Remember when I wrote about Web Audio weirdness on iOS? Well, this is a nice little library that wraps up the same hacky solution that I ended up using.
It’s always gratifying when something you do—especially something that feels so hacky—turns out to be independently invented elsewhere.
A Creative Commons licensed web book that you can read online.
Carbon dioxide removal at a climate-significant scale is one of the most complex endeavors we can imagine, interlocking technologies, social systems, economies, transportation systems, agricultural systems, and, of course, the political economy required to fund it. This primer aims to lower the learning curve for action by putting as many facts as possible in the hands of the people who will take on this challenge. This book can eliminate much uncertainty and fear, and, we hope, speed the process of getting real solutions into the field.
This is a very thoughtful and measured response to Alex’s post Platform Adjacency Theory.
Unlike Alex, the author doesn’t fire off cheap shots.
Also, I’m really intrigued by the idea of certificate authorities for hardware APIs.
Heydon’s newest short video is right up my alley.
A rant from Robin. I share his frustration and agree with his observations.
I wonder how we can get the best of both worlds here: the ease of publishing newsletters, with all the beauty and archivability of websites.
Flash, from the very beginning, was a transitional technology. It was a language that compiled into a binary executable. This made it consistent and performant, but was in conflict with how most of the web works. It was designed for a desktop world which wasn’t compatible with the emerging mobile web. Perhaps most importantly, it was developed by a single company. This allowed it to evolve more quickly for awhile, but goes against the very spirit of the entire internet. Long-term, we never want single companies — no matter who they may be — controlling the very building blocks of the web.
Tending this website keeps me sane. I think of it as a digital garden, a kind of sanctuary. … And if my site is a kind of garden, then I see myself as both gardener and architect, in so much as I make plans and prepare the ground, then sow things that grow in all directions. Some things die, but others thrive, and that’s how my garden grows. And I tend it for me; visitors are a bonus.
A thoughtful and impassioned plea from Colly for more personal publishing:
I know that social media deprived the personal site of oxygen, but you are not your Twitter profile, nor are you your LinkedIn profile. You are not your Medium page. You are not your tiny presence on the company’s About page. If you are, then you look just like everyone else, and that’s not you at all. Right?
Ridiculously cute and fun—all in the browser.
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.
I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane with Chris:
From the Web’s inception, an ancient to contemporary history of the Web.
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.
Amber describes how she implemented webmentions on her (static) site. More important, she describes why!
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.
In 1990, the science fiction writer Douglas Adams produced a “fantasy documentary” for the BBC called Hyperland. It’s a magnificent paleo-futuristic artifact, rich in sideways predictions about the technologies of tomorrow.
I remember coming across a repeating loop of this documentary playing in a dusty corner of a Smithsonian museum in Washington DC. Douglas Adams wasn’t credited but I recognised his voice.
Hyperland aired on the BBC a full year before the World Wide Web. It is a prophecy waylaid in time: the technology it predicts is not the Web. It’s what William Gibson might call a “stub,” evidence of a dead node in the timeline, a three-point turn where history took a pause and backed out before heading elsewhere.
Here, Claire L. Evans uses Adams’s documentary as an opening to dive into the history of hypertext starting with Bush’s Memex, Nelson’s Xanadu and Engelbart’s oNLine System. But then she describes some lesser-known hypertext systems…
In 1985, the students at Brown who encountered Intermedia had never seen anything like it before in their lives. The system laid a world of information at their fingertips, saved them hours at the library, and helped them work through tangles of thought.
Tom gives a succinct history of the ongoing arms race between trackers and end users.
Sensible advice from Chris:
So what’s the best rendering method? Whatever works best for you, but perhaps a hierarchy like this makes some general sense:
- Static HTML as much as you can
- Edge functions over static HTML so you can do whatever dynamic things
- Server generated HTML what you have to after that
- Client-side render only what you absolutely have to
Growing—that’s a word I want to employ when talking about my personal sites online. Like a garden, I’m constantly puttering around in them. Sometimes I plow and sow a whole new feature for a site. Sometimes I just pick weeds.
I like this analogy. It reminds me of the the cooking analogy that others have made.
Most of my favorite websites out there are grown—homegrown in fact. They are corners of the web where some unique human has been nurturing, curating, and growing stuff for years. Their blog posts, their links, their thoughts, their aesthetic, their markup, their style, everything about their site—and themselves—shows growth and evolution and change through the years. It’s a beautiful thing, a kind of artifact that could never be replicated or manufactured on a deadline.
This part of the web, this organic part, stands in start contrast to the industrial web where websites are made and resources extracted.
Zonelets is a simple HTML blogging engine with scrappy, DIY spirit! I made it because I really want everyone to blog, but I felt that the existing options were generally overcomplicated and commercially-focused in a way that made web creativity feel intimidating and arcane.
I love the philosophy behind this blogging tool, which actively encourages you to learn a little bit of HTML:
Plenty of services can help you to “create a professional-looking website without writing a single line of code.” Now, thanks to Zonelets, you can create an UNPROFESSIONAL-looking website by writing NUMEROUS lines of code!
Goodhart’s Law applied to Google’s core web vitals:
If developers start to focus solely on Core Web Vitals because it is important for SEO, then some folks will undoubtedly try to game the system.
Personally, my beef with core web vitals is that they introduce even more uneccessary initialisms (see, for example, Harry’s recent post where he uses CWV metrics like LCP, FID, and CLS—alongside TTFB and SI—to look at PLPs, PDPs, and SRPs. I mean, WTF?).
I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.