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Inspired by Ben, Zachary and Courtney, I’m going to make an offer: join me for a virtual coffee chat! For the next two weeks, I’m going to keep 9am - 11am UK time on Wednesdays (excluding August 6th) and 6pm - 7pm UK time on Thursdays open for coffee chats. We can chat about: ArtPoetryMaking websitesThe future of the webDesigning technologyInterface designYour favourite Taylor Swift songOr just say hello! If you’d like to chat, feel free to email me at readers@jamesg.blog with the time that works best. I’ll send over a calendar and Zoom invite in which we can meet. I look forward to saying hi!

I have this list of ideas, but would you believe I am insecure about not having enough ideas? I said to a friend recently. As soon as I said it, I realised how direct I had been about a persistent, deep anxiety I have had about coming up with ideas. Another part of my mind re...

Today I have been thinking about how wonderful links are. With a link, I can send a resource to someone that they can immediately open and read. I can share a blog post I wrote, a blog post I read that is relevant, a Wikipedia article, a news story, a collaborative document, ...

Having a website encourages me to document, and share, my ideas, especially in prose. Whereas some ideas exist as notes in my notepads, having the medium of a blog post available as a means of expression encourages me to develop some ideas. Through this process, I consider my...

Or maybe option D – titles with a short summary ?

When you are visiting a personal #website or #blog: do you enjoy reading all the latest blog posts / journal entries / notes *in full* on the home page or do you prefer a list of headings for the latest entries?

Show me all the content!
I love clicking on links in lists!
I don’t really mind…

I just love this section at the end of your journal entries, @adactio! 🤩

When I am using Notion – a notes tool – on my phone, sometimes I accidentally press a button and my text ends up formatted in a way I did not expect. Notion offers an undo button, except I didn’t know it was there until recently. There is an icon tray of several buttons, bu...

For the last year or so, I have used my static create page to prepare posts for publishing on my blog. The tool generates a file that I can then add to the Git repository from which my site is generated. This workflow works well for posts that are mainly words, but falls shor...

If you’re thinking about buying #audio #plugins to improve the sound of your voice recordings or music, don’t make the same mistake I made – don’t buy Waves. Buy Toneboosters, Kiive, Klanghelm, Tokyo Dawn Labs, Fuse Audio Labs, Kazrog, Noiseash, et al.
And, of course, try out all the fantastic free plugins out there first! You might not need to spend any (or at least very little) money on plugins at all… 😉

Maybe I should write a few blog posts about the best free and paid plugins 🤔

This is James' Coffee Blog, a brand new site by James that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!

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When I search for the word “:laugh” in Discord, I see the :rofl: emoji. When I search for “:pumpkin” in Slack, I see a result for the :jack_o_lantern: emoji. The : key triggers an emoji autocomplete interface in these tools. Here is an example of the :laugh phrase in Discord:...

Setting a 1px solid coloured border makes it easy to see how much space an element is taking up on the page, or what the CSS selector you have written selects. This is helpful in debugging where rules apply on the page. The :target selector lets you select an element whose ID has been targeted. For instance, if you are viewing example.com/index.html#coffee, the element with the ID coffee would be targeted. This is useful for adding a highlight (i.e. a background colour or a border) to the element that the page the user is visiting has linked directly to. Add line-height: 1.5 to text on the page to create more space between lines of text on the page. Learn more about line height.

My previous blog post on the need for link best practices for Stories, wherein I note some deficiencies with existing Stories implementations on the open web, has me thinking about the opposite end of user experience: what technology experiences or features have been delightf...

Setting a 1px solid coloured border makes it easy to see how much space an element is taking up on the page, or what the CSS selector you have written selects. This is helpful in debugging where rules apply on the page. The :target selector lets you select an element whose ID has been targeted. For instance, if you are viewing example.com/index.html#coffee, the element with the ID coffee would be targeted. This is useful for adding a highlight (i.e. a background colour or a border) to the element that the page the user is visiting has linked directly to. Add line-height: 1.5 to text on the page to create more space between lines of text on the page. Learn more about line height.

When I search for the word “:laugh” in Discord, I see the :rofl: emoji. When I search for “:pumpkin” in Slack, I see a result for the :jack_o_lantern: emoji. The : key triggers an emoji autocomplete interface in these tools. Here is an example of the :laugh phrase in Discord:...

My previous blog post on the need for link best practices for Stories, wherein I note some deficiencies with existing Stories implementations on the open web, has me thinking about the opposite end of user experience: what technology experiences or features have been delightf...

Both the BBC and Wired are experimenting with Stories-like interfaces. The BBC has been shows short videos for sports highlights and news stories. Here is an example of a sports Story section on the homepage today: https://jamesg.blog/assets/images/2025/08/bbc_story.png ALT...