I recently got access to the BlueSky beta, and decided to poke around to see what it's all about. I will save the details of what it is and how I feel about it for a different post. However, one of the first things you do when you sign up is choose a username that exists under the bsky.app domain. I have zero interest in another name rush where everyone tries to claim the shortest username possible, so I went with aaronpk.bsky.app rather than trying to get a or apk.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Dig Deeper
After about a year of living in our new home, after waiting for our neighbors to finish their driveway (life lesson: don’t expect gratitude from strangers), after our wholehearted horticulturist recovered from an acute illness, and after thaw had set in in the southwestern p...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Expand and Stabilize, Explore and Craft
Dave wrote about what he calls The Feature Work → Maintenance Work Loop: he often finds himself working in cycles of Feature Work and Maintenance Work, “balancing the growth and health of a product with a cycle of building and repairing”.
I’ve noticed the same both in design...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Web Push It Real Good
Let’s call it what it is: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were a great idea full of potential but they never really caught on. One reason for that was that although you could add any website to the Home Screen in Apple’s iOS, it always felt like nothing more but a fancy bookmark...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
CSS Speech Module Level 1
As I noted yesterday, screen readers don’t convey the semantics of many HTML elements like strong or em.
When I shared my post on Mastodon, Stéphane Deschamps chimed in and pointed to an promising candidate recommendation fresh from the press that might give authors much mor...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Screen Readers Don’t Convey the Semantics of STRONG and EM
I always was under the impression that if I add emphasis to a piece of text in HTML by adding an em or a strong element, this emphasis would also be indicated to screen reader users in some way. For example, by a change of the tone of voice, much like if you are reading a t...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Uncontainable Container Query Excitement
CSS Container Queries are now available in all major browsers. 🥳 With the release of Firefox 110 yesterday, the stable versions of Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox all support them. There have been many major additions to CSS in recent years, but this one is definitely one ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Time To Fresh Blogpost
I want to start a little experiment: I want to see if I can reduce my TTFB, which is, of course, short for “time to fresh blogpost”.
Why? Because I think this is something where I can still improve a lot. Although I am aware that a few of you are indeed reading my posts and ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Streams of Consciousness
Jeremy wrote a little something about streams, in particular about streams on personal websites. His home page actually is like a stream: links, notes, and blog posts all appear underneath each other in chronological order.
Many of us are now rediscovering or reviving their ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Reflections
A lot of us are still working from home these days. Many are in meetings every day, more and more people are holding important customer presentations or running workshops from their little home office, and some are even joining podcasts and online meetups as guests, or are s...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Analytics Analysis
When it comes to tracking and analyzing a website‘s traffic, Google Analytics (GA) seems to be the obvious choice: everyone knows it, it’s powerful, it’s free, it’s used by millions of sites. 53 % of sites worldwide, to be precise. No wonder many clients ask for it and many ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Tapetenwechsel, or: Breaking the Sameness
We all want to do our best work. We all want to create something of value. But what if you’re stuck? What if the solution just doesn’t show up, the idea just won’t come, the interesting just doesn’t want to happen? Writers sometimes call it writer’s block, but not only write...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Spirits That I’ve Cited
I have a tip for everyone who’s now – or very soon – trying to find out whether a text was written by a human or an AI.
Sure, you could train another AI to look for clues and confidently call it a “classifier”. But chances are, your classifier won’t be fully reliable. It might not work on short texts. Or, it might incorrectly but confidently label AI-written text as human-written. Also, people will sure as hell edit AI-written text so that it can’t be detected anymore.
Given that you have no idea how those algorithms really work, you might as well just use the classifier written by the same company that is currently gifting you the gift of AI for free. Sounds really reassuring, right?
Instead, how about you try this:
Look for the soul.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
A Birthday Audio Gear Upgrade
Today, I turned 41. It was a wonderful, relaxed day with my family – and my parents’ dog who is a bit of a maniac… 😅
I also got to try out my two “office” birthday presents: a new microphone for voice, the Røde Procaster, and an audio interface, the MOTU M2.
The Røde Procast...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Updating My Site in 2023
Alright. Enough talk. Let’s get to it.
One of my plans for 2023 is to redesign this website. Here is the thing: it is easy to promise things to yourself. It is much harder to deliver, especially when the project is quite large and you have to do it in your spare time, like ...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
The Year of the Personal Website
We all know that it is going to happen. It’s not a question of if, but when Twitter will collapse. By the way: one day, Medium will follow. So will Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Or Mastodon.
Many people are now desperately waiting for their Twitter archives, hoping that th...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 24: NaN
For the last day of this year’s Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar, we’re back in Berlin. NaN is a foundry and type design practice “balancing weirdness and wisdom” that was founded by designer Luke Prowse. In late 2021, Luke was joined by Jean-Baptiste Morizot, who ha...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 23: Typotheque
Typotheque is a type design studio based in The Hague, Netherlands. Founded in 1999 by Peter Biľak, who also teaches typeface design at the renowned postgraduate course TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the foundry is well-known for the excellent design qua...
How to create a keyboard shortcut to export the current slide in Keynote
Lately I've been using Apple Keynote to create graphics for using in videos and blog posts. It's a quick way to arrange things on a page, copying and pasting most things just works, and there are enough built in shapes and tools to get the point across. However, after spending a full day creating graphics for a video, I found myself frustrated by the number of clicks required to export a single slide at a time.
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 22: 205TF
205TF is a type foundry based in Lyon, France. It was founded in 2017 by Damien Gautier and Florence Roller who run the foundry together with foundry manager Rémi Forte. Collaborating with many independent type designers, they have built a library of typefaces that is wonder...