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

A public list by feedcity.

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Good Riddance, GPTBot

Just like Google is constantly indexing the Web, OpenAI is now crawling the open Web to scrape content from websites for free to train their LLM (lucrative language model) “AI” products.

But, as I learned from a post by Ethan on Mastodon, you can disallow GPTBot to get its tiny robot hands on your writing by adding those two lines of code to your website’s robots.txt:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Good riddance, GPTBot! 👋

ooh.directory blog Valid
• Phil Gyford

What does recently updated mean?

You might be familiar with the Recently updated blogs page, which shows a list of blogs ordered by those that posted most recently. It can be a nice way to see what people are blogging about right now. In fact, in a recent blog post, Warren Ellis said: the ooh.directory recently updated blogs list is what I have instead of social media if I’m in the mood to “waste” time on my phone Which sounds like a great idea. However, a while back I realised a small problem with the page. 

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

The New CSS

Alright, let’s write more about CSS! CSS! CSS! Change I’ve been writing CSS since the early 2000s, shortly after we ditched building web layouts with tables and spacer GIFs in favor of hacking our designs together with floats. CSS has since become my favorite programming lan...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Writing, Fragments, and the Memex Method

This piece by Cory Doctorow about blogging, which I read a few days ago, is exceptional. Why? I already knew that blogging – and having a personal website in general – is a superpower. I had heard before of Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking essay “As We May Think” that directly...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Simple Truths About Personal Websites

Nobody knows you.

You are not entitled to anyone’s attention.

Be respectful, be helpful, be kind.

Your personal website isn’t a replacement for social media. It’s much more than that.

Who is your site for?

Document your life.

Your perspective matters.

Capture your thoughts.

Share what makes you lean forward.

Use RSS.

You never know what sticks.

Make it easy to publish.

Enjoy the process.

The adverb is not your friend.

Typography is everything.

You will surprise yourself.

You will grow.

Be curious. Be intentional.

This is your playground. Play.

Your canvas is limitless.

Sell the world.

Hit publish.

It’s yours.

HeydonWorks

Functional documentation

Some collected thoughts and ideas around applying a functional approach to writing and maintaining documentation, especially for design systems. In programming, you have these things called functions. Functions are chunks of code, typically identified by name. How you write...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

CSS Custom Properties Beyond the :root

Manuel asked: Is there a good rea­son why we’re defin­ing glob­al cus­tom prop­er­ties on :root/​html and not on body?” It’s a g...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Starting A New Kirby Project

Today, I started a new project with Kirby CMS. (No, it’s not my personal site. That one’s still brewing…) Kirby is a lightweight, no-fuzz content management system (CMS) created by Bastian Allgeier, which works well for projects of any size. It is easy to install and amazing...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

A README Template – With an Automatically Generated Table of Contents

A while ago, I wrote about what you could include in a README file for a project. Based on this post and a few practical examples of READMEs, I created and published a template that I will use in my own projects going forward. It is available on GitHub: https://github.com/m...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

How I (Usually) Write Blog Posts

Manuel shared how he approaches writing and publishing blog posts on his personal site. If you follow him, and especially if his RSS feed is on your list of feeds, you know that Manuel indeed does put out a lot of posts. Just recently, he completed 100 posts about more or le...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

How To README

Solid documentation of a project is important, especially if you’re working in a team. When all information about how to install, deploy, or contribute to a project is buried in only one person’s brain, you’re in trouble once you have to make changes and that person is on va...

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• Matthias Ott

Synthe Size Me

Leonie Watson just shared an interesting audio snippet on Mastodon: https://front-end.social/@tink/110007014963441869 What sounds like her speaking about accessibility is actually not Leonie, but an AI-generated synthetic voice, a cloned version of Leonie’s voice based on au...

Articles by Aaron Parecki Supports Webmention Valid
• Aaron Parecki

OAuth Support in Bluesky and AT Protocol

Bluesky, a new social media platform and AT Protocol, is unsurprisingly running up against the same challenges and limitations that Flickr, Twitter and many other social media platforms faced in the 2000s: passwords!

Articles by Aaron Parecki Supports Webmention Valid
• Aaron Parecki

How to use your own domain as your BlueSky handle

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.

Matthias Ott Supports Webmention
• 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 Supports Webmention
• 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 Supports Webmention
• 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 Supports Webmention
• 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 Supports Webmention
• 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 Supports Webmention
• 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 ...