FeedCity

Third day of the Micro.blog winter wonder photo challenge: firelight.

Calvin Tomkins, leading up to his 100th birthday, wrote a series of journal entries for The New Yorker, a mix of memories from his career and the new challenges of getting older and losing his vision:

When she types my spoken text, I spend the next few days editing it on my antediluvian laptop—changing words, deleting sections and redoing them, fine-tuning the focus. This gets harder and harder, but the alternative, I fear, is doing nothing.

The technical explanation for how Bluesky has implemented their find friends from contacts is fascinating. I don’t plan to do anything with phone numbers again, but I still learned some things from it.

If a new CEO of Mozilla took an oath to restore the web to its former greatness, they would find a lot of business models open to them. Instead, they’re trying to be part of the tech industry which places no value on the web being a place for open development. I am pretty su...

We just finished our last Homebrew Website Club Europe event of the year. We spent the time chatting about the last year on our websites – what we made, what we are proud of, what we learned – and looked ahead to what we may be interested in doing next year. One question came...

Wednesday session

Rainy day in Austin. Looking out from my car as the skyline fades up into the mist.

OpenAI often makes fun of their own product names — “really bad at naming things” — but Google’s image product is literally called Nano Banana. 🍌

But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.

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Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.

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I like this blog post by Robin Rendle about whether the current disruption of search engines might be a good thing:

Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.

Most blogs are not monetized with ads and shouldn’t be. There are still indirect benefits to writing on the web. Sharing for the sake of it, bringing people into newsletters or subscriptions, and building an audience that leads to other good things, jobs, friends.

Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.

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Richard MacManus mentions Ev Williams posting about when Google bought Pyra/Blogger in The Blogosphere Blossoms in 2003 As RSS Readers Catch On. I mentioned it in my post/page Blogosphere Part 2: Musings/Blogosphere: 22 years ago: …so I’ve not had a net connection in about 16 hours. The HUGE news from last night announced was that...

“What a terrible thing it is,” said Donald Trump, “And all we can do right now is pray for the victims, and for those that were very badly hurt.” Such was the president’s reaction to the mass shooting at Brown University. We are inured to these clichéd formulations. But they are an essential element of...

"Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in digital media what they think is coming in the year ahead. Here's what they told us." Some essays from the annual collection that caught my eye.

Last night while I was on the phone, ChatGPT started talking to me in a British woman's voice. It's something that my Android phone does every so often, when I haven't said the magic word that activates it, even if I'm not in the same room as the device. It's a tiny bit funn...

I read The Frugal Gamer’s post “If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?” with great joy. Like The Frugal Gamer, I too am bundled up inside bracing the weather. I was hoping to go for a walk but the rain and wind has convinced me to stay inside and instead hu...

In an Irish session, tunes are almost never played in isolation. They’re played in sets. A set of tunes might be as few as two. More usually, it’s three or more. It’s unusual to change from one tune type into another. You tend to get a set of jigs, or a set of reels, or a ...

You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.

While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.

Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.

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