There goes 2024.
It was a year dominated by Ukraine and Gaza. Utterly horrific and unnecessary death courtesy of Putin and Netanyahu.
For me personally, 2024 was just fine. I was relatively healthy all year. The people I love were relatively healthy too. I don’t take that ...
People spent a lot of time and energy in 2024 talking about (and on) other people’s websites. Twitter. Bluesky. Mastodon. Even LinkedIn.
I observed it all with the dispassionate perspective of Dr. Manhattan on Mars. While I’m happy to see more people abondoning the cesspool...
I’ve been keeping track of the books I’m reading for about seven years now. I do that here on my own website, as well as on bookshop.org.
It has become something of a tradition for me to post an end-of-year summary of the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months. Maybe...
Yesterday when I mentioned my paranoia of third-party dependencies on The Session, I said:
I’ve built in the option to switch between multiple geocoding providers. When one of them inevitably starts enshittifying their service, I can quickly move on to another. It’s like...
The Session has been online for over 20 years. When you maintain a site for that long, you don’t want to be relying on third parties—it’s only a matter of time until they’re no longer around.
Some third party APIs are unavoidable. The Session has maps for sessions and other...
This year I decided I wanted to get better at speaking Irish.
Like everyone brought up in Ireland, I sort of learned the Irish language in school. It was a compulsory subject, along with English and maths.
But Irish wasn’t really taught like a living conversational languag...
I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.
If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.
Needless ...
Last year I described how I syndicate my posts to different social networks.
Back then my approach to syndicating to Bluesky was to piggy-back off my micro.blog account (which is really just the RSS feed of my notes):
Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. On...
There are different kinds of buzzwords.
Some buzzwords are useful. They take a concept that would otherwise require a sentence of explanation and package it up into a single word or phrase. Back in the day, “ajax” was a pretty good buzzword.
Some buzzwords are worse than u...
I went to FFConf on Friday. It did me the world of good.
To be honest, I haven’t much felt like venturing out over the past few days since my optimism took a big hit. But then when I do go and interact with people, I’m grateful for it.
Like, when I went out to my usual Wed...
I think of myself of as an optimist. It makes me insufferable sometimes.
When someone is having a moan about something in the news and they say something like “people are terrible”, I can’t resist weighing in with a “well, actually…” Then I’ll start channeling Rutger Bregma...
I read Madeline Miller’s Circe last year. I loved it. It was my favourite fiction book I read that year.
Reading Circe kicked off a bit of a reading spree for me. I sought out other retellings of Greek myths. There’s no shortage of good books out there from Pat Barker, Nata...
I went to the UX Brighton conference yesterday.
The quality of the presentations was really good this year, probably the best yet. Usually there are one or two stand-out speakers (like Tom Kerwin last year), but this year, the standard felt very high to me.
But…
The theme...
UX London isn’t the only event from Clearleft coming your way in 2025. There’s a brand new spin-off event dedicated to user research happening in February. It’s called Research By The Sea.
I’m not curating this one, though I will be hosting it. The curation is being carried...
Is it too early to start planning for 2025 already? Perhaps. But you might want to add some dates to your calender:
June 10th, 11th, and 12th, 2025.
That’s when UX London will return!
It’ll be be back in CodeNode. That’s the venue we tried for the first time this year and...
Speaking of serendipity, not long after I wrote about making a static archive of The Session for people to download and share, I came across a piece by Alex Chan about using static websites for tiny archives.
The use-case is slightly different—this is about personal archive...
I described using my feed reader like this:
I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email.
Instead it’s like this:
When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels...
Earlier this year I wrote about some performance improvements to The Session using the content-visibility property in CSS.
If you say content-visibility: auto you’re telling the browser not to bother calculating the layout and paint for an element until it needs to. But you...
Back in June I documented a bug on macOS in how Spaces (or whatever they call they’re desktop management thingy now) works with websites added to the dock.
I’m happy to report that after upgrading to Sequoia, the latest version of macOS, the bug has been fixed! Excellent!
...
When I went up to London for the State of the Browser conference last month, I shared the train journey with Remy.
I always like getting together with Remy. We usually end up discussing sci-fi books we’re reading, commiserating with one another about conference-organising, ...
One of the perks of speaking at conferences is that I get to travel to new and interesting places. I’d say that most of my travel over the past couple of decades was thanks to conferences. Recently though, I’ve been going places for non-work related reasons.
A couple of wee...
This seems to be the attitude of many of my fellow nerds—designers and developers—when presented with tools based on large language models that produce dubious outputs based on the unethical harvesting of other people’s work and requiring staggering amounts of energy to run:
This is the future! I need to start using these tools now, even if they’re flawed, because otherwise I’ll be left behind. They’ll only get better. It’s inevitable.
Whereas this seems to be the attitude of those same designers and developers when faced with stable browser features that can be safely used today without frameworks or libraries:
The Session goes through periods of getting spammed with automated sign-ups. I’m not sure why. It’s not like they do anything with the accounts. They’re just created and then they sit there (until I delete them).
In the past I’ve dealt with them in an ad-hoc way. If the sig...
The datalist element is good. It was a bit bumpy there for a while, but browser implementations have improved over time. Now it’s by far the simplest and most robust way to create an autocompleting combobox widget.
Hook up an input element with a datalist element using the ...
I went along to this year’s State Of The Browser conference on Saturday. It was great!
Technically I wasn’t just an attendee. I was on the substitution bench. Dave asked if I’d be able to jump in and give my talk on declarative design should any of the speakers have to drop...
I’ve noticed a really strange justification from people when I ask them about their use of generative tools that use large language models (colloquially and inaccurately labelled as artificial intelligence).
I’ll point out that the training data requires the wholesale harve...
I’ve been going buildless—or as Brad crudely puts it, raw-dogging websites on a few projects recently. Not just obviously simple things like Clearleft’s Browser Support page, but sites like:
The Clearleft podcast
Patterns Day
UX London
They also have 0 dependencies.
Lik...
I’ve been on a sabbatical from work for the past six weeks.
At Clearleft, you’re eligible for a sabbatical after five years. For some reason I haven’t taken one until now, 19 years into my tenure at the agency. I am an idiot.
My six-week sabbatical has been lovely, alterna...
So Frostapalooza happened on Saturday.
It was joyous!
It all started back in July of last year when I got an email from Brad:
Next summer I’m turning 40, and I’m going to use that milestone as an excuse to play a big concert with and for all of my friends and family. I...
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