a Damn Website via Louie Mantia
11 Jan 2025 | original ↗

A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.

Bad shape via Erin Kissane
10 Jan 2025 | original ↗

The idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Dickens' Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, which is dead on their feet.

Digital Gardening via Chris Armstrong
5 Jan 2025 | original ↗

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.

Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture via Anil Dash
5 Jan 2025 | original ↗

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...

Blogodammerung? via Tim Bray
4 Jan 2025 | original ↗

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?

Your words are wasted via Scott Hanselman
4 Jan 2025 | original ↗

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...

Dynamic Websites with Static Site Generators via Evan Sheehan
2 Jan 2025 | original ↗

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...

What RSS Needs via Mark Nottingham
22 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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...

The End of The Twitter Era via Ben Sandofsky
13 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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 is the future of the internet. Here's why I'm excited. via Ben Werdmuller
13 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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...

The Race For the Best Stock Footage via Joe Steel
11 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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.

Code shufflin’ via Robin Rendle
7 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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.

Knowing CSS is mastery to Frontend Development via Anselm Hannemann
7 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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...

Semi-Annual Reminder to Learn and Hire for Web Standards via Adrian Roselli
6 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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.

The Free Web via Jay Hoffmann
6 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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...

You should have a website via Nora Reed
5 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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

10 powerful ways to use CSS variables via Adam Argyle
3 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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.

modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics via Jenny Zhang
2 Dec 2024 | original ↗

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...

For Love of God, Make Your Own Website via Aftermath
27 Nov 2024 | original ↗

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...

Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web via Ben Werdmuller
27 Nov 2024 | original ↗

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.

Learn how overflow: clip works in CSS. via Ahmad Shadeed
26 Nov 2024 | original ↗

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

The New Alt Media and the Future of Publishing via Anil Dash
12 Nov 2024 | original ↗

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.

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