Jeremy Keith - Building The Web - View Source 2019 - YouTube
I had a chat with Vitaly for half an hour about all things webby. It was fun!
Tags: web
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Why We All Need a Personal Website – Plus Practical Tips for How to Build One - Adobe 99U
The best time to make a personal website is 20 years ago. The second best time to make a personal website is now.
Chris offers some illustrated advice:
- Define the purpose of your site
- Organize your content
- Look for inspiration
- Own your own domain name
- Build your website
Progressive Enhancement
This post was originally written in 2015, but upon re-reading it today, it still (just about) holds up, so I finally hit publish.
Simon Collison | Timeline
I’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.
Simon describes the process of curating the lovely timeline on his personal homepage.
My timeline is just like me, and just like my life: unfinished, and far from perfect.
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
A short, snappy web book on product development from Ryan Singer at Basecamp.
Like Resilient Web Design, the whole thing is online for free (really free, not “give us your email address” free).
How to run a small social network site for your friends
This is a great how-to from Darius Kazemi!
The main reason to run a small social network site is that you can create an online environment tailored to the needs of your community in a way that a big corporation like Facebook or Twitter never could. Yes, you can always start a Facebook Group for your community and moderate that how you like, but only within certain bounds set by Facebook. If you (or your community) run the whole site, then you are ultimately the boss of what goes on. It is harder work than letting Facebook or Twitter or Slack or Basecamp or whoever else take care of everything, but I believe it’s worth it.
There’s a lot of good advice for community management and the whole thing is a lesson in writing excellent documentation.
Toast
Chris describes exactly why I wrote about toast:
But we should be extra watchful about stuff like this. If any browser goes rogue and just starts shipping stuff, web standards is over. Life for devs gets a lot harder and the web gets a lot worse. The stakes are high. And it’s not going to happen overnight, it’s going to happen with little tiny things like this. Keep that blue beanie on.
Bridgy for Webmentions with Brotli—zachleat.com
This is good to know! Because of a bug in Google App Engine, Brid.gy won’t work for sites using Brotli compression on HTML.
Curating A Design System Newsletter
Some time ago I was going through the backlog of around 90 unread articles on Design Systems. About 80 of those were Medium articles and about 40 of those took me to either their user-hostile “you ready a lot and we like that” pop-up or their money-grabbing “you’ve read lots this month, pay us to read some more.”, it turns out that Medium only likes you reading things when you give money to do so.
Therefore I’ve started to add a little warning notice to each article that’s on Medium.
Get off of Twitter | Read the Tea Leaves
You can’t criticize Twitter on Twitter. It just doesn’t work. The medium is the message.
Nolan’s plea for sanity.
Write blog posts. Use RSS. Use micro.blog. Use Mastodon. Use Pleroma. Use whatever you want, as long as it isn’t manipulating you with algorithms or selling access to your data to advertisers.
Automate your outgoing webmentions
I’ve been kicking the tyres on this great new tool from Remy. Give it a URL and it’ll find all the links in its h-entrys and automatically send webmentions to them. Very cool!
The documentation on the site is excellent, guiding you to the right solution for your particular needs. Read Remy’s announcement:
I’ve also tried very hard to get the documentation to be as welcoming as I can. I’ve tried to think about my dear visitor and what they want to do with the software, rather than type my typical developer approach to documentation - listing all the features and options.
Kicks Condor: The Web Finally Feels New Again
For me, I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web. Webmentions are just so versatile—you can use them to commment, you an form ad-hoc directories with them, you can identify yourself to a wider community. I really feel like they are a useful modernization.
A wonky barter (Phil Gyford’s website)
I don’t know how we got to a point where chatting and sharing with friends means having to pick through adverts, and agreeing to being tracked and marketed at, and risk being exposed to, or abused by, terrible people. Our conversations and holiday snaps have become darkly marketed events. You could say this is a fair exchange but it feels wrong to me. The things being exchanged are too different, a kind of category error. It’s a wonky kind of barter in which I feel powerless and used. It’s not why I came here, to the internet.
The Problem With “Content” – On my Om
My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.” Looking at it from the other side, for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, everything is “content” regardless of its provenance. Each creation is merely an object, only valuable for its ability to increase our time spent on their platforms, allowing them to sell more advertising.
The Crushing Weight of the Facepile—zachleat.com
Using IntersectionObserver to lazy load images—very handy for webmention avatars.
When should you be using Web Workers? — DasSur.ma
Although this piece is ostensibly about why we should be using web workers more, there’s a much, much bigger point about the growing power gap between the devices we developers use and the typical device used by the rest of the planet.
While we are getting faster flagship phones every cycle, the vast majority of people can’t afford these. The more affordable phones are stuck in the past and have highly fluctuating performance metrics. These low-end phones will mostly likely be used by the massive number of people coming online in the next couple of years. The gap between the fastest and the slowest phone is getting wider, and the median is going down.
The Lost tags of HTML
I’ll be in my bunk.
Baking accessibility into components: how frameworks help
A very thoughtful post by Hidde that draws a useful distinction between the “internals” of a component (the inner workings of a React component, Vue component, or web component) and the code that wires those components together (the business logic):
I really like working on the detailed stuff that affects users: useful keyboard navigation, sensible focus management, good semantics. But I appreciate not every developer does. I have started to think this may be a helpful separation: some people work on good internals and user experience, others on code that just uses those components and deals with data and caching and solid architecture. Both are valid things, both need love. Maybe we can use the divide for good?
Render Snarky Comments in Comic Sans—zachleat.com
Sounds like Zach had a great time at Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf:
I can’t really express how meaningful this experience was to me. An antithesis to the rat race of social media, IndieWebCamp was a roomful of kindred spirits that care about the web and their own websites and hosting their own content. It felt like the Google Reader days again, when everyone was blogging and writing on their own sites. I dunno if you can tell but I loved it.
He also made a neat little plug-in that renders negative comments in Comic Sans with mixed cased writing:
This isn’t intended to be a hot-take on Comic Sans. Instead it’s meant to change the tone of the negativity to make it sound like a clown is yelling at a kid’s birthday party.
mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes
Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.