kiko.io Posts

Re: JulyReply 2026, a blog connecting month

2026-07-02T18:27:00.000Z

June has just ended, and it was fun to take part in Robert’s Junited campaign, even though I had a few days with gaps and only managed to collect 29 links. For my first time participating, though, that’s pretty near optimal.

Today Robert has launched the next stage: JulyReply. Now it’s not just about collecting, but about replying to posts. Just the right thing for me, since I’m feeling a bit lazy about writing actually and prefer to tinker with my photos.

#JulyReply

JulyReply 2026, a blog connecting month

June is done and Junited 2026 wrapped up. Now it's time for JulyReply, the third edition of this blog connecting event where bloggers reply to each other's posts throughout July.

robertbirming.com

This post is part of the #JulyReply campaign initiated by Robert Birming.

TownSquare - Chatting with Strangers

2026-06-26T12:02:17.000Z

You stroll around a traditional market in town, stop at a stall and have a look at what’s on offer. You’re never alone, as others are doing the same. Unless you’re in a hurry and you like people, it’s quite common to strike up a casual conversation with other stall-goers or even the stallholder. “The stand is quite busy.” “The product is rather expensive, though.” “It’s hot today, but it’s finally supposed to rain this afternoon.” Conversations that we usually forget quite quickly, but which make us social beings.

One problem with the traditional internet, on the other hand, is that you usually ‘surf’ the web on your own. Reading a blog post is a passive activity, and contact with the blogger, if possible at all, is asynchronous. Social networks are somewhat different in this regard, but the platforms usually operate in a silo, acting in their own interests – with all the associated excesses – and outside the confines of your own blog. The latter can be mitigated somewhat, for example, by using tools such as Mentions United to bring platform interactions ‘home’, but these interactions are still asynchronous and merely link content to comments, likes and the like.

Cauê Napier has reduced the distance between blog owners and visitors in a playful way with his TownSquare project – and right on the blog itself, using embedded JavaScript and CSS as a widget. In an interactive, customizable scene, your own website acts as a stall, and visitors stroll past as stick figures whom you can address in a sort of chat. You can give yourself a name and, browser-dependent, crown yourself the owner in the admin console so that other visitors can see when the blogger is present. There, you can also moderate the chats and kick users out if they behave badly.

The project is available on GitHub (without license specified so far) and consists of the mentioned web widget and a Node.js server, which you can self-host if you wish to operate independently of Cauê’s own instance.

TownSquare is less than a month old, and Cauê openly admits that AI did most of the work. Whilst that leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste at first, I find the concept convincing and have confidence that he will properly test all upcoming enhancements before release. That’s why you’ll find the new town square in the footer of all my pages…

Hacker News - Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites

news.ycombinator.com

Good News on Google's AI Overviews

2026-06-11T08:54:00.000Z

It was clear that Google’s unilateral abandonment of the quid pro quo principle of search — now effectively replaced by an AI-generated summary — poses a threat to the internet and will eventually backfire. Now there is a court ruling from Germany that holds Google directly responsible for false statements in its “search” results, whereas previously it could fall back on the excuse of merely listing the most relevant hits. Very good, keep it up. Perhaps this will help prevent the dystopias announced at this year’s I/O conference.

More Links:
TechPolicy: Google’s ‘New Era for AI Search’ May Threaten Democracy

#AI

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators don't apply to AI overviews. In this case, Google's AI had falsely linked two publishers to fraud and made claims that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The ruling could set a precedent for AI-generated content liability worldwide.

the-decoder.com

Miniatur Wunderland, Hamburg @ 2026-06-04

2026-06-07T12:39:33.000Z

Many, many years ago, my darling and I planned a long weekend in Hamburg, including a sightseeing bus tour, a harbor cruise, and all the other things you typically do in Germany’s northernmost metro area when you’re there together for the first time.

Since even as a grown man, I can hardly shake off my inner child, I suggested visiting the famous Miniatur Wunderland (Wikipedia) in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt, and she didn’t mind, even though she seemed skeptical at first. Girls just don’t usually play with model trains, but what Gerrit and Frederik Braun, the founders of Miniatur Wunderland, have built there in the space of a 150-year-old warehouse has since become famous far beyond the borders of Hamburg, so she let herself be persuaded.

Now we’re both die-hard fans of this XXXXXL model train layout (biggest in the world!), because what sets it apart from others isn’t just the size, but also the attention to detail and the humor of its builders, who are also too stubborn to give up when something seems technically impossible. Just think of the 10 years it took to develop real Formula 1 races with miniature race cars in the Monaco section.

We try to visit Hamburg once a year, and this year, combining our trip with the Linkin Park concert made it the perfect opportunity for our fifth (or sixth?) visit to Miniatur Wunderland. I’ve taken lots and lots of photos of the exhibit in the past, but I’ve never posted them here before — until now.

Construction Site: South America

Another thing that makes Wonderland so appealing is the fact that new attractions are always being built right in plain view, allowing visitors to literally look over the builders’ shoulders. Currently, the largest section to date is nearing completion: South America, featuring the Atacama Desert and the Rainforest, created in collaboration with the Argentine company United Scale Arts of the Martinez family from Pilar, who have already built the majority of the Patagonia and Rio de Janeiro sections. This new section is by far the largest ever created at Wunderland: nearly 160 square meters, spanning two floors!

