I came across this post from Mark Nottingham on what RSS needs. I’ve written before about my conflicting feelings towards RSS, and I think having a body responsible for interoperability between feed readers as Nottingham suggests could address some of those issues; if there was a standard for handling footnotes and web components, for example....
Tracy Durnell is starting a new series on her blog about wrestling with this mindset of always wanting more. If you’re not already following Tracy’s RSS feed maybe now’s the time; her’s is one of my favorites. She shares lots of interesting articles and is a generally thoughtful person. Personally I’m a little skeptical of how this first post...
Today I learned that Robin Sloan — author of Moonbound — writes software. He has this great story about how he wrote a messaging app for his family. He also articulates very well this desire that many people who can program computers have: that more people should learn to code so that they can write their own little softwares for themselves and...
When I first saw this headline from Streetsblog — I Tried to Hate-Ride a Waymo. Turns Out, I Loved It — I was prepared to hate-read it. Normally I wouldn’t bother hate-reading something, but despite my initial reaction to the headline, I do trust Streetsblog, so I thought I’d try to set aside my preconceptions and see what this was about. Then I...
Erin Kissane, of the Fediversalist Papers, has announced the launch of her new studio, wreckage/salvage. Even though I am off of social media now, I am excited to see what she comes up with, so I’m subscribed to the RSS feed on the site. Personally, I’m pessimistic that it’s possible to have pro-social social media — at least in the sense of...
These Magic: The Gathering cards are gorgeous. I got rid of my Magic cards years ago, but I am genuinely tempted to buy these just because I love Helvetica Blanc’s art so much. I mean just look at “Teferi’s Ageless Insight”! Comments, questions, suggestions? Email me at comment@darthmall.net.
In a contest between specific suggestions and vague suggestions, the specific suggestion wins. This, according to Mike Monteiro, is how to make choices using The Strong Choice Doctrine. The way we do this in our house is that a strong choice wins. We call this The Strong Choice Doctrine™. For example: if I say that I want to watch a movie, and...
“Nature, it just does whatever the fuck it wants when you aren’t looking.” I think that’s the best description of gardening I’ve ever heard. The other day, Hollie shared this conversation she had with her housemate about his work to turn the lot next to their house into an urban food forest. It reminds me of my own struggles with our yard....
My brother once said of someone, “they strike me as being very intelligent, but not particularly thoughtful.” This distinction has had a profound effect on me. It’s hard for me to pin down what intelligence is, exactly. When I think of someone who is intelligent, I think of someone capable of understanding complex ideas, perhaps someone who has...
fraidycat seems like a really cool way to follow blogs and other websites. It’s kind of just bookmarks that check the sites for recent updates. It seems like it solves a couple of problems: Your feed is not presented to you as another inbox that you have to get through You read posts on the author’s site There are a few media outlets I follow —...
Over on StreetsBlog, Kea Wilson makes a strong case for how we need consequences, not punishment, for reckless driving. Consequences, Singer explained, "are the direct effect of an action; they’re guaranteed, and they teach a lesson." When a driver strikes a concrete bollard separating a bike lane from the driving lane, a mangled bumper and the...
Mandy Brown wrote this lovely, thoughtful piece about attention, social media, and her own creative process. There’s a lot I love about Coming home. In particular, Mandy’s description of how being on social media has come to feel like a distraction so all-consuming that it is like a kind of madness felt familiar. To step into the stream of any...
Hollie implores parents to be more thoughtful about the videos they share of their kids. I’ve been very circumspect about the photos and videos I’ve put online of my own kid. But I confess — and am even a little ashamed to admit — that Hollie’s framing never occurred to me. I was concerned about protecting him from corporations now and in the...
I appreciated this post by Mike Monteiro on hobbies. The idea that ‘hobby’ is capitalism’s word is intriguing to me, and I think I’m mostly convinced of the truth of that assertion. Certainly, the points Monteiro makes about how we live within an economic system that prevents us from making a living doing things we love — things that matter to us...
