Jane Goodall, the scientist, conservationist, and educator who died last Wednesday at 91, will always be remembered for her singular, field-defining work on wild chimpanzees. She lived with wild chimpanzees to study them, befriended them, and made a groundbreaking discovery:...
For a European with lots of friends and like-minded web folks in the US, it is both heartbreaking and bewildering to see how the political and societal climate in the country is changing right now. All of this is not only worrisome from a political perspective, but also pose...
When the people at EMI ordered a bunch of Altec 436B compressors in the late 1950s for Abbey Road Studios, they were hoping for that legendary American sound they had heard at their sister studio Capitol Records in Los Angeles. But when the units arrived in London and the en...
Age quod agis. This Latin phrase, attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, translates to “do what you are doing.”
Do what you are doing. Like in: dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to whatever you engage in. Do what you are doing. Not the thing over ...
It’s Blogtober again. And this time, I’ve (more or less spontaneously) decided to take part in it. For those of you who don’t know what it is: Blogtober is a writing challenge that takes part every Oktober (similar to Bloguary, Blobuary, Blarch, Blapril, Blay, Blune, Bluly, ...
I am convinced that it makes total sense to spend a certain amount of your (spare) time on this planet tinkering around and exploring stuff that seems totally useless or silly compared to what you normally do. And without having a real explanation for why it happened, I’ve b...
Now that the Webmention plugin is finally Craft 5 compatible after last week's update, I jumped at the chance and updated another plugin I had once written for my personal site.
The Internet Archive plugin automates the archiving of your posts to the Wayback Machine. Each ti...
Imagine my surprise, when, roughly two weeks ago, I received a direct message on Mastodon from Brandon Kelly, the founder and head of the team behind Craft CMS, opening with:
👋 I spent today worki...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 do...
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...
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...
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...
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 universe, and everything, then maybe it makes sense to look back on what the old lad actually le...
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...
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...
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 did...
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 pla...
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-industrial...
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 ...
I just sent out the first i...
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 MacBook Pro, just because I was ...
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...
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 elementary...
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