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Matthias Ott

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Articles and notes by Matthias Ott, User Experience Designer from Stuttgart, Germany.

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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 elementary...

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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! 👋

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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 lan...

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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 directly...

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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.

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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 g...

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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 amazing...

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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/m...

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How I (Usually) Write Blog Posts

Manuel shared how he approaches writing and publishing blog posts on his personal site. If you follow him, and especially if his RSS feed is on your list of feeds, you know that Manuel indeed does put out a lot of posts. Just recently, he completed 100 posts about more or le...

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How To README

Solid documentation of a project is important, especially if you’re working in a team. When all information about how to install, deploy, or contribute to a project is buried in only one person’s brain, you’re in trouble once you have to make changes and that person is on va...

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Synthe Size Me

Leonie Watson just shared an interesting audio snippet on Mastodon: https://front-end.social/@tink/110007014963441869 What sounds like her speaking about accessibility is actually not Leonie, but an AI-generated synthetic voice, a cloned version of Leonie’s voice based on au...

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Dig Deeper

After about a year of living in our new home, after waiting for our neighbors to finish their driveway (life lesson: don’t expect gratitude from strangers), after our wholehearted horticulturist recovered from an acute illness, and after thaw had set in in the southwestern p...

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Expand and Stabilize, Explore and Craft

Dave wrote about what he calls The Feature Work → Maintenance Work Loop: he often finds himself working in cycles of Feature Work and Maintenance Work, “balancing the growth and health of a product with a cycle of building and repairing”. I’ve noticed the same both in design...

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Web Push It Real Good

Let’s call it what it is: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were a great idea full of potential but they never really caught on. One reason for that was that although you could add any website to the Home Screen in Apple’s iOS, it always felt like nothing more but a fancy bookmark...

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CSS Speech Module Level 1

As I noted yesterday, screen readers don’t convey the semantics of many HTML elements like strong or em. When I shared my post on Mastodon, Stéphane Deschamps chimed in and pointed to an promising candidate recommendation fresh from the press that might give authors much mor...

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Screen Readers Don’t Convey the Semantics of STRONG and EM

I always was under the impression that if I add emphasis to a piece of text in HTML by adding an em or a strong element, this emphasis would also be indicated to screen reader users in some way. For example, by a change of the tone of voice, much like if you are reading a t...

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Uncontainable Container Query Excitement

CSS Container Queries are now available in all major browsers. 🥳 With the release of Firefox 110 yesterday, the stable versions of Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox all support them. There have been many major additions to CSS in recent years, but this one is definitely one ...

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Time To Fresh Blogpost

I want to start a little experiment: I want to see if I can reduce my TTFB, which is, of course, short for “time to fresh blogpost”. Why? Because I think this is something where I can still improve a lot. Although I am aware that a few of you are indeed reading my posts and ...

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Streams of Consciousness

Jeremy wrote a little something about streams, in particular about streams on personal websites. His home page actually is like a stream: links, notes, and blog posts all appear underneath each other in chronological order. Many of us are now rediscovering or reviving their ...

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Reflections

A lot of us are still working from home these days. Many are in meetings every day, more and more people are holding important customer presentations or running workshops from their little home office, and some are even joining podcasts and online meetups as guests, or are s...

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Analytics Analysis

When it comes to tracking and analyzing a website‘s traffic, Google Analytics (GA) seems to be the obvious choice: everyone knows it, it’s powerful, it’s free, it’s used by millions of sites. 53 % of sites worldwide, to be precise. No wonder many clients ask for it and many ...

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Tapetenwechsel, or: Breaking the Sameness

We all want to do our best work. We all want to create something of value. But what if you’re stuck? What if the solution just doesn’t show up, the idea just won’t come, the interesting just doesn’t want to happen? Writers sometimes call it writer’s block, but not only write...

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Spirits That I’ve Cited

I have a tip for everyone who’s now – or very soon – trying to find out whether a text was written by a human or an AI.

Sure, you could train another AI to look for clues and confidently call it a “classifier”. But chances are, your classifier won’t be fully reliable. It might not work on short texts. Or, it might incorrectly but confidently label AI-written text as human-written. Also, people will sure as hell edit AI-written text so that it can’t be detected anymore.

Given that you have no idea how those algorithms really work, you might as well just use the classifier written by the same company that is currently gifting you the gift of AI for free. Sounds really reassuring, right?

Instead, how about you try this:

Look for the soul.

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A Birthday Audio Gear Upgrade

Today, I turned 41. It was a wonderful, relaxed day with my family – and my parents’ dog who is a bit of a maniac… 😅 I also got to try out my two “office” birthday presents: a new microphone for voice, the Røde Procaster, and an audio interface, the MOTU M2. The Røde Procast...

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Updating My Site in 2023

Alright. Enough talk. Let’s get to it. One of my plans for 2023 is to redesign this website. Here is the thing: it is easy to promise things to yourself. It is much harder to deliver, especially when the project is quite large and you have to do it in your spare time, like ...

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The Year of the Personal Website

We all know that it is going to happen. It’s not a question of if, but when Twitter will collapse. By the way: one day, Medium will follow. So will Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Or Mastodon. Many people are now desperately waiting for their Twitter archives, hoping that th...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 24: NaN

For the last day of this year’s Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar, we’re back in Berlin. NaN is a foundry and type design practice “balancing weirdness and wisdom” that was founded by designer Luke Prowse. In late 2021, Luke was joined by Jean-Baptiste Morizot, who ha...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 23: Typotheque

Typotheque is a type design studio based in The Hague, Netherlands. Founded in 1999 by Peter Biľak, who also teaches typeface design at the renowned postgraduate course TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the foundry is well-known for the excellent design qua...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 22: 205TF

205TF is a type foundry based in Lyon, France. It was founded in 2017 by Damien Gautier and Florence Roller who run the foundry together with foundry manager Rémi Forte. Collaborating with many independent type designers, they have built a library of typefaces that is wonder...

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Independent Type Foundry Advent Calendar – Day 21: HvD Fonts

For day 21, we’re back in Berlin, where a young graphic designer with a love for type decided in 2008 to make his passion his full-time job. Today, Hannes von Döhren’s type foundry called HvD Fonts sells a wide range of typefaces, some of them being hugely popular designs. T...