Chances are pretty good that you’ve already seen How to Monetize a Blog, but maybe you haven’t read it yet. I bounced off of it the first time I came across it because in the first couple of paragraphs the satire is pretty subtle, but it’s a fun read. It’s the kind of writing and design I wish I did. You can read it on your phone, but the design...
I enjoyed reading about Cassey Lottman’s “productivity streams”. I’m kind of a sucker for people writing about the tools and systems they use to organize themselves. Sometimes I’ll come across something I want to try myself. Often I’ll see a lot of similarities between my own organizational systems and the author’s. Occasionally I’ll find...
Ben Myers shared this very excellent video with me about these tactile maps of intersections (YouTube) that can be installed along with audio crossing signals so that pedestrians with visual impairments know what to expect when crossing the intersection. The video is pure catnip for me. It has everything: mobility infrastructure, accessibility,...
Chances are pretty good that if you're reading this, you know what the fediverse is. You may even be on the fediverse (I’m currently taking a break from it). So it may interest you to know that Darius Kazemi and Erin Kissane have published their findings into governance on Mastodon and Hometown servers. They’ve also published a blog post with a...
There are so many mundane social problems with the technology here and now that don’t even remotely range into the territory of Skynet, Paperclip Maximizer/Grey Goo, Roko’s Basilisk or The Matrix. So many huge, conspicuous, world-changing events have to happen before any of those sci-fi situations are even close to plausible, yet those are the...
I came across this talk a little while back with some great tips for Git (YouTube). I’m a sucker for Git tips (see also Vim). Here are a few of the ones that jumped out at me. git log -L The -L flag (which also works with git blame) will limit the commits shown to just the specified lines, or even some function in the file. So git log -L...
I am inspired by Chris over at uncountable thoughts writing about their experiments with RSS to publish some notes as RSS-only. Seems like a good solution for posting links I find interesting or just half-baked thoughts I’m not ready to write about more thoughtfully. I always got a little hung up about the IndieWeb idea of posting notes to my...
Typically, if you make lists, you probably make lists so that you don’t forget something. You make a shopping list so you don’t have to run back to the store for the basil leaves you forgot. You make a to-read list so that when you are looking for something to read, you can remember the name of the book your friend recommended. Because I play...
Where I grew up, we were a 30 minute drive from anywhere except a gas station and an elementary school; and even those were 6 miles from my house along a road 5 lanes wide with no sidewalks. I could not go anywhere or do anything unless my parents could drive me. Until the summer that I turned 14. That year, I met my best friend; he’d just moved...
How do we create a just, equitable society? How do we live sustainably? What is a life well-lived? How do I make the place where I live better? How do we make computer systems that empower people? Richard Feynman reportedly kept in mind a list of his twelve “favorite problems.” Whenever he encountered a new idea, he would compare it against each...
First and foremost let me state that this post is not about excluding people from the IndieWeb community. I am not here to be a gatekeeper. Rather, I am trying to call attention to a disconnect I see in how I’ve seen the IndieWeb movement promoted and how the IndieWeb community presents itself. What Even is the IndieWeb? The movement...
For my photo gallery I decided to use the JPEG files as templates in Eleventy. I parse the EXIF data from the image files for things like the published date in Eleventy and for the image alt text. I’m not convinced this is a good idea. It seems too clever by half, but I intend to stick with it for a while to see if it becomes a problem. The...
I think RSS[1] is great, but I sometimes feel like it’s at odds with one of my favorite things about the web. For one thing, I see less of my friends’ cool websites. A lot of the websites in my feed reader are really nice to look at. Some of their owners do periodic redesigns which are fun to see. I feel like I’m missing out a little on these...
My friend Hollie invited me to play a game on Mastodon under the hashtag “#10Films”. The rules are simple: Post a frame from a film that impacted you each day for ten days Do not include any explanation or identify the film (no posters) Each day, tag someone else to join in Below are the images I posted along with the movie titles. The...
