August 20, 2023

I was thrilled this week to find that one of my favorite sites from the Flash era, orisinal, has been recreated with a Flash emulator. Orisinal had the most beautiful graphics, the coolest music, the cutest games… it was a minor obsession for me in the early 2000s. My favorite game, Cats, is like, well, herding cats. Give it a try.

DeForest Kelley’s 1968 Thunderbird is for sale. It’s a surprisingly affordable $12,900 and has just 69,000 ORIGINAL MILES on the speedometer. It does look a little rough, because apparently it was his daily driver for more than 20 years.

The Banned Book Club gives everyone access to banned books: download the app, create your “card,” and then check