This is just a quick test whether the Craft 5 version of the Webmention plugin is sending mentions properly…
Please ignore this, dear RSS lovers!
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Articles and notes by Matthias Ott, User Experience Designer from Stuttgart, Germany.
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btconf 2025 speakers
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Testing Webmention Sending
This is just a quick test whether the Craft 5 version of the Webmention plugin is sending mentions properly…
Please ignore this, dear RSS lovers!
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Owning It
For the second time now, someone mentioned to me that it is kind of paradoxical that my newsletter, which is called “Own Your Web”, is not hosted on my own server or under my own domain but on Buttondown.
And yes, they are right. I realize that this is kind of not walking th...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
Free Audio Plugins: Accusonus ERA 6 Bundle
I’ve been down in an audio plugin rabbit hole lately. More on that in a later blog post. But I just stumbled upon a set of free plugins that might be of interest to you, if you are doing voice recordings of any kind – be it a podcast, voice over, or, let’s say, video tutoria...
Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott
How to Set Your Domain as Your Bluesky Handle
As Twitter is (far too) slowly falling apart and more and more people are looking for alternatives, Bluesky is enjoying a surge in popularity at the moment.
One neat little feature is that you can use your own domain as your handle on Bluesky. In a way, this is the perfect h...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
Highlighting Blogging on Mastodon
In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or MacRumors, the official Mastodo...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
Fixing the Logitech Spotlight
The Logitech Spotlight presentation remote is a sleek piece of hardware. It is comparatively small, fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and the buttons come with a very satisfying, albeit for my taste a tiny bit too loud, click. But most importantly, the brushed aluminium ...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
Making Own Your Web More Sustainable
I just published the 11th issue of Own Your Web, my newsletter about designing, building, creating, and publishing on the Web. When I started the newsletter back in autumn of 2023, I didn’t yet know what form the newsletter would take on, if people would like it, and also wh...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
Welcome to the IndieWeb
Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes d...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
Links Worth Sharing
Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interes...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
We ❤️ RSS
In the last issue of Own Your Web, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which probably everyone wit...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
All Things Being Equalized
For my birthday, I got a new pair of speakers for my home office / home studio. After looking around for quite some time, I settled on the ADAM Audio T5V in the end. The T5Vs are affordable, entry-level studio monitors with a 5“ woofer that are optimized for smaller rooms. A...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
42 for 42
ol {
list-style-position: outside;
padding-left: 1em;
}
ol li {
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
}
I’m turning 42 today and yes, I am as surprised about that number as you are. If 42 really is the answer to life, the u...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
Tour De-Noise
Whether you are running online workshops, hosting a live stream, or recording audio or video content, optimal audio quality is absolutely essential. People in your audience might tolerate if your video is noisy or not perfectly sharp. But if your audio quality is poor, for e...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
What’s Too Good to Be True?
The web platform is changing rapidly these days. With every major browser release, more and more powerful features get added, many of which are based on previous input about what web developers need to build better for the web. One way for
browser vendors and developer advoc...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
The Best Comment Section on the Internet
Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, recently sat down with Tim Ferriss to talk about a bunch of different things. One of those things: blogging.
It might not come as a surprise, but Matt described blogging as one of the most rewarding things he di...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
2024: The Year of the Personal Website
At the beginning of 2023, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website:
In the search for a permanent home on the web, more and more people are now rediscovering the personal website as a place to shar...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
Climate Optimism
It’s not going well.
After all-time heat records were shattered worldwide during heat waves across all continents and ongoing wildfires eradicated 5 % of the entire forest area of Canada, 2023 will be the hottest year ever recorded (1.43°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industria...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
No Borders
Where were you in 2013 and what were you doing back then? What have you done over those last ten years? How have the last ten years changed your life, your work, or what’s important to you? I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t often pause to reflect about the past ...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
My New Newsletter: Own Your Web
I just sent out the first iss...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
My Favorite Mac Apps in 2023
h3 a {text-decoration: underline}
After three years, I finally replaced my old Intel MacBook Pro – and its cracked screen – with a new machine. I’m still holding back a bit with my excitement for this 16-inch M1 Max M...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
WOFF Has Left the Building
In a recent project, the web fonts I bought and downloaded were only available as WOFF2 files. Staring in disbelief at the unpacked folder full of WOFF2 files, I wondered: Why did they not include WOFF files as well? Isn’t WOFF still needed? Or is it finally time to ditch WO...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
Pointing Fingers
Don’t use your finger!”
Regardless of which country and school system you grew up in, chances are you have heard this sentence at least once from one of your teachers. I, for one, remember my elementa...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
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! 👋
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
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 l...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
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 direct...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
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.
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
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 great question: Everybody just...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
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 amazin...
Matthias Ott
• matthiasott
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/...