Dave Rupert wrote a post about how to handle being accessibility-shamed that’s been making the rounds. It’s got some really solid advice for how to handle criticism (of any kind), so if you haven’t read it, I definitely recommend it. If you’ve been publicly shamed for anything, what matters most is how you respond next. You can double-down on...
One of my favorite uses of Web Components is as a container for HTML elements that helps manage some aspect of state. In this case, we can wrap a couple of elements to create a set of toggle buttons, like you might use for a theme picker on your website. Let me know what you think over on the fediverse: @darth_mall@notacult.social. A group of...
Wildfires have been a going concern in Colorado for a long time. When I was in elementary school, we had to evacuate and stay with friends for a couple nights because of a fire up Waterton Canyon. I’ve watched fires burning from my apartment windows while I packed bags in case we were given the order to leave. And it’s getting worse as we warm...
I turned 40 yesterday. I don’t mind getting older, it’s happening all the time. After all, I’m older than I’ve ever been. And now I’m even older. And now I’m even older. And now I’m even older. I’m older than I’ve ever been, and now I’m even older. And now I’m older still.[1] That said, I do find that I’m bothered by my birthday. I don’t remember...
Alex wrote about his productivity stream, which is something I’ve been thinking about for myself a lot lately. This kind of stuff is a bit like catnip for me, so I couldn’t really resist writing about my own tools and workflow, despite the fact that I’m experimenting pretty heavily with some changes to the process at the moment. I’m not sure how...
The other day, a friend of mine mentioned that they thought they’d discovered a problem with the sorting machine at their local Post Office which might have explained why they had so much mail getting mis-delivered. It appeared that the machine might be transposing two letters in the address and sorting the mail incorrectly. They were wrestling...
I just noticed that Jimbo Mathus recorded “Long Black Veil.” It’s not a surprise. “Long Black Veil” is a pretty popular song among the folk/roots music crowd. Tim O’Brien recorded it on Fiddler’s Green, and We Banjo 3 did it as well. It’s got a great chorus that’s easy to learn and fun to sing along to. It’s not a surprise that it’s popular. But...
I wrote previously about some changes I made to the design of this site; changes that made text that was previously invisible on the page, but still exposed to assistive technology, visible to everyone. These changes were prompted by a debate in the accessibility community about whether or not it would be good to have a native mechanism to create...
I just finished listening to the latest episode of The Joy of Why, Is There Math Beyond the Equals Sign?, in which Dr. Eugenia Cheng discusses category theory. It’s a fun episode. Dr. Cheng’s enthusiasm for her field is infectious. Category theory is a branch of mathematics I’d never heard of before this evening, and it is apparently a very...
If you’re at all involved in web development and concerned with accessibility, there’s a good chance you saw one or more articles recently debating the idea of adding a native way to visually hide elements in the DOM without removing them from the accessibility tree. It kicked off when TPGi published a breakdown of the .visually-hidden class and...
Generative “artificial intelligence” (AI) seems to have replaced “crypto” and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as the topic du jour. I burned out on this topic long before chatGPT launched and shifted the conversation from image generation to large language models (LLMs), so I’ll keep this brief. It surprised me today when I thought to myself, “if...
Lately I’ve been feeling like my publishing workflow is interfering with my blogging, so I’ve been looking into flat-file content management systems like Kirby. I really like the portability of markdown files that comes with a static site generator. And in theory I like Git-based workflows. I’ve never bothered implementing a drafts status in...
Lately I’ve been feeling that NPM has had a small negative impact on web development workflows. It feels very difficult to have a dev environment without a bundler. What I’d like to do is just rely on ECMAScript modules (ESM) imports in development because I’m not worried about the network latency and chained requests in development. Then for...
I wonder how many people care about HTTP methods anymore. Tools like GraphQL seem to just shrug and POST all the things. I kinda get it. Having a POST body makes it easier to send complex queries to the server. I’ve been struggling a little bit at work to devise URL parameters for specifying a bounding box on a map, or ranges of values that could...
