Link tags: ring

Colin Devroe - Blogging is alive and well

The past, present and future of blogs.

The Year of the Personal Website · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Especially if you are a designer, an artist, a photographer, a writer, a blogger, a creator of any kind, owning your work is as important as ever. Social media platforms might be great for distributing your content and creating a network of like-minded people around you. But they will always be ephemeral, transient, and impermanent – not the best place to preserve your thoughts, words, and brushstrokes.

Why Not Mars (Idle Words)

I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.

Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.

And don’t skip the footnotes:

Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.

(Almost) no one cares

Every time I’ve thought “this is a niche subject or random thought, no one will be interested but I’ll publish anyway” someone will let me know that it was the EXACT train of thought they were thinking or thing they were looking for.

How to Weave the Artisan Web | Whatever

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations? Wouldn’t it be nice not to have ads shoved in your face every time you open an app to see what your friends are up to? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that when your friends post something, you’ll actually see it without a social media platform deciding whether to shove it down your feed and pump that feed full of stuff you didn’t ask for?

Wouldn’t that be great?

“You can be a carpenter this time around.” – Lucy Bellwood

A personal website is a lovely thing. Nobody will buy this platform and use it as their personal plaything. No advertisers will boycott and send me scrambling to produce different content. No seed funding will run out overnight.

It takes one person to knock down a silo - daverupert.com

Pour a foundation for your own silo or home.

COLOR anything | colouring pages of absolutely anything for kids or grown ups

This is a genuinely lovely use of machine learning models: provide a prompt for an illustration to print out and colour in.

Mike explains his motivation for building this:

My son’s super into colouring at the moment and I’ve been struggling to find new stuff for him.

Remix and the Alternate Timeline of Web Development - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

It sounds like Remix takes a sensible approach to progressive enhancement.

Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies – Baldur Bjarnason

This extract from Baldur’s new book is particularly timely in light of the twipocalypse.

What to blog

Eventually, it becomes second nature: jot down some thoughts and hit publish. Until then, think of it like starting a running habit. The first few days you run, it’s awful and you think it’ll never feel any better. But after a few weeks, you start getting antsy if you don’t run. If you’re not used to writing, it can feel like a slog, but it’s worth getting over that hump.

Blogroll | Max Böck

A lovely collection of blogs (and RSS feeds) that you can follow.

(Just in case, y’know, you might decide that following people on their own websites is better than following them on a website controlled by one immature manbaby who’s down with the racists.)

Get Blogging!

Your easy guide to starting a new blog.

A blog is an easy way to get started writing on the web. Your voice is important: it deserves its own site. The more people add their unique perspectives to the web, the more valuable it becomes.

Two JavaScripts

There are two JavaScripts.

One for the server - where you can go wild.

One for the client - that should be thoughtful and careful.

Yes! This! I’m always astounded to see devs apply the same mindset to backend and frontend development, just because it happens to be in the same language. I don’t care what you use on your own machine or your own web server, but once you’re sending something down the wire to end users, you need to prioritise their needs over your own.

It’s the JavaScript on the client side that’s the problem. What’s given to the visitor.

I’d ask you, if you’re still reading, that you consider a separation of JavaScript between client and server. If you’re a dev, consider the payload, your bundle and work to reduce the cost to your visitor. Heck, think progressive enhancement.

Descriptive engineering: not just for post-mortems – Dan Slimmon

I wrote a while back about descriptive and prescriptive design systems—and a follow-up post—but I didn’t realise there was such a thing as descriptive and prescriptive engineering.

A Web Component Story

I get it. React feels good and it’s sticky. But all frameworks eventually fizzle out.

Thanks to Web Components, large companies are realizing you don’t need to rebuild buttons and other UI primitives every few years. Teams don’t need to argue about frameworks anymore. You can have your cake and eat it too!

I think this may be the best long-term argument for web components:

Any org that goes all in on a single framework will eventually find themselves swimming upstream to hire talent to maintain legacy code and avoid framework rot. But you can reduce this burden (and the associated costs) by using Web Components in your design system.

Will Serving Real HTML Content Make A Website Faster? Let’s Experiment! - WebPageTest Blog

Spoiler: the answer to the question in the title is a resounding “hell yeah!”

Scott brings receipts.

Web UI Engineering Book - toheeb.com

I like the way this work-in-progress is organised—it’s both a book and a personal website that’ll grow over time.

A long-term plan for logical properties? | Miriam Eric Suzanne

Well, now I’m really glad I wrote that post about logical properties!

We’re not there yet. So how do we get there?

Well, I don’t know for sure – but articles like this are very helpful as we try to work it out!

Take Care of Your Blog

Blog!

Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in.

Excellent advice from Robin:

There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away.