Links

Here Dragons Abound: The Forever Project

I think that working on your own website can be a good Forever Project.

It’s an open-ended topic that you can explore for a long time without running out of challenges.

Also, this is spot-on:

Compare two different situations where you tell a story at a party. In the first situation, you tell the story in a corner to one or two people, who are totally interested and smiling. In the second situation, you tell the story in the center of the party with a large group of people around you, but they’re almost all bored and uninterested, talking amongst themselves and largely ignoring you. The first situation sounds better, right? Well, that’s the non-obvious benefit of blogging. There are a load of people out there blogging, and almost all of them are better writers and better looking than you. Nobody is going to read your blog about frabulizing widgets unless they really care about frabulizing widgets. So it’s not going to be a big audience, but it should be an interested audience. And I think you’ll find that you get 90% of the benefits of socialization from a handful of readers as you would get from a sea of readers.

Are your Anchor Links Accessible? | Amber Wilson

I really like the way that Amber doesn’t go straight to the end solution but instead talks through her thought process when adding a feature to her site.

Blob Opera — Google Arts & Culture

Ridiculously cute and fun—all in the browser.

Cloudflare’s privacy-first Web Analytics is now available for everyone

Cloudfare’s alternative to Google Analytics is now available—for free—regardless of whether your a Cloudflare customer or not:

Being privacy-first means we don’t track individual users for the purposes of serving analytics. We don’t use any client-side state (like cookies or localStorage) for analytics purposes. Cloudflare also doesn’t track users over time via their IP address, User Agent string, or any other immutable attributes for the purposes of displaying analytics — we consider “fingerprinting” even more intrusive than cookies, because users have no way to opt out.

Cameras and Lenses – Bartosz Ciechanowski

This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.

At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.

Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.

Web Almanac 2020

I spent most of the weekend reading through this and I’ve still barely scratched the surface—a lot of work has gone to the analyses and write-ups!

The sections on accessibility and performance get grimmer each year but the raw numbers on framework adaption are refreshingly perspective-setting.

History of the Web - YouTube

I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane with Chris:

From the Web’s inception, an ancient to contemporary history of the Web.

EStimator.dev: the modern JavaScript savings calculator

Find out how much smaller your JavaScript could be.

FSG Originals | Subprime Attention Crisis

For anyone who expressed doubt at my depiction of behavioural advertising simply not working, this book by Tim Hwang is for you:

From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented.

Our Last-Minute, Extremely Online Gift Guide - The New York Times

Chindogu gone wild.

What Can You Put in a CSS Variable? / Coder’s Block

A reminder that the contens of custom properties don’t have to be valid property values:

From a syntax perspective, CSS variables are “extremely permissive”.

Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will | Palladium Magazine

Technologies are always coming out of networks that require other related ideas to have the next one. The fact that we have simultaneous independent invention as a norm works against the idea of the heroic inventor, that we’re dependent on them for inventions. These things will come when all the other pieces are ready.

Make it Personal | CSS-Tricks

On your personal website, you own your work. You decide what and when to publish. You decide when to delete things. You are in control. Your work, your rules, your freedom.

The Importance of HTML – Jerry Jones

You’re not going to get a Webby Award or thousands of views on Codepen for how amazingly crafted your HTML is. You’ll need to be OK going unrecognized for your work. But know that every time I use a screen reader or keyboard on a site and it works correctly, I have a little spark of joy.

Grow the IndieWeb with Webmentions | Amber Wilson

Amber describes how she implemented webmentions on her (static) site. More important, she describes why!

npm ruin dev | CSS-Tricks

Chris is gathering end-of-year thoughts from people in response to the question:

What is one thing you learned about building websites this year?

Here’s mine.

In 2020, I rediscovered the enjoyment of building a website with plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no transpilin’, no compilin’, no build tools other than my hands on the keyboard.

Merch Table

Feel bad because your favourite artists aren’t getting any income from Spotify? Here’s a handy tool from Hype Machine that allows you to import Sportify playlists and see where you can support those artists on Bandcamp.

What Makes CSS Hard To Master - Tim Severien

CSS is simple, but not easy.

If we, as a community, start to appreciate the complexity of writing CSS, perhaps we can ask for help instead of blaming the language when we’re confused or stuck. We might also stop looking down on CSS specialists.

Quantum to Cosmos

Well, this is rather wonderful! It’s like an interactive version of the Eames’s Powers Of Ten.

My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.