File this under stuff nobody wants to hear about, but I’m going back to alphabetizing my CSS declarations. A year or two ago I got sold on ordering them based on a taxonomy, but I’m ready to declare defeat. Don’t get me wrong, a taxonomic ordering is a really great idea — I was using the ordering proposed by 9elements. To make this work I had to...
Henry Desroches wrote about his decision to leave New York City and move back to Denver. It struck a chord with me. My wife and I lived in Brooklyn for a little over five years. We were married in Brooklyn Bridge Park. A lot of our friends from grad school live in New York (although we were the only ones in Brooklyn). Still, when we left in 2018,...
The other day, Andy Bell published a great post about how developer experience is a poor excuse for building shitty websites and it got me thinking, “What even is ‘developer experience’? Is it necessarily at odds with user experience?” In truth, I think it may have gotten a bit of a bad wrap because it has been so thoughtlessly trotted out as an...
Robb Owen had a nice post about how his frontend development process is more like making a bowl from clay than it is assembling Lego bricks. The gist is that he’s not snapping together prefabricated pieces into a user interface, he builds the UI up over multiple passes. Each pass over the user interface refines it, makes it a little better. And...
There’s a great bot on the fediverse: TMBG Lyrics. It just posts random snippets of lyrics from They Might Be Giants’s songs. This morning, it posted this gem: Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn’t thinking isn’t thinking of “Where Your Eyes Don’t Go”, Lincoln (1988) by They Might Be Giants It’s a...
Last year I started buying music again. Mainly I just didn’t want to be tied to any specific streaming service and their willingness/ability to support whatever operating system or hardware I want to use. Also I want to support artists, but that’s a topic for another day.[1] The conundrum is always whether or not to buy something digitally or buy...
I have too many interests. Fiddle. Guitar. Piano. Board games. Reading. Biking. Skiing. Hiking. Jogging. Video games. Generative art. Juggling. Card magic. Web development. I don’t know if this is a common problem, but I suspect I’m not alone. If I were still childless and single, I might be able to find time to indulge all of these interests....
I signed up for bringback.blog. I noticed that Tom MacWright did, too. The commitment seems manageable: just three blog posts in January. I’ve already got three open drafts, at least one of which I’ll actually publish — maybe two. I’d be happy to see a resurgence of blogs. I think blogs are great. Hat-tip to Zach and Inês for bringing this to my...
For the first time in years, I had occasion to take my 27mm pancake lens off of my camera and use my 90mm. I could feel how out of practice I was taking photos of anything other than my kid. Still, I got a few shots I was happy with. I’m ambivalent about zoos. I understand that they can serve a function in conservation efforts, and that many...
Andy Bell wrote about how much he’s enjoying being on Mastodon. I can relate to the feeling of just wanting a place to chat with friends, but feeling like you have to be somewhere you hate being, viz. Twitter. This is also why I’ve enjoyed being on Mastodon for the past four years. My timeline moved relatively slowly. I wasn’t posting much,...
The topic of content warnings — often abbreviated “CW” — has been coming up quite a lot over on the fediverse[1]. As a result, I’ve been thinking about content warnings more carefully than I had previously. This is not a guide for using content warnings. I’m certainly not qualified to write that. I’m not here to tell you how you should use...
My interest in Astro has been growing slowly, and it’s causing an absurd reaction in my brain: the more interested in Astro I become, the more guilt I begin to feel because it feels disloyal to Eleventy. It is, of course, absurd to feel disloyal to a piece of software. One might as well feel disloyal to a hammer, but here we are. This is not a...
For the past couple of days we’ve been getting some much needed rain in Colorado — we’re getting quite a lot this morning. Every time I look out our front window and see the rain running down the gutters and pooling on the asphalt in the street I think, “What a waste.” So much of that water is just going to evaporate, instead of soaking into the...
We just finished watching Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman.[1] I absolutely adored it! It’s been over fifteen years since I read the comics and I had forgotten how much I loved these stories. “The Sound of Her Wings” is as beautiful in the show as I remember it from the comics. What a treat this was. The casting in the adaptation is superb. I...
