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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
Thursday session
Accessibility, performance, privacy, security, sustainability …some of the things I value more than “developer experience” when I’m working on thesession.org
anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/haterdom/2025/08/26/i-am-an-ai-hater.html
I wanted to quote an excerpt of this post, but honestly I couldn’t choose just one part—the whole thing is perfect. You should read it for the beauty of the language alone.
(This is Anthony Moser’s first blog post. I fear he has created his Citizen Kane.)
Put the kettle on. This is a long one!
Matt takes a trip down memory lane and looks at all the frontend tools, technologies, and techniques that have come and gone over the years.
But this isn’t about nostalgia (although it does make you appreciate how far we’ve come). He’s looking at whether anything from the past is worth keeping today.
Studying past best practices and legacy systems is crucial for understanding the evolution of technology and making informed decisions today.
There’s only one technique that makes the cut:
After discussing countless legacy approaches and techniques best left in the past, you’ve finally arrived at a truly timeless and Incredibly important methodology.
smashingmagazine.com/2025/08/optimizing-pwas-different-display-modes/
There’s really good browser support for display-mode media queries and this article does a really good job of running through some of the use cases for your progressive web app.
I like the idea of adding this to personal websites:
Mastodon shows an “Alt” button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image.
Thursday session
Wednesday session
Monday session
If I were to photocopy this article, nobody would argue that my photocopier wrote it and therefore can think. But add enough convolutedness to the process, and it looks a lot like maybe it did and can.
In reality, all we’ve created is a bot which is almost perfect at mimicking human-like natural language use, and the rest is people just projecting other human qualities on to it. Quite simply, “LLMs are doing reasoning” is the “look, my dog is smiling” of technology. In exactly the same way that dogs don’t convey their emotions via human-like facial expressions, there’s no reason to believe that even if computer could think, it’d perfectly mirror what looks like human reasoning.
Did a live server migration over the weekend, switching over DNS like…
I was thinking about something I wrote yesterday when I was talking about styling underlines on links:
For a start, you can adjust the distance of the underline from the text using
text-underline-offset. If you’re using a generous line-height, use a generous distance here too.
For some reason, I completely forgot that we’ve got a line-height unit in CSS now: lh. So if you want to make the distance of your underline proportional to the line height of the text that the link is part of, it’s easy-peasy:
text-underline-offset: 0.15lh;
The greater the line height, the greater the distance between the link text and its underline.
I think this one is going into my collection of CSS snippets I use on almost every project.
I just found out that Stephanie “Steve” Shirley passed away.
She was an absolute hero to me.
Monday session
Reading Bee Speaker by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Float like a bee, sting like a butterfly.
The last of the Apollo 8 crew is gone.
I’m somewhat obsessed with CMAT’s Euro Country. An opening verse in Irish and a blistering bridge that might single-handedly scupper Bertie Ahern’s presidential ambitions.
Thursday session
Wednesday session
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
Tuesday session
I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:
RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.
When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It’s only legacy code if you have to maintain it!
The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt.
If you don’t understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.