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Feeds from people participating at the IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, May 2025.

A public list by dan.

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Useless Is Useful

Much like every other weekend, I spent several hours cleaning the apartment this Sunday. Although I enjoyed the result of it, I had always looked at cleaning as a tedious task. Yet, I have come to enjoy it over the last few years. This is because I have started to listen to ...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Fear

I knew it would happen again. The fear. The tunnel vision. The blackout. Only a few seconds left. I don’t want to be here. “Next is Matthias, who will play the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 for us.” Applause! I can’t think straight. The tunnel vision is here...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

The New Urgency of Climate Change

The COVID-19 crisis has temporarily shifted our attention away from the most pressing and life-threatening of all challenges: Climate change. But while we – at least in Europe and other parts of the world with responsible leadership – are on a flattening curve, the issue of ...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Don’t Assume, Validate.

As we gain more and more experience in building digital products, we tend to think ever so often that we already know what a good solution looks like and how people will use our design. But that’s not true. Far too often, we are assuming that things work in a certain way or ...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Necessity Is the Ultimate Teacher

Remember that thing you wanted to learn? You know what I mean. That thing that keeps on nagging in the back of your head. That thing that comes to mind now and then and reminds you that there are so many things that you could explore. You know it would be interesting and, al...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

TeamOps

Ethan Marcotte just wrote a great piece about design systems and how the promise that design systems would hugely improve collaboration between designers and developers never really materialized. Many teams are still working in silos, which means there is a clear separation ...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

One Egg

The kids wanted pancakes. But there was only one egg left. Usually, I use four eggs to make pancakes. But the kids wanted pancakes. So I made pancakes. With only one egg.

They turned out delicious.

Sometimes, one egg is enough.

Sometimes, you should just try although the conditions seem less than ideal.

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This is the 32nd post of my 100 days of writing series. You can find a list of all posts here.

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Thoughts on Writing: Read It Out Loud

For me, 2020 started with a few posts about writing. I had read and listened to a lot of material on writing and wanted to share some of the things I had learned about how other writers approach writing as a craft, a process, and a passion. So I wrote posts about shitty firs...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

85 Percent

As a child, teenager, and student, I used to play a lot of football (or soccer, for my American friends). I only played in a club for about two years and had to quit the team because of an injured knee, but I always loved playing with my friends during my leisure time. Spend...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Fussy Web, True Meaning.

Sarah Drasner just published a fabulous article, In Defense of a Fussy Website, in which she makes the case that we should all design and build websites again that are a joy to visit. Sites with those little details that make you smile, with small delights and touches that r...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Milton Glaser – Ten Things I Have Learned

Milton Glaser, one of the greatest graphic designers of our time, passed away this Friday on his 91st birthday in New York City. Well known for his 1977 “I ❤️ NY” logo and his Bob Dylan poster with psychedelic hair, Glaser changed the visual culture in the 1960s and 70s with...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

The Web in the Age of Ubiquity

If you have kids, you think a lot about how the world might look like when they grow up. At the moment, the world is being transformed on so many levels and so rapidly that, as Seth Godin argues, we might be in the middle of a change that is as big as the change that marked ...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Go Deep

Do you know the feeling when you know an album so well that you always anticipate the next bar of a song and when the song ends, you can already hear the first beats of the next song playing in your head? The best albums are the ones, where it might take quite a while to get...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

What Would This Look Like If It Were Easy?

Tim Ferriss just released the audiobook of his book “Tribe of Mentors”. The book contains the answers to 11 questions he sent out to hundreds of the world’s “top performers” from across all possible fields of expertise. In the introduction, which you can also listen to in Ti...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Debugging HTML With Advanced CSS Selectors

Writing HTML is hard. At least writing semantically sound, valid HTML is. This might come as a surprise to those who only scratch the surface of what HTML really can do. What can be so hard about a few elements, right? At least it isn’t an object-oriented, multi-paradigm pro...

Daniel Pietzsch Verified Updates instantly via WebSub Supports Webmention Valid

So, no German Corona Warn App for me: my iPhone 6 Plus is stuck on iOS 12. And you need to be able to run iOS 13 (which came out last year) and above to run it. A shame.

I’m probably in the minority of iPhone users on such an old device, though. Still, I wonder how many people have a similar problem (at least Android devices only require Android 6, which is five years old). And how many people won’t even bother installing it.

Furthermore, the seemingly extraordinary high development costs of €20 million - plus an additional €48 million running costs until the end of 2021 - makes me wonder whether the money could have been used more wisely. Time will tell I guess.

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Becoming a Tyrant

It is one of the most emotional and finest moments in “The Last Dance”, Netflix’s documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls of the Nineties: The interviewer asks Michael Jordan if he thinks that the intensity at which he played the game has come at the ex...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Release

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how to know when something is ready. A website, an article, a song, a painting – whatever it is, how do you know that it is ripe for publication? There are many answers to that question and maybe everyone of us has their ow...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Smooth Operations

How many connections are there in a team of two? One, of course. In a team of three? Three, of course. A team of four? Six. A team of five? Ten, already. What about a team of ten people? A team of ten has 66 connections. Yes, sixty-six. This basic concept of network theory ...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Feck Perfuction

There are books that you read once and never open again. There are even more books that you start to read and somehow never finish. I have a lot of them. And there are book with a lot of images in them, so there is not so much to read. I have a lot of them, too. But then, th...