A few shipping containers carrying the building components arrived in Hamburg this spring, and the team is currently putting everything together and adding the finishing touches. For those interested in seeing the construction process over the years, I recommend the YouTube playlist “Regenwald-Updates” (German). I’m sooo excited to see how it turns out in the end. Our next trip to Hamburg is practically booked…

You want to see more photos from the Miniatur Wunderland, Hamburg? Go ahead …

Miniatur Wunderland - kiko.io

Photo Box 'Miniatur Wunderland' by Kristof Zerbe

kiko.io

Hamburg Views

2026-06-07T10:29:26.000Z

The first settlement, known as Hammaburg, dates back to the 8th century AD. What developed over the following 1,200 years is what we know today as Germany’s second-largest city: Hamburg.

My partner and I go there for two or three days every year because we simply love the city, the harbor, the nearby sea, and the city’s vibe, as well as the Miniatur Wunderland located there, which is a once-a-year fixture on our travel calendar.

There’s never enough time to wander around the city and take photos, but I snapped a few this time as well…

Linkin Park, Hamburg @ 2026-06-03

2026-06-06T13:39:58.000Z

It’s been 25 years since I first heard Chester Bennington growling into a microphone, and ever since then I’ve been a fan of both hard rock and crossover. My goodness, what gems these guys from Linkin Park delivered in the 2000s. “Crawling” isn’t just on my all-time best playlist, but I can sing along to it at any time (or so I like to think ;)

Of course, I too was saddened in 2017 when the news of Chester’s tragic death broke, knowing for certain that there would never be any new music from this extraordinary group, because their music was – and still is – defined by his incredible voice.

When Mike Shinoda announced in 2024 that Emily Armstrong would be taking Chester’s place in the band and that new material was on the way, I was sceptical at first… but the guys – and now the lady too – have proven me wrong. The NEW Linkin Park are brilliant, and Emily brings a fresh, positive touch to the mix.

So I just had to get tickets for myself and my girl for one of the concerts on their tour in Germany, and we chose Hamburg… at the stadium with around 50,000 other fans. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right … … and it was just awesome!

🤘

Blooming Velmede

2026-06-02T15:27:51.000Z

The mother of my sunshine has a beautiful garden behind her house, right by the river Ruhr, which her son tends with great passion. There are quite a few gorgeous flowers in bloom at the moment and it’s simply lovely. I had to made some photos, even with my crappy smartphone. Here are a few shots. Enjoy.

Link Journal 26-05

2026-06-02T06:15:54.000Z

Over the past month of May, I’ve collected 17 links for my link journal.

2026-05-07

Chrome secretly installs a 4GB AI model on Windows 11 – here’s how to stop it

pureinfotech.com

AI Browser

Stop Chrome from silently downloading the 4GB Gemini Nano model on Windows 11. Use this Registry fix to block it for good.

Chrome secretly installed U2's Songs of Innocence without your consent and how to uninstall (4gb AI in Chrome) - Pocketables

There's been a lot of talk about where a 4gb AI file on people's computers came from and how Chrome secretly pushed it... much like they secretly pushed

pocketables.com

Google’s Prompt API

No web standard should require you to agree to an advertising company’s “terms of use.”

wil.to

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy!

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.

www.thatprivacyguy.com

2026-05-09

I'm off GitHub

kevquirk.com

Git Codeberg

GitHub has now been officially replaced with Codeberg.

2026-05-10

Email address obfuscation - What works in 2026

spencermortensen.com

Security Mail

Here are some of the best techniques for keeping email addresses hidden from spammers—along with the statistics on how likely they are to be broken.

2026-05-10

taken

sinceyouarrived.world

Security

A web page that tells you what your browser gave away the moment you arrived. No login, no form, no permission. Most pages do this. None of them tell you.

2026-05-12

Datatype — variable font that turns text into charts

franktisellano.github.io

Font Charts

An OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images — just type.

A data font, from the inside out | All about Ken Hawkins

Datatype is a variable font that turns text into tiny inline charts.

www.allaboutken.com

2026-05-14

Continue

www.sitepoint.com

AI VSCode

Comprehensive guide covering Continue.dev for Developers: The Complete Local AI Coding Assistant Setup with practical implementation details.

2026-05-14

Install web apps with the new HTML install element

developer.chrome.com

Browser PWA

Installing web apps has always required JavaScript. When you use the `beforeinstallprompt` event, the installation flow lives entirely in script. The new `<install>` element changes that: drop a single HTML element into your page and the browser renders a trusted install button for you, with no JavaScript required.

2026-05-14

Media Queries Range Syntax

ishadeed.com

CSS

Media queries are the backbone of responsive design. We use them to control how a design should change based on the viewport size. But the `min-width` and `max-width` syntax can be confusing, and in some cases, cause layout bugs that take time to spot. This article aims to convince you to use range queries, starting today.

2026-05-14

Planting a Website on Codeberg Pages

shellsharks.com

Hosting

How I set up a new static site using Codeberg pages

2026-05-14

Vanilla Scroll Sky

github.com

JS CSS/Animation

A lightweight, JavaScript-free CSS utility for modern scroll-driven storytelling sections - ulrischa/vanilla-scroll-sky

2026-05-16

Animating Focus with View Transitions

frontendmasters.com

CSS/Animation

Let's try a fresh take on animating focus rings around a page. Flying focus, as it were. Only instead of measuring where elements are ourselves, we'll let View Transitions figure it out.

