If you feel like flagging the analytics subdomain of someone’s personal website on various DNS blocklists, at least take the time to look up what Plausible analytics is and why a cookie banner might not be needed before labelling it as "BREAKS EU LAW!" *sigh* 🙄

Also: there are only a few tickets left for what might just be Europe’s finest conference on design, creativity, and the Web. ✨ Trust me: this one’s genuinely special. The kind of event that will change you and your perspectives. 🖤

https://beyondtellerrand.com/events/dusseldorf-2026

A week from now, I’ll be in Düsseldorf for @btconf 🎉🤗

Can’t wait to be back in the audience – who will join me there? 👋

“Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.”

Wise words from @zeldman 💙
https://zeldman.com/2026/04/15/the-courage-to-stop/

✍️ New post: Design and Engineering, As One

A #longread about a man with a stopwatch, a school in Weimar, and why the gap between design and engineering isn’t an accident.

https://matthiasott.com/articles/design-and-engineering-as-one

14-year-old today: “The option of me becoming a classic coder, one who writes everything by hand, probably doesn't exist anymore, does it? Too bad, it was actually fun.”

😢

Your AI-generated videos of the Moon sure look impressive. But nothing compares to the real Artemis II footage – they’re almost there 😯:

https://www.youtube.com/live/6RwfNBtepa4

“LLMs can autonomously, and without fancy scaffolding, find and exploit 0-day vulnerabilities in critical software. This is not something that was true even, let’s say, three or four months ago.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sd26pWhfmg

Just released a small but useful update for my little Internet Archive Plugin for Craft CMS. 🏛️

You can now opt individual entries out of automatic archiving via a lightswitch field – and manually send any entry to the Wayback Machine straight from the Craft CP entries index. ✨

https://github.com/matthiasott/craft-internetarchive

New UNSW Sydney research finds vaping likely causes lung and oral cancer: Carcinogens in e-cigarette aerosols show DNA damage, tumours in mice & cellular harm. Please – tell your children, friends, and loved ones who might believe the “vaping is safe" lie of the tobacco industry. 💚

https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/03/vaping-likely-to-cause-cancer-new-findings

✍️ New post: Hello Again, World

📷🌍

https://matthiasott.com/notes/hello-again-world

Only like 6-7 minutes left! 🚀

So “Matt” and “Matt” from Cloudflare used their AI coding agents to slopfork WordPress? Really? 🤔🧐

I learned in design school in Germany that of course, the percent symbol is separated from the number with a space. Because you could also write 100 Prozent. You also don’t write 100cm without a space, right?

And the careful typographer will make a Jan Tschichold gesture and decrease the space slightly …

But obviously, things are different in written English.

That’s going to be … interesting 😂

Typography nerds, I need your opinion! (And help 🙏)
Channeling your inner Robert Bringhurst – how would you write a percentage in English correctly?

100 % – with a space, because % is a unit
100% – who needs a weird space here?
100 % – with a thin space, don't half-ass it!
Honestly, who cares, really…

✍️ New post: This, Still Not for Everyone

A few thoughts on the new WebAIM million report. And why we will only improve #accessibility on the Web together.

https://matthiasott.com/notes/this-still-not-for-everyone

Quick reminder, especially if you’re a freelancer or developer using Free/Pro/Pro+ plans for client work: Opt out of GitHub using your data for AI model training before April 24 (seriously, wtf that this isn’t opt-in!).
https://github.com/settings/copilot/features#copilot-telemetry-policy

And here’s a small favour I’d love to ask: If you’ve seen me speak and have a few kind words to share – a short testimonial about your experience – I’d be genuinely thankful if you wrote me. It would mean a lot and help others know what to expect. 🙏💚

I finally did it: I now have a speaking page on my site. 🎤🎉

If you’re looking for someone to talk about design, the web, CSS, accessibility, or the independent web at your event, that’s where you’ll find what I do, what I’ve spoken about, and how to get in touch:

https://matthiasott.com/speaking

31 years.

For the kids: That’s a dad joke referring to a line from a hip-hop track from 31 years ago.

I just had to … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
#shimmyshimmyya

@chriscoyier @davatron5000 Thanks for the shout out on my favorite podcast! 🤗 The issue in my case was indeed an incredibly large number of crawler bots from different countries, all brute-force attacking my notes section with tags in the URL params. They also completely ignored nofollow and canonical. The majority were coming from Singapore, later Taiwan. So I still have no idea why my hosting provider decided to block Canada. 😆

Release 1.2.0 of Webmention for Craft CMS adds a “Failed Webmentions” view for easier debugging and retrying with one click. 🎉

https://github.com/matthiasott/webmention/releases/tag/v1.2.0

Webmentions can fail for all kinds of reasons – broken microformats, unreachable sources, flaky CDNs – and debugging them from log files is cumbersome. So I added a new “Failed Webmentions” section to the Craft CMS plugin’s control panel that shows what went wrong. Already works on my machine™ 😁

Hello migraine with aura my old friend… 😘

Could be fun to try to visualize that. The patterns are different every time and a mix of blank spots, blurry areas, and rainbow stars or rather twinkling chrystal patterns slowly growing and wandering around my field of vision. ✨

✍️ New post: The Shape of Friction

I wrote a short blog post reply to @davatron5000’s recent post (👏) about generative AI, friction, and people.

https://matthiasott.com/notes/the-shape-of-friction

Added a feature to the Webmention plugin for @craftcms that I’ve wanted to add for a long time:

Threaded Webmentions 😍

I still need to fine-tune the logic for matching the in-reply-to URL a bit (Mastodon’s URLs vary, and there’s often also Bridgy in between). But overall, the feature works. 🥳

https://github.com/matthiasott/webmention/releases/tag/v1.1.1

RE: https://w3c.social/@timbl/116218139512953309

Still vague, but still so exciting …