If you take the time to create content online, you probably want people to read it. It doesn't have to go viral, but it'd be nice if some folks read it, right? But for people to read your stuff, they must know about it. And for this, Google (or other search engines) must index your site. Googlebot…

April 15, 2024 indieweb blogging personal While surfing the web this weekend, I saw a curious question from Kev Quirk on Mastodon, attached to a blog post: What About Anonymous Blogging? Have you ever thought about blogging anonymously? I blog under my real name, but wonder if that could have held…

The link-peek Web Component allows you to turn a regular anchor link to a rich preview (also known as an 'unfurled' link) to show description, meta image, website name and more using a JSON API. Origin For a number of years I've been using Ghost to write my website content, and one of its very…

Hi All! 🤗 There are many pages you can add to your personal site that people can visit if they want to learn more about you. A “contact” page or an “about” page are two classics that you’ll find on many sites out there. But what if someone doesn’t want to read your bio, your scope of activities, or…

I've made a change to my site's pagination wherein I've enhanced the page count displayed at the bottom of my home and links pages to display the page count in a select element. The select displays a list of all the pages and navigates to the selected page. If a user does not have JavaScript…

Back in the pandemic, as my personal website started to become a comfort in difficult times, I often asked myself: what can I do with my website this weekend? I would make small changes. Add a link here, write a blog post there, change a background colour every now and again. Sometimes, I would take…

I’ve been blocking various “artificial intelligence” (“AI”) bots on my site. Why, you ask? Well, I don’t like the idea of my work being hoovered up to train “AI” data models; I don’t like that these companies assume my content’s available to them by default, and that I have to opt out of their…

Git Fresh Published on April 7, 2024 I don’t know if this is a personal quirk or a side effect of my role (designer first, developer second), but my Git branches rarely stray far from main. I branch; I whip up whatever prototype, pattern or design adjustment I had in mind; I return to and update…

9 April 2024 When you design a product, you should usability test it. Otherwise, you won’t know how well it works. Typically you either: create and test a prototype build it in production and test there Building it in production is usually the most expensive and risky approach so lets leave that out…

One of my favourite pastimes is clicking around the blogosphere, exploring and reading personal websites. I especially love encountering blogrolls or link lists, wherein a site owner links to other websites that may be of interest. I have maintained a blogroll listing some of the blogs I follow for…

Daily Tips I’m coming to realize that a lot of my dissatisfaction with the state of the web is that I view web development as a craft, but as a profession we’re in the late-stage industrial age. I prefer a web of hand-laid bricks placed by skilled masons. The industry wants poured, stamped concrete.…

We've got it real good when it comes to standing up websites these days (especially static ones). Modern hosts like Vercel and Netlify take care of a lot out of the box, shielding us from the meticulous, complicated stuff. Caching is one of them. To accommodate the widest range of users, many…

There’s no truth teller quite like Google autocomplete. As you type “Design development handoff is…” into the search bar, it quickly fills in the blank with terms like “issues” and “not working.” It’s not that everyone’s handoff is broken; it’s that we’re constantly in search of ways to make it…

Yesterday, we learned about CSS variables. Today, I wanted to show you an advanced approach to working with them that I often use with client projects. Let’s dig in! Globals for system or theme defaul

Yesterday, I mentioned that I love CSS variables. Today, I thought I’d explain what they are and how they work, for those who aren’t already familiar with them. Let’s dig in! You define a CSS variable

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of understanding the medium that we work in. Today, I wanted to share my best practices for writing code with a team. Here’s the short list: Have and enforce co

I’m not a “[full-stack] developer”, regardless of what my last job title says. I’m not even a front-end developer, thanks to the JavaScript–industrial complex. I’m a front-of-the-front-end developer, but that’s too long. So, I’m a web designer. And I also specialise in accessibility, design systems,…

This post is adapted from the talk I did at the Eleventy Meetup. You can also watch the talk on YouTube. This is what I look like when I try to explain how my website works: There are three main parts that make up this website: Echo, my API server (and Eleventy data files), and standard Markdown…

I'll definitely reference the following blog post in the future. Kitty Giraudel describes when to use disabled and aria-disabled. Ready? Because here comes some solid HTML attribute advice. The disabled attribute is totally fine and should be used when relevant! What’s important is not to use it…

Here’s a full disclaimer upfront: This isn’t something I’ve come up with. Jeffery Way from Laracasts has come up with this technique in one of the videos and I’m just sharing it here for my reference.

The other day on Mastodon, Hawk Ticehurst asked… If you were asked to build a “proper complex” web application (let’s say a full featured mastodon client or similar) and you were going to “use the pla

I decided to start using Robb Knight’s Echo tool, to syndicate my blog posts to Mastodon, and trigger Webmentions. I’m not going to go through the configuration of Echo here, the project README has some good instructions for setting it up. However, I have just started using Gitea Actions for CI on…

In This Article: Introduction Discovery is a preliminary phase in the UX-design process that involves researching the problem space, framing the problem(s) to be solved, and gathering enough evidence and initial direction on what to do next. Discoveries are crucial to setting design projects off in…

When I first started developing websites back in 2000 the internet was a much simpler place. Google existed, but most people still used Yahoo or Ask Jeeves to find sites on the internet. My personal website, which was hosted on my ISPs web hosting, contained a collection of jokes, links to friend's…

Hi All! 🤗 It is one of the most common reasons why we abandon our personal sites and blogs: at some point, we stop publishing. But why? Weren’t we so enthusiastic when we started (or restarted) our sites? Didn’t we tell ourselves that this time, we would really post more regularly? And didn’t it…

Support for subgrid (part of the CSS Grid Level 2 specification) has just landed in Firefox Nightly! To start experimenting with it you’ll need to enable the feature by going to about:config in the br

With the recent news that CSS nesting is now available in the major evergreen browsers , our team was discussing how it differs from nesting in Sass , and the question came up — When should you use ne

Today, I wanted to quickly share two newer CSS properties that make it easier to create nice, well-balanced layouts. The text-wrap property has two newish values: balance and pretty. The balance value

There’s lots about code that slows us down I’ve been doing a lot of code reviews recently. And while most of the code I review works (by which I mean: meets the specification), it often takes me a lon

I've been using Pagefind for my site search for a while now and would readily recommend it, but I wanted to throw together something a bit lighter weight and customizable. Enter minisearch: a tiny full-text search library written in JavaScript. To populate it, I needed to generate an index (which…

This article on privacy-focussed web design by Paul Jardine and Becky Thorn of sustainably-minded web design agency Root raises some great points about the link between invasive tracking scripts and the carbon footprint of a website. I’ve often been frustrated by the negative performance impact of…

The "IndieWeb" feels like coming home March 14, 2024 post, tech, featured Due to the convenience of not needing to code or maintain anything I’ve opted to use Squarespace or Cargo for many years. Now that I've moved this site to Eleventy hosted on Neocities, I'm having fun with my website again! I…

14th March 2024 #Development #Eleventy Since I really got back into following RSS feeds in the past couple of years I've noticed a problem with Eleventy sites[1] and post dates. This also caused me an issue while building EchoFeed but that's a story for another day. If I didn't know better I'd think…

If you find yourself removing a border from an element that has a border and are tempted to use border: 0 , border: none, or outline: none, I’d urge you to stop for a moment and reconsider. It’s like the old G.K. Chesterton saying about fences: Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up…

Documenting a refactor that introduced a folder structure and configuration changes, which summarises how I Eleventy. I first starting using Eleventy to build this site back in 2020 using version 0.10.0 and through a combination of the official documentation and other people's source code on GitHub,…