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Matthias Ott

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

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Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

An Internet Archive Plugin for Craft CMS 5

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...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Webmention for Craft CMS 5

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...

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 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...