2026-05-16

Conditional Content Visibility with show-when Web Component

www.cssscript.com

WebComponents

A Web Component that shows or hides content based on URL params, hash, media queries, CSS support, or network state.

GitHub - oddbird/show-when: An element that shows or hides based on provided conditions

An element that shows or hides based on provided conditions - oddbird/show-when

github.com

2026-05-18

Using the round() function to get a more predictable fluid sizing

ishadeed.com

CSS

Using the round() function to get a more predictable fluid sizing.

2026-05-21

The O(n^2) Bug That Looked Like Clean Code

kitmul.com

JavaScript

Five production-breaking patterns where quadratic complexity hides behind readable, idiomatic JavaScript. Why .find() inside .map() passes code review and fails at scale; and the one-line fixes that drop O(n^2) to O(n).

2026-05-25

brownies - 🍫 Tastier cookies, local, session, and db storage in a tiny package

github.com

Browser JavaScript

🍫 Tastier cookies, local, session, and db storage in a tiny package. Includes subscribe() events for changes. - franciscop/brownies

2026-05-25

npq - safely install npm packages by auditing them pre-install stage

github.com

NPM

safely install npm packages by auditing them pre-install stage - lirantal/npq

2026-05-30

Color Grade Photos in Lightroom Using Complementary Colors

fstoppers.com

Lightroom

Sean Dalton breaks down Lightroom's color grading panel and how to use complementary color combinations like blue-orange and green-red to add depth and mood. See real before-and-after examples.

Updated:

2026-06-01T05:45:14.000Z

Back in the day, there were only hunters and gatherers, and I would certainly have been in the latter group. Collecting things is satisfying.

This month, I’ll be collecting links to blog posts as part of Robert’s Junited 2026 campaign on this page. Keep an eye on it …

Junited: a blog love letter

May has been, and still is, all about the wonderful WeblogPoMo. Just one more week to go. Let’s keep it up, friends! Some folks have been asking if there’...

robertbirming.com

Imagining human-oriented online posts – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

tracydurnell.com

Distinguishing Technology From Technology - Geoff Graham

This isn't a post on AI (thank God). It also isn't really a post about tech. Well, it sorta is, but tangential to tech in the sense that I've come to a

geoffgraham.me

Gmail Thinks I'm Stupid, So I Left

Gmail's rapid descent into belittling their users, powered by AI.

moddedbear.com

An Ode to the Exacting Pedantry of Computers

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

blog.jim-nielsen.com

GitHub Copilot's metered billing: the wake-up call we needed (but didn't want)

Explore the implications of GitHub Copilot's metered billing and how it reshapes developer workflows and AI tool usage.

www.eliostruyf.com

Now that your newsletter is AI-generated, I've Unsubscribed

I've remained subscribed to some newsletters for over 20 years. The authors managed to keep my attention all that time. But then, one day, they decided to switch to an AI-generated newsletter without

idiallo.com

Self-Hosting Adventures

The last essay I wrote about mercury was the clean version. One evening, six sites, a tidy migration, a satisfied ending. This is the other version. The one...

kennethreitz.org

Mental defrag – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

tracydurnell.com

A Wake Up Call

When I first met my wife, around seven years ago, she was what I would call a typical internet user. She was glued to Facebook and Pinterest and spent a lot of time curating her feeds and her image. She wasn't an influencer, ...

brandons-journal.com

More molly guards – Unsung

A blog about software craft and quality

unsung.aresluna.org

Being “Good” at Things

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

blog.jim-nielsen.com

“Don’t You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?”

Can ChatGPT replace translators? A freelance translator shares a funny Ottawa story about AI translation, professional judgment and why human expertise still matters.

correresmidestino.com

The honest truth about leaders who want to replace their workers with AI

"The problem tends to show up when a CEO is handed an agentic tool like Claude Code, and has it create something, which will work just fine, and thinks “oh, wait, why do we need so many people, when I can just sit here and make things work?”This is a bad CEO."

werd.io

Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb

Responding to criticism of 'buy me a coffee' links on blogs, I argue that asking for support isn't commodification—it's mutual aid! Exploring the economic pressures on creators, the history of mutual aid, and why the IndieWeb needs community support mechanisms to sustain independent art.

brennan.day

Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other - cauenapier

Releasing Town Square. Bring back the feeling that real people are browsing your site with you.

cauenapier.com

I Fired Google

One of the most irritating developments of modern life is the way companies keep improving things that were already working. Nobody asked for New Coke. Nobody asked for cars that require IT support and 3

www.theartofdoingstuff.com

Career Update - Life After Stepping Down - Kev Quirk

It's been 8 months since I stepped down as a global exec. Here's how it's going.

kevquirk.com

Photography Is Not About Photography | Fstoppers

Photography succeeds when rooted in lived experience, not gear. Great photographers study life, literature, cinema, and culture—not just technical specs. Why consciousness matters more than cameras.

fstoppers.com

Degitalisierung - Montage

Ähnlich wie in Propagandafilmen wird heute daran geforscht, wie sich Werbebotschaften gut in KI-Suchen integrieren lassen. Mit Blick auf Google stellt sich die Frage, ob es da nicht einen harten Schnitt braucht.

netzpolitik.org

Blog posts as starting points - James' Coffee Blog

jamesg.blog

My Neighbour tells me I am Crazy!

