The easiest way to make an interface harder to maintain is to rebuild the browser badly. A div can look like a button. It can be given a click handler, a pressed style, a hover state, a focus ring, an ARIA role, a keydown listener for Enter, another one for Space, a disabled class that hopefully also blocks interaction, and enough attributes to convince assistive tech that it is interactive. Or it can be a button. That sounds obvious until you look inside a lot of modern component libraries.…
I've gotten both a baby and now a teen cardinal on my lifer list, I'm so stoked lmao Ok so like, a month ago I photographed a baby cardinal who was learning how to fly and was this awkward little frumpy mess - but today?? TODAY I GOT TO SEE THEM MORE GROWN UP and it's fucking glorious. Please observe!!! The color mixes from molting, the lack of proper crest, the way it looks like they decided to go Mohawk but cowarded out at the last minute. The way it looks like it's unsure of what it even is.…
Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. 2001: The Family Computer 3. 2004: Exploring the Web 4. 2007: Living There 5. 2012: When Everything Started Changing 6. 2026: Logging On Today 7. The Internet I Miss 8. Closing 1. Introduction The internet; what can I say? It's the driving force behind nearly the whole world today - economies, countries, communities, and more run solely on the internet these days. However, it wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, the internet didn't even exist. When it…
Photo by: Ailbhe Flynn via Unsplash I was into photography many years ago (like over 40 years ago), and in all this time there have been several significant changes. The single biggest is the change from analog film based photography to digital photography. This one change has completely changed aspects of photography that cannot be understated. For example, photographers today will never know the joys and horrors of working in a darkroom. Dealing with all the chemicals for developing film and…
Few months ago Cloudflare introduced Markdown for machines: As a business, to continue to stay ahead, now is the time to consider not just human visitors, or traditional wisdom for SEO-optimization, but start to treat agents as first-class citizens. Feeding raw HTML to an AI is like paying by the word to read packaging instead of the letter inside. You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript. This needs a browser built by thousands of engineers just to show you a paragraph.…
There is so much more to the internet than your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, and chat GPTs. And these things are not known by the general masses, not because it's a quality problem, but instead it's a discovery problem. Honestly, the content in these places are more human and heartwarming, if not high quality. That is, if you go on the right places. The internet is full of people and every person is unique. You might get a feeling of awe or you might come across very horrifying things.…
Uphill battle of selling 1-click Linux installer.
I stand in my kitchen, with the hum of the kettle boiling, and inevitably I glance at the windows of the apartment across. Bright in the morning sun, their laundry flaps in the wind, heavy with moisture, hung at weird angles along the three lines on pullies outside their window. They're too far to make any sound, but in my mind I hear the weeping of fabric, sobbing, begging to be pulled in to the safety of an indoor drying rack. The concept of Hung here is tenuous both in definition and…
Web browsers are not document viewers. They are customer acquisition channels for massive tech ecosystems. They don’t serve users, but corporations. AI features, VPNs, crypto wallets, and countless of other nonsense. Markdown, on the other hand, is a public good. It would empower writers to publish their words independently. It would strip out countless CMS systems, frameworks, trackers, and ads. All those things where the money sits. Markdown is practically anti-platform. It’s simple. Source:…
I try to do my best with my technology stack, by ensuring they meet my own morals and standards for life. I do this via a combination of informed choices; supporting independent developers; self-hosting. A combination of these help me feel I am doing the right thing. What is the Right thing?That is the million-dollar question. For me, I want to be as sure as I can that my tech stack is not exploiting people; is fair to the community; delivers and lives by standards I can identify with. Changes…
Thus far (see here and here), we have studied the first three passages in Adam Smith’s 79-page pamphlet: Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1784). Today, we will explore the next two substantive passages (Additions #4 and #5), which together take up three full pages. In his fourth insert (Addition #4, pp. 3-4), Smith describes Britain’s punitive trade policy toward France: “By what is called…
June is over and so is Junited 2026. Thank you so much for the fantastic response. I'll put together some numbers over the weekend. As some of you know, July means JulyReply. It's time for the third edition of this blog connecting event. The idea is straightforward and something many bloggers already do. Replying to others' blog posts in a "Re:" format. No contest, no challenge. Just a fun and rewarding way to connect with fellow bloggers. One thoughtful reply during the month is better than…
Robert has a lot of stuff up his sleeve for connecting bloggers around the smallweb. After an amazing Junited 2026, now it’s time for JulyReply 2026! I really enjoyed participating in Junited. Thanks to that, I connected with a few bloggers, one of whom was Imperfect. Imperfect inspired me to write reply posts, but I was reluctant until now. What’s a better excuse than JulyReply to start doing it? I’ll tag my posts with #JulyReply. Thanks, Robert, for organizing this!
