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People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.

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HeydonWorks

How I Accidentally Killed Several UX Designers

Recently, I perpetrated a serious tactical error that resulted in a number of User Experience Designers (UXers) being found unexpectedly dead. As a front-end developer, this has done little to buoy my professional reputation. I first knew there was something wrong when I was...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Converting Your Twitter Archive to Markdown

The bird is not well. So it is time to request and download an archive of your Twitter data now, if you haven’t done this recently. After you have requested your archive, it can take a while until you receive it. I requested my archive on the day Elon walked in and got an em...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

The Wrong Question

When author Jim Collins first met his hero Peter Drucker, whom many regard as the greatest management thinker of all time, the two men where at very different points in their lives. Here, a man in his thirties, eager to start a new endeavor, a new self-directed path, but equ...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

It Wasn’t Written

It takes years to become good at it. So we read books, take classes, and visit workshops to become better. And still, it may take a lifetime to master it. But more than anything, it is one of the things that makes us human: Writing. But now, the algorithms are coming for us....

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Syndicating Posts from Your Personal Website to Twitter and Mastodon

The hellsite has a new king. And so, many are moving from Twitter to other social networks like micro.blog or Mastodon or are at least trying out those other options while waiting how things might develop. Cross-posting – or not? One of the first questions that comes to mind...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Suspension

It could happen out of the blue, without any warning. It could happen without you knowing what you did wrong. It could happen today. Twitter could just suspend you. Gone. Your Tweets, your followers, your thoughts, your jokes, your conversations. They’re just gone. Gone, not...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

None of Your Business

I bet you know this: You’ve created something – a drawing, a layout, a video, a piece of code, or a blog post – and after you’re more or less done, you pause and you look at it. And you don’t like it. Maybe it is a little detail that is not right, or maybe you don’t like the...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Shitty Code Prototypes

I love building prototypes. They allow me to explore and sketch ideas, test my assumptions, and try out things at an early stage to make better design decisions. Prototyping is the single best tool we have in our toolbox as designers and developers. And because anything can...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Better Bridges

I couldn’t agree more to what Dave wrote in his recent blog post about the increasing demands of the front-end web: the job of a front-end developer is getting ever more complex. From writing well-structured, semantic HTML to the latest (fantastic) new CSS features, to acces...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Foundations

Please use whatever tool gets the job done and makes sense for you.

But then again, I’ve seen so many frameworks and tools come and go that it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. You know what really is time well spent and a worthy investment into your future, your career, and your team? Learning the basics and becoming really good at them.

Therefore, don’t let tools cover up weak spots in your or your team’s knowledge. Because what looks like a flaw at first glance is actually an opportunity to learn and improve.

And don’t let any tool make you believe that it isn’t worthwhile to learn the foundations of web technology or let it stop you from participating in the vital dialogue that pushes the platform and its standards forward.

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Detecting CSS Selector Support with JavaScript

There are many ways to adjust your CSS code to a browser’s support for a specific CSS feature. If you want to check if a certain property is supported, you can write a feature query using the @supports at-rule, for...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Doing Our Part

I’m right with Dave on this one! 💚 I’m tired of envi­ron­men­tal respon­si­bil­i­ty always falling on the con­sumer. I know con­sumer demand bub­bles up into soci­etal change, I’m will­ing to do my...

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• Matthias Ott

Patch That Package

You probably know this situation. You are working on a project and one of the npm packages you are working with contains a nasty bug or is lacking a critical feature. Of course, you first head over to the repositor...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Brain Dump

You know what makes it so easy for many people to just dump their thoughts into a silo like Twitter instead of writing a post on their own site?

You don’t have to come up with a title for your post.

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Level Up Your Headings Game

Providing a proper document outline is one of the most effective things you can do to improve the accessibility of your HTML. Like the headings of the chapters and subchapters in a book, the structure of the heading elements in our HTML should have a semantic, tree-like stru...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Generating Accessibility Test Results for a Whole Website With Evaluatory

Yesterday, I shared how to test a whole website for accessibility issues with Pa11y and how to output the results as HTML. I also shared the link on Twitter, as I usually do, and Darek Kay chimed in, mentioning an alternative tool he created: Evaluatory. Just like Pa11y, Eva...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Generating Accessibility Test Results for a Whole Website With Pa11y CI

This week, I’m doing an accessibility audit for a client. One of the first steps is to have a general look at the site. You can – and should – do that manually for sure, but another very useful way to get a good fi...

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• Matthias Ott

The CSS Cascade, a Deep Dive

The Cascade is legendary. Legendary because it is the C in CSS. Legendary in how well it works to determine which selector wins when browsers apply styles to HTML. And legendary in how little many of us really know about it. Bramus van Damme recently gave a fantastic talk ab...

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• Matthias Ott

Eleventy Plus Vite

What’s the single best thing you can do if you want to learn a new tool or evaluate a new technology? Right, it’s getting your hands dirty. Only by building something tangible, like a realistic prototype or even a real project, you’ll get immediate answers to the questions t...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

You, a Million Times

Who should you write for? Your friends and family? Your colleagues and peers? The people you look up to? Everyone in the community? Everyone on the Internet? The answer? None of those people. You should only write for one person and one person only: you. Me? But who would r...