She may well be correct, but let's have some context.I live on the outskirts of a small village, which has one road in. There's no out unless you want t...

forkingmad.blog

Fuck Brexit

10 years ago I woke up in a tent in Glastonbury and realised that the utterly unthinkable had happened. We spent the morning, we festival goers, wandering around in a daze. It can’t be true?!…

www.gordonmclean.co.uk

Your Grid Lanes will likely fail WCAG 2.4.3 - Manuel Matuzovic

I’m a frontend developer, consultant, accessibility auditor, blogger, teacher, and book author from Austria.

www.matuzo.at

Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

blog.jim-nielsen.com

Founding a Company in Germany: €9,600, 152 Days, and I Still Can’t Send an Invoice

I started a company in Germany in late January. By late June I had spent 9,600 euros, registered two companies, and still cannot issue a single invoice of my...

paolino.me

Maybe "is AI a bubble?" is the wrong question

Bulls and bears agree the technology is real—they disagree on the clocks. Not whether AI is a bubble, but whether the payoff arrives before the financing runs out.

emilesilvis.com

Finishing

On perseverance and care as anti-slop.

seanvoisen.com

Every Commit A Sentence: Git Commit Messages for Bloggers

I had 448 `feat:` commits and 417 `fix:` commits. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. Here's why conventional commits were never designed for a writer's blog, and the eleven-type system I built to replace them.

brennan.day

Is AI Profitable Yet?

2026-05-27T10:49:00.000Z

I’ve been asking myself for a while now, with all the hype surrounding AI, who’s supposed to pay for all the money being thrown into this technological meat grinder… or rather, when the enthusiastic managers will realize that it’s them. So every fanboy deserves a look at this website …

#AI

Is AI Profitable Yet?

isaiprofitable.com

Well, for you it's enough

2026-05-17T14:01:00.000Z

This 20 minute video, I found today, illustrates impressively why AI and above all Generative AI is nothing more than worthless.

The original (and best version) is in German, but the translation in English (YT AI?) does the job…

Für Euch reicht’s from Fynn Kröger:

Es ist die Haltung von Influencern, Fernsehsendern, Filmproduktionen und Marken da draußen, das es für das eigentliche Publikum schon reichen würde, ihnen nur Schatten an die Wand zu werfen, statt ihnen die echten Objekte vor dem Feuer zu zeigen.

(It is the attitude of influencers, TV stations, film productions and brands out there, that it would be enough for the own audience simply to just cast shadows on the wall, instead of showing them the real objects in front of the fire.)

Crochet Monsters

2026-05-16T15:44:28.000Z

To me, my sweetheart is a phenomenon. With two needles and an indefinite amount of wool in various colours, she whips up all sorts of little marvels at a speed that would take me just to get my fingers back in order.

Most of the things she crochets are made for her children, or for the fund-raising efforts of the kindergarten where she works, as every now and then the parents’ support group organises a children’s bazaar and all the earnings go to the little ones. And soon these little monsters will disappear into the pocket of another little monster in exchange for a fiver from their parents.

This isn’t the first time she’s crocheted a whole gang of different characters, but her figures - and therefore her craftsmanship - deserve to be memorialised forever on the internet.

Belated May

2026-05-10T14:59:19.000Z

This year, I was late getting started with taking photos in Thomas’ garden. Whereas I’m usually out and about as early as March, I only managed to take the first pictures of his extraordinary plants this weekend, and I’ve probably missed the early bloomers this year.

There were plenty of reasons: holidays, bad weather, lack of time and so on, but now the season has kicked off and you can look forward to new photos from the Thomas Garden series every month.

Link Journal 26-04

2026-05-10T11:52:13.000Z

Over the past month of April, I’ve collected 16 links for my link journal.

2026-04-03

Introducing view-transitions-toolkit ..

www.bram.us

CSS/Animation JavaScript

Over the past years, I’ve published a bunch of View Transitions contents: articles, talks, demos, etc. I’ve also done a bunch of more experimental things with them, such as optimizing the keyframes or driving a View Transition by scroll.What I noticed while doing all those experiments is that I repeated a lot of the code … and they were scattered a bit all over the place as well. So I bundled that all up in a package: view-transitions-toolkit.

2026-04-06

Password Protecting Static Site Content with WASM

al9000.com

JavaScript Security

a post from alan w. smith

2026-04-08

Disasters I've seen in a microservices world

world.hey.com

Architecture

When Martin Fowler's post about microservices came out in 2014, the teams where I worked were already building service-oriented architectures. That post and the subsequent hype made their way into almost every software team in the world. The "Netflix OSS stack" was the coolest thing back then, allowing engineers worldwide to leverage N...

Disasters I've seen in a microservices world, part II

When I first wrote about microservice disasters, I thought we'd eventually "solve" them, with better tooling, frameworks, and operational maturity. We didn't. We just learned to live with the chaos. Distributed systems will always surprise you: timeouts, retries, and fallacies don't disappear; they just shift shape. Maybe that's the re...

world.hey.com

2026-04-10

The AI Great Leap Forward

leehanchung.github.io

In 1958, Mao ordered every village to produce steel. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Today's top-down AI mandates are producing the same pattern: ba...

