With every passing night, I find myself thinking how the sun now sets a little bit earlier each day. Whereas the sun sets late in the peak of summer – at around ten o' clock at night – the autumn sun falls earlier. I notice change in the air as we move from summer to autumn. ...
When I watch Local Hero, I am reminded of how much I love home. Indeed, the movie is a story of someone falling in love with Scotland. The beaches may be cold, but they are beautiful. The skies may be dull, but you can sometimes see the Northern Lights. The phone service in t...
In "Mashups", I explored the question "what is the blog equivalent of a mashup?" The post itself was a mashup of several other posts chosen to complement the ideas I was thinking about. (What better way to figure something out than to try it?) The topic of mashup pertains to ...
Writing HTML on a phone is difficult. To write HTML – like all programming languages – you need to use a lot of symbols. The main symbols that you need for HTML are the open and closing angle brackets (< and >, respectively).
On iOS, these are in the tertiary keyboard....
Mastodon shows an "Alt" button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image. Here is an example of a post with an attached image that has alt text:
The Mastodon user interface s...
Under the blanket of the late evening, having been in awe at the beauty of the sunset, I looked to the sky and saw a star – a single star. There are other stars out there, but they are not yet visible. My eyes fixate on the first star, feeling awe at the sparkle in the night ...
Look at the hills! I remark every week at a particular point on a journey through the countryside. They span for miles, I think to myself. The scene is awesome, in the traditional sense of the word. On a bright, clear night like tonight there is often a slight haze above the ...
On the bus this morning, I listened to an album by Death Cab for Cutie, a band whose music I enjoy. As the songs passed by, I noticed there were occasionally small pauses at the end of a track. A few seconds – no more than four or five – but enough to feel that this pause may...
I recently moved to using Ghost to manage the posts and pages on my website. With Ghost, I now have a user-friendly web interface in which I can format my blog posts and pages. I am especially enjoying the ease with which I can upload images. When I publish a page, a webhook ...
This morning I have been doing a bit of work on my website. With a cup of coffee by my side, I have worked on something that I have had on my TODO list all week but haven’t gotten around to: enabling incremental builds for my static website. This feature means that whenever I...
The first thing I would write in my notebook at the start of a class in school was the date, followed by a title. The date was among the only text that would occupy the margin. Dates helped me find information.
Memories of writing dates in notebooks came to me this week when...
When I woke up, the hills outside were mostly invisible through the fog. A thick haze – an autumn fog – enveloped the landscape. In these moments, my mind turns to what is immediately in front of me – the trees. The trees are starting to change colour, I thought to myself. Wi...
When the Internet Phone Book was released, it came up in several calls I was in. I had a copy of the book on the table next to me so that I could bring it out. Knowing that some people may not have seen the book – or heard of the project – showing the physical copy had signif...
At last week’s Homebrew Website Club, we had a discussion about making websites collaboratively. The discussion made me think back to the time when several participants all edited the same web page at the same time. The setup was an Etherpad – a web-based collaborative text d...
Interface design is intertwined with real-world metaphors. Computers save information to files. Files are stored in folders. We can open one or more windows to view different applications. We put files we no longer want into the rubbish bin (trash can). While looking for more...
I was featured in Dense Discovery’s Worthy Five series, in which participants are invited to share five things that are worth seeing/doing/watching/asking, et cetera. Dense Discovery is among my favourite weekly newsletters. I recommend subscribing!
When I write for other s...
I have been thinking a lot about tech tips lately. How should I document the tools I use or configurations I have that improve my experience using technology? While I think about this, I wanted to start by publishing a list of browser extensions I use.
I use Firefox every d...
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...
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...
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!
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:...
IndieWeb
IWC BER 2025