Recently, Chris Fedinandi wrote about the constructor pattern and when you might use it. This got me thinking about a design pattern in JavaScript of which I’m fond—I think of the pattern as “callable objects”. I first encountered this pattern in D3, where it is used extensively to create utilities like scales. I probably call these “callable...
I think it’s hard to overstate the brilliance of Sir Terry Pratchett, although it may have been easy to miss because you were so busy laughing. I suspect—because I’ve seen it make the rounds on Twitter—many people are familiar with the Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness. The reason that the rich were so rich,...
A few months ago I started bullet journaling after my brother mentioned that he’d been doing it and that it was working well for him.[1] One reason bullet journalling was appealing to me was how it included task management as part of the practice. Shortly after graduating from college, I read Getting Things Done and it changed how I kept track of...
Eleventy uses the debug package to log debug messages to the console. If something is going wrong with your build, you can set the DEBUG environment variable to view log messages from specific parts of Eleventy, or all of it. The Eleventy docs refer to this as Debug Mode. DEBUG=Eleventy* eleventy Turn on debug logging for all of Eleventy....
In the grand tradition of web developers everywhere, I have redesigned my website. Hopefully for the last time. Once you choose the technology that runs your blog, use it. Don’t replace it, ever. Never ever rewrite it. — Tom MacWright, How to Blog I admire the fact that Tom MacWright’s website has had the same theme for about 10 years. He’s been...
For the last ten years, I’ve been using the same image for my phone’s lock screen / wallpaper. I made it over winter break while I was in grad school, so, coincidentally, this is just about ten years to the day since I made the wallpaper. My original “Don’t Panic” wallpaper. I had just learned how to create that glossy sticker effect...
When you're working with Nunjucks (or Jinja2), you have two[1] options for creating reusable bits of template: includes (I often refer to these as "partials") and macros. It's not always obvious why you should choose one over another. Just about anything you can do with a macro can also be done with a template include[2]. The heuristic I follow...
I don't use Docker for my development environments as a matter of course, but I do sometimes find that it is useful. I use it infrequently enough for development that I sometimes forget some of these tricks (specifically the one about the NPM cache, which I've now had to figure out twice). So, to save my future self some time, I thought I'd write...
Home page of the newly launched Science On a Sphere website Today we launched the new website for Science On a Sphere that I've been working on for the past year. The launch went surprisingly smoothly. I plan to do a more in-depth write up at some point, but for now these are some of the highlights for me. Improved Lighthouse Scores Three of the...
Programming isn't hard, it’s just extremely poorly explained and documented. — Heydon (@heydonworks) May 16, 2021 Nailed it. Heydon's being a bit silly and provocative again, but that doesn't mean he doesn't make a very good point. I only bring this up because it caused me to reflect on something I've belived...
I originally saw this on CSS Tricks. 🏠 They say an average person lives in 11 homes in their lifetime. What’s your number? (I’m currently at 8🤪) — CanadianPam (@PamelaApostolo1) May 1, 2021 I've lived in 17 different homes. I'm too paranoid to list out the cities the way Chris did — I'm pretty sure I've seen...
Finally! I'm very excited to have webmentions up and running (I hope). I've been planning to support webmentions on here since before I launched this site and I think I have it working. It's a little bit hard to test before you launch the thing, so I guess we'll see. What's a Webmention? Basically a webmention is just a way for you to respond or...
There's currently an enhancement requested for Eleventy to offer some kind of official asset pipeline. I was thinking about this problem at work (where I'm rebuilding the Science On a Sphere website in Eleventy) and came up with a Clever Hack™ using Eleventy's computed data, pagination, collections, and filters. Fair warning: this is probably too...
The other day I was listening to an episode of Rework where they were they were talking about their decision to switch hosting providers for their podcast because their old provider, Art19, was introducing targeted advertising to the platform. Basecamp as a company is eschewing targeted ads because mass surveillance doesn't align with their...