2026-04-10

Google Maps for Codebases - Paste a GitHub URL, Ask Anything

dev.to

Coding

Navigating a large codebase for the first time is painful. You clone the repo, realize there are 300...

GitHub - starlightknown/codebase-navigator

Contribute to starlightknown/codebase-navigator development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

2026-04-11

Using CSS animations as state machines to remember focus and hover states with CSS only

patrickbrosset.com

CSS

I discovered this CSS-only trick to store the past <code>:focus</code> or <code>:hover</code> state of any element. Without JavaScript, you can style elements depending on whether they were ever focused or hovered. Here's how it works.

2026-04-14

Squash and Stretch

www.joshwcomeau.com

CSS/Animation

Have you ever heard of Disney’s 12 Basic Principles of Animation? In this tutorial, we’ll explore how we can use the very first principle to create SVG micro-interactions that feel way more natural and believable. It’s one of those small things that has a big impact.

2026-04-15

vanilla-jcrop

github.com

JS Component Imaging

Modern, dependency-free image cropping library. Drop-in replacement for the classic JCrop without jQuery. - tijoladev/vanilla-jcrop

2026-04-17

The Intl API ..

polypane.app

JavaScript

Chances are you've used Moment.js , date-fns , Luxon , or numeral.js at some point. Developers have relied on these libraries for years to format dates…

2026-04-21

For the Love of Obsidian and IndieWeb

blog.giersig.eu

IndieWeb Obsidian

For the Love of Obsidian and IndieWeb Planted: 14 March 2026 on/memex smallweb/indieweb dev 🌳 Evergreen Tended: 21 April 2026 I spent a few hours building a bridge between my favourite writing tool a...

2026-04-25

JSON Alexander - Syntax highlighting and tree view in the browser

www.heise.de

Browser

Syntax highlighting and tree view: The add-on improves the display of JSON data, especially for API developers.

2026-04-25

Madblog - A Markdown Folder That Federates Everywhere

blog.fabiomanganiello.com

Blog

A lightweight blogging engine based on text files, with native Fediverse and IndieWeb support

2026-04-25

Mathematical curve based loading animations

github.com

CSS JavaScript

A lightweight gallery of mathematical curve based loading animations with modal previews, formulas, and copyable code snippets. - Paidax01/math-curve-loaders

2026-04-26

Quick and Dirty Colour Palettes using color-mix

www.alwaystwisted.com

CSS

Learn how to use CSS color-mix() to create tints, shades, opacity variants, and even dynamic palettes for your projects. From simple setups to advanced techniques, this guide explores how to enhance your design system and streamline theming with modern CSS tools.

color-mix() CSS function - CSS | MDN

The color-mix() functional notation takes one or more <color> values and returns the result of mixing them in a given colorspace by a given amount.

developer.mozilla.org

2026-04-30

Multi-stroke text effect in CSS

yuanchuan.dev

CSS

I used to see that retro multi-stroke text effect quite often and tried to replicate it using the CSS text-stroke property, but the results never quite matched. Because text-stroke accepts a single value, stacking elements was the only workaround I could think of, though it didn't seem to work.

2026-04-30

Scroll-Driven Animations

www.joshwcomeau.com

CSS

The new Animation Timeline API allows us to create dynamic scroll animations without any JavaScript! It’s honestly a very lovely API, and in this blog post, we’ll explore some of the super cool things we can do with it.

Integration of the Byline Feed Extension

2026-05-07T10:28:48.000Z

Lately, there’s been a lot of buzz in my tech bubble about good old RSS/Atom feeds. Not only are people rediscovering them and making them available on their blogs, but new services are also popping up around this 30-year-old technology. It’s just so wonderfully independent and fits the trend of moving away from increasingly terrible platforms at the protocol level and returning to the free, open internet.

A good example of this is, of course, my new daily companion Bubbles by Ben, but also initiatives like Sourcefeed by Terry Godier, which rely on RSS-based content publishing WITHOUT a dedicated website. Write, Feed, done.

Terry recently published another project that Ben had addressed in a similar way a few days earlier. Ben’s was about integrating a Fediverse address into the commenting process on Bubbles via a meta tag on one’s own blog. In other words, enriching the posts extracted from the feed with additional information about the blogger.

Terry now has published a specification for an RSS/Atom extension called byline, which allows any desired personal information to be integrated directly into the feed.

My plan with RSS

With Current, Sourcefeed, and Byline all in the world now, the thesis is probably close to being clear. I fundamentally believe that people want to make things …

blog.terrygodier.com

The specification already leaves very few questions unanswered and even includes a generator for easily generating the code, as well as a validator, which unfortunately cannot yet handle URLs.

atom.xml
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:byline="https://bylinespec.org/1.0">
  ...
  