Last week New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a bunch of his "democratic socialist" allies won several key primaries in the city. The victories kicked several Democratic party incumbents to the curb, instantaneously triggering a massive wave of extraction class hyperventilation echoed across the corporate press.Despite being a handful of primary victories in the deep blue areas of New York, it immediately triggered a wave of headlines about how "socialism" was now dangerously close to…
Notes from a burning Paris. People are dying – 55 people died in Paris alone in the past 24 hours. Festivals, school, gym classes are cancelled. Hundreds of thousands of chickens have perished across France. I just read an alert: a bus driver passed out from heatstroke and crashed into a tree in central Paris. I’m not sure of the details yet. Mosques have opened their doors so people can sleep on the cool tiles. The parks in the capital are open 24 hours for the immediate future. Thousands of…
I think I've been playing video games wrong my whole life. But I also think a lot of other people have too. I worry that the industry's relentless march towards prettier, more graphically sophisticated games is taking us away from the substance of why games are so good in the first place. I am coming into this argument as a convert. Previously, I would only buy games which looked amazing — and I mean that literally. I would scroll through the screenshots on Steam, and if it caught my eye…
A scene keeps playing in my head. Over and over again.A man is riding his bicycle. He crosses the street and starts weaving right to left. He hits a pole and falls down. Head first on the street. He isn't moving. I get off my bike and run towards him. Blood is gushing from his head. He's still not moving. I turn him around and talk to him. No response. I gently nudge him. I hear him breathing. While helping him I signal cars passing by. A lady stands next to me, she's calling an ambulance. More…
I use my keyboards a lot, my job as a software engineer involves quite a lot of typing, I also spend quite a lot of my spare time in front of a computer. I’ve been daily driving small keyboards for a while and have been enjoying doing so. Here’s a bit about which keyboards and why I like them. I built my first keyboard in 2014, a 44 key Atreus. I used my school’s laser cutter to cut sheets of clear acrylic for the case, hand-wired all the keys and diodes to a microcontroller board, and made…
John Gruber writes about those annoying popups every website seems to have now and while he does a great job tearing into these ubiquitous, user-hostile patterns, one of the things that stood out to me about his piece was this meta commentary on blogging. Here’s John: If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to…
YouTube used to be one of my favorite spots on the internet for years. I'd watch endless videos from various creators (half of which got outed as being absolute freaks [derogatory] in the last 10 years, but that's neither here nor there). It seemed like a place where people would just... well... broadcast themselves. That was the motto of YouTube for a long time. I'd come home from school and watch Halo 3 machinimas, Equals Three, SMOSH, some let's plays, someone's vlog, a bunch of college…
I shared some thoughts earlier about building Moments. In simple terms, it’s like Bear Blog, but focused on photos. I expected a handful of people to get it. More did than I thought. Some signed up. Some posted old photos. Some wrote just to say the feeling made sense. Not because it’s refined. It’s not. But because the idea connected: a calm space for photos. No metrics, no audience-building, no pressure. Most responses weren’t about adding features. People just got the premise: a photo can…
Some people take this idea further, with 36 key keyboards that eschew the outer most column of keys to reduce the burden on the pinkies. There are tricks to get more utility out of the most accessable keys, like using home row modifiers. I haven’t tried going that far yet but it is interesting – I have found 42 keys to be a sweet spot giving both the benefits I’ve explained above, as well as being similar enough to a standard keyboard that it hasn’t impacted my ability to type on anything else.…
Big tech social media, Mastodon, blogs. They all have inherited from the libertarian culture of the internet. And I'm tired of it.
I’ve been off social media for a while. I do dip into one of the platforms now and again, but my blog is where I do my posting. My online reading is via my RSS reader, Bubbles, Bear blog discovery, and Pika Pulse. The latter is new, and in beta. We all know that social media platforms are powered by an algorithm. We also know that their main function is to keep you on the platform for ads. So why bother shouting or attention while fighting an algorithm and have ai scrap your work and have no…
Please don't use an LLM to communicate with other human beings. I keep seeing people drafting documents, messages, and emails with some LLM, and it makes me sick. I experimented myself with the writing capabilities of the agents, and every time I felt something was missing from the text... I was missing. Communication is a fundamental skill, no matter the work you do! Being able to articulate your thoughts and deliver them in a way that is understandable by your audience has an impact in every…
In the UK, the hottest June day on record has been broken three days in a row. And it's not just the UK experiencing unprecedented levels of heat. France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have also recorded their highest-ever June temperatures in the past week.You can get a sense of the scale of the heat dome currently sitting over Europe with the European Heat
Lightning can strike the same spot many times. Goldfish can remember things for months. Bulls are colourblind. Vikings didn't wear horned helmets. Napoleon wasn't short. When I was looking over the topic for this month's IndieWeb Carnival run by Alex Hsu, "No Way!" the first few ideas that popped into my head were the most obvious. The well-known facts that weren't facts at all, but really, the truth about these facts is usually already well-known. Anti-facts, if you will. It's a fantastic…
I can't stop thinking about this stupid interaction I had while playing an online game with strangers. For context, my username is very obviously feminine and I don't hide the fact that I'm a woman when talking to strangers. Somehow, in the chat, the topic of operating systems came up and I mentioned that I use Linux. This man proceeded to tell me that I must be a man because women don't use Linux. It might just about be the stupidest thing I ever heard. As if I'm only capable of thinking about…
The Supreme Court legitimized bigotry again this morning with the excuse of protecting the children — or at least, those who play sports. The laws about transgender athletes have never been about sports or fairness, though. It’s not even just about trans people. They are about using the language of eugenics to narrow the definitions of gender and laying the groundwork so they can impose their gender roles onto everyone. Clarence Thomas knew that. And said the quiet — and scientifically wrong —…
There are questions every person I meet asks, and I’m getting sick of answering. Worse, the newest of these questions has been severely harming my motivation to write for several years. I didn’t want to talk about this, but I’m beginning to think I need to. Hopefully, if I get this off my chest, I’ll be able to move on to writing about things I love. the dreaded question Every time I tell someone new that I’m a writer, they pause for a moment, then ask the same question: “So, what do you think…