  <byline:contributors>
    <byline:person id="kristofz">
      <byline:name>Kristof Zerbe</byline:name>
      <byline:url>https://kiko.io</byline:url>
      <byline:avatar>https://kiko.io/images/kiko-reverentgeek-200-straight.png</byline:avatar>
      <byline:profile href="https://indieweb.social/@kiko" rel="mastodon"/>
      <byline:profile href="https://github.com/kristofzerbe" rel="github"/>
      ... more profiles
      <byline:uses>https://kiko.io/uses</byline:uses>
      <byline:theme style="light"/>
    </byline:person>
  </byline:contributors>
  
  <entry> ... </entry>
  ...
</feed>

Anyone who is familiar with my website knows that I’m actually quite generous — some might even say wasteful — with my basic personal information, such as my real name and profile links. For example, the footer always includes a meta link that allows anyone to pull the JSON-LD data embedded in the pages, which I’ve deliberately made machine-readable.

Of course, Ben could now use Bubbles to query the bloggers’ websites for JSON-LD after reading the feed, but the question is, why should Bubbles make any additional requests at all when I can already provide everything directly in the feed?!

All 6 of my feeds (RSS, Atom, JSON with full text or excerpts) now include a byline block, which not only saves Ben from having to make additional requests but also eliminates the question of what information he can or should use. I simply deliver it with the feed.

With byline, some of the hoops you have to jump through to provide or retrieve additional information about the person beyond the standard author field become unnecessary. And as always on the open and free web, it’s up to each individual to decide what and how much of it they use. I hope that Terry’s idea will be a success and that classic feed validators like the W3C Feed Validation Service, RSS Validator, or CAP-Validator will quickly add the new extension to their portfolio and more blogs start to integrate byline.

Spread the word …

Byline: Structured Identity for Syndication Feeds

An open specification that adds author context to RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed.

www.bylinespec.org

Mentions United Loves Bubbles

2026-04-29T13:11:26.000Z

As I wrote recently, I Love Bubbles. The new blog post aggregator (based on the RSS feeds of a curated list of blogs) has become part of my morning routine: making coffee, browsing my blogroll, opening Bubbles, and discovering new posts from blogs I’ve never heard of before — though that’s about to change ;)

Since my blog is also included in Bubbles’ list — and I imagine others are in the same boat — I suspect the reach of my posts will increase somewhat. Previously, I could only achieve this by manually syndicating my posts, primarily on Mastodon and IndieNews, and my photos on Vernissage and Pixelfed.

Now Bubbles helps me on that, by automatically syndicating its entry to its own GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse. And of course, I’m interested in bringing the interactions with my post, that accumulate there, back to my site, just as I already do with the other platforms through my Mentions United project. That’s why there’s now a new Bubbles plugin …

Bubbles not only lets users vote on posts to determine the rankings in the TOP and HOT sections, but also allows them to comment via the mentioned GoToSocial instance. Both types of interaction can be accessed via a single API without an access token, which Ben has kindly made available to us. The structure of the new plugin looks like this:

For those unfamiliar with how Mentions United works, here’s a brief overview: The JavaScript-based client system consists of a main script to which two different types of plugins can be registered:

Provider Plugins, for collecting interactions from a specific platform
Renderer Plugins, for displaying the interactions converted to a uniform format in a specific location within the page’s HTML

The Bubbles plugin is therefore a new Provider plugin that collects not only the votes, but also all other interactions in a total of 4 separate requests. Key value to all this is the syndication URL of the entry on Bubbles, like https://bubbles.town/entry/114467.

For more information, I recommend my initial article Mentions United … 3, 2, 1, Go on the project and what it is all about.

To integrate the plugin into your website, you just need a little experience with JavaScript … and some predefined empty HTML elements in your posts page, where the generated code will be placed by Mentions United.

Include the main script, the Provider plugin and the desired Renderer plugins (here two of those I use for my posts):

<script src="/js/mentions-united.js"></script>
<script src="/js/mentions-united-provider_bubbles.js"></script>
<script src="/js/mentions-united-renderer_avatars-by-type.js"></script>
<script src="/js/mentions-united-renderer_grouplist-by-origin.js"></script>

Initialize the main script with the required options and the list of plugins:

// wait until the page is loaded ...
window.addEventListener('load', function () {

  // init Mentions United with your name as option, 
  // to distinguish your interactions from others', 
  // and an array of new instances of the plugins 
  // with their options
  const mentionsUnited = new MentionsUnited({ 
    ownerName: "__MY-NAME__" 
  },[
    new MentionsUnitedProvider_Bubbles({ 
      syndicationUrl: "__BUBBLES-ENTRY-URL__"
    }),
    new MentionsUnitedRenderer_AvatarsByType({
      placeholderId: "__LIKES-PLACEHOLDER-ID__",
      typeVerb: "like"
    }),
    new MentionsUnitedRenderer_AvatarsByType({
      placeholderId: "__REPOSTS-PLACEHOLDER-ID__",
      typeVerb: "repost"
    }),
    new MentionsUnitedRenderer_GroupListByOrigin({
      placeholderId: "__GROUPLIST-PLACEHOLDER-ID__",
      skipTypes: "like, repost"
    })
  ]);

}

(Please replace the __VARIABLES__ in the sample with your data.)

Let it run

mentionsUnited.load()
  .then(() => {
    return mentionsUnited.show();
  })
  .then((count) => {
    // do something, if needed
  });

All you have to do now is spruce up the raw HTML inserted by the scripts with a little CSS so it fits your design.

As I write this, it occurs to me that passing the Bubbles entry URL in the new provider plugin isn’t actually necessary, because Ben has kindly written an API endpoint that can resolve it, based on the blog post URL. I’m sure I can integrate this into the next version soon.

I Love Bubbles

2026-04-19T10:50:39.000Z

Any new way of interconnecting websites and users on the IndieWeb is not only welcome but also vital for a stable counterbalance to Big Tech’s shitty walled gardens. Yesterday I stumbled across a really good and new one, that integrates also the Fediverse: Bubbles from Ben.

We monitor thousands of independent, personal blogs via RSS. Every new post appears on Bubbles automatically. Nobody submits individual links.The blogs were hand-picked from various curated sources and individually reviewed.

There are currently around 5,000 blogs and I was surprised to find my own among them.

You can use Bubbles to jump into all new posts of these blogs freely, but if you log in to Bubbles using your own Fediverse account (Mastodon, Pixelfed or whatever federated platform you like), you are also able to vote or comment on posts or follow an entire blog.

This enables Bubbles to generate three views:

NEW - new posts
HOT - posts ranked by votes and freshness
TOP - post people are commenting currently

The commenting thing is particularly interesting because it uses automatically syndicated posts on GoToSocial under @bubbles@social.bubbles.town. Comments therefore do not end up in some dubious databases, but in the structures intended for this purpose by the ActivityPub protocol.

Anyone familiar with my website may know that I follow exactly the same approach for posts and photo comments, except that I manually set the syndication on Mastodon, Pixelfed or Vernissage. When loading a certain page, I use my Mentions United script to collect all comments on that post from the various platforms via its syndications and display them below the post.

Here, Bubbles syndicates automatically for me, and all I need now is to implement a GoToSocial plugin for Mentions United to show these syndications and the corresponding comments under the post too. Awesome … stay tuned.

More than that … Ben is providing a tiny script called vote.js to embed the given votes from Bubbles on a posts page. See Embed the Bubbles vote count

For more info about Bubbles, I recommend to read the detailed FAQ to learn more of this amazing project.

Versengold, Wiesbaden @ 2026-04-09

2026-04-11T10:22:18.000Z

It was time to see Versengold again… and for the first time in my hometown of Wiesbaden. It’s great when it only takes a 10-minute bus ride to see your favorite band.

Earlier this year, the guys released their ninth studio album, and it rightfully climbed straight to the top of the German album charts. We’ve seen the band from the far north of Germany just as many times before… and this time they delivered by far their best show. On the one hand, it was really professional and varied (fire, confetti cannons, etc.), and on the other, you could really tell the guys were having fun with their music, and that energy transferred 100% to the audience. The crowd was jumping and bouncing, chanting in unison, “Versen”… “Gold,” “Versen”… “Gold”…

The band brought along Kupfergold as the opening act for the first time—a band whose music isn’t just similar to Versengold’s in name. They’re funny as hell and put on a fantastic show :D

Stickers

2026-04-05T16:29:20.000Z

I’m 57 and currently hooked on stickers, and AI isn’t entirely innocent in this, combined with a bit of a guilty conscience - but it’s a lot of fun.

I recently “retired” my old business laptop after just two short years, with a battery life of 28 minutes after a full charge, and somehow I felt sorry, because the best thing about that otherwise junk of a Dell laptop was the lid with the stickers (see header image). Everything started with the “truck” in the middle, which ended up on my desk one day and seemed to be yelling, “Stick me on your laptop!”

A Brief Detour
This chubby, red guy with wheels instead of feet, known as Brummi, is a marketing mascot from 1971 that the German transport industry created to give road freight transport a new image. Every German of my generation knows him, and to this day he remains a symbolic figure for a wide variety of projects in the industry, where I’ve been working as an IT manager for a few years now.

Next came a few stickers from my favorite soccer club, SV Wehen-Wiesbaden, a few from fundraising campaigns, and some I still had lying around somewhere.

One day, I had the idea to turn one of my wife’s sayings into a sticker, because it’s so typical of the region she comes from (Sauerland, east of Dortmund) and it’s already become a running joke between us…

You can’t really translate this into English, because literally it would mean “Yeah, look” or “See,” but that doesn’t capture the essence of the saying at all. Imagine your wife or someone else telling you how to do something, but you do it differently at first, until you come around and have to admit that it works. Then you get the ironic version of “Ja kuck” But it’s always meant positively - to briefly comment on an action that produces something positive or interesting.

Now, I’m not artistically gifted, so I threw a quick prompt at ChatGPT, and it surprised me with a nice graphic, which I immediately uploaded to StickerApp to have nearly 80 4x4 cm stickers made. A few days later, it ended up on my laptop (and now also on various public signs and poles across Europe ;)

The next sticker that found its way onto the lid comes from a funny conversation about coworkers and other enemies, and translates to “It’s escalating anyway”. No matter what you do, trouble is bound to happen.

One evening, my wife came home from work and told me that she and her colleagues had been coming up with new perfume names all day long after one of them used the laminator and a strong plastic smell lingered in the air for a moment - something like “Lamination, a fragrance by Ralf Laurel”. My favorite creation was “Echauffage” (pronounced in French), the perfume you put on when you’re really pissed off 😂 Of course, with ChatGPT’s help, I had to put that on my laptop. In the meantime, the sticker has spread among my coworkers, and recently I was having trouble hiding my anger about something and was asked if I was wearing THAT perfume.

There are two types of people: Larks, who cheerfully jump out of bed early in the morning and go to bed early at night, and Owls, who you’re better off not talking to before 9 a.m. but who are fit and alert well into the night. I’m an Owl, and so that everyone knows right away, I had to turn this postcard saying into a sticker.

Germans love to make fun of their own language, which allows them to form wonderfully long words like “Donaudampfschiffartskapitänsmütze.” People who have only a limited grasp of English add to the fun by trying to translate such a German word one-to-one into English.

The biggest hit I’ve come across lately is “onewallfree,” the direct and hilariously incorrect translation of the German “einwandfrei,” meaning “flawless.” I just HAD to get that as a sticker…

I’ve since switched to the Swedish sticker printer PrettyGoodStickers, because they can produce even very small batches of 5 to 10 stickers for a low price and ship them to you. It’s perfect for all the silly ideas in my head - though I’ll eventually run out of space on my laptop lid.

Link Journal 26-03

2026-04-05T11:52:06.000Z

Over the past month of March, I’ve collected 22 links for my link journal.

2026-03-04

Light-Dark Theme with Relative Colors

codepen.io

CSS Colors

A "zero-maintenance" theme switcher for the New Colors challenge. It uses a single brand color to automatically generate an entire light and dark theme...

2026-03-04

OneDrive Client for Linux

github.com

Linux Synchronisation

OneDrive Client for Linux. Contribute to abraunegg/onedrive development by creating an account on GitHub.

2026-03-05

WebHaptics – Haptic feedback for the mobile web

haptics.lochie.me

JavaScript

Haptic feedback for the mobile web.

2026-03-08

WebPerf Snippets

webperf-snippets.nucliweb.net

Performance

A curated list of snippets to get Web Performance metrics to use in the browser console or as snippets on Chrome DevTools by Joan León

2026-03-10

A GitHub action to create an issue using content from a file

github.com

GitHub/Actions

A GitHub action to create an issue using content from a file - peter-evans/create-issue-from-file

2026-03-11

Abusing Customizable Selects

css-tricks.com

CSS

Let’s go over a few demos using the new customizable <select> feature that may be wild, but also give us a great chance to learn new things in CSS.

2026-03-10

How to host a static site on bunny

european-alternatives.eu

Hosting CDN

bunny.net is one of the few european CDN providers and it is the perfect service to host fast and reliable static sites

So hosten Sie eine statische Website auf bunny.net CDN mit automatischem Deployment | European Alternatives

bunny.net ist einer der wenigen europäischen CDN-Anbieter und der perfekte Dienst, um schnelle und zuverlässige statische Websites zu hosten

european-alternatives.eu

2026-03-10

Just the Browser

justthebrowser.com

AI Browser PowerShell

Remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from web browsers.

2026-03-10

Modern CSS Code Snippets - Stop writing CSSlike it's 2015

modern-css.com

CSS

A collection of modern CSS code snippets. Every old CSS hack next to its clean, native replacement, side by side.

2026-03-10

Windows zu Linux Mint — Digital Independence Day

di.day

Windows Linux

An jedem ersten Sonntag im Monat veranstalten wir den Digital Independence Day. Wir holen uns unser freies digitales Leben zurück und wechseln zu demokratiefreundlichen digitalen Alternativen.

2026-03-12

A web font strategy

adactio.com

Font CSS

How I’m prioritising performance when it comes to typography on The Session.

2026-03-12

Animated Dark Mode Transition with Modern CSS

jonshamir.com

CSS/Animation

How to animate @property

2026-03-12

The Value of z-index

css-tricks.com

CSS

How we look at the stacking order of our projects, how we choose z-index values, and more importantly, the implications of those choices.

2026-03-14

CSS Colors Module

codepen.io

CSS/Colors

A semi educational playground, or my attempt to better understand the topic. Made with Ai assistance. Sources: MDN: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

2026-03-14

Typographic Scales in CSS..

www.alwaystwisted.com

CSS Typography

Learn how to build flexible, mathematical typographic scales using :heading(), sibling-index(), and pow() for cleaner CSS design systems.

2026-03-17

Agentic Engineering Patterns - How coding agents work

simonwillison.net

How coding agents work - Agentic Engineering Patterns

2026-03-18

Add a Wobbling Animation to your Images

css-tip.com

CSS

Create an infinite fancy animation using clip-path and shape()

2026-03-29

BaseWatch

basewatch.dev

CSS

Track CSS, JS & HTML browser support. Get email alerts when features hit your chosen support threshold. Free, no account needed.

2026-03-26

How to be a web developer - Stuff Everybody Knows

stuffeverybodyknows.com

Career Web

A guide to the rest of your web development career, by Laurie Voss

2026-03-28

Progressive Web Components

arielsalminen.com

WebComponents JavaScript

Introducing Elena, a simple, tiny library for building Progressive Web Components.

2026-03-28

The Great CSS Expansion

blog.gitbutler.com

CSS

CSS now does what Floating UI, GSAP ScrollTrigger, Framer Motion, and react-select used to require JavaScript for. Here is exactly how much that saves, why these libraries were painful beyond their size, and what the platform still hasn't figured out.

2026-03-31

Obs

csswizardry.com

JavaScript

Obs.js reads device and network signals and allows you to build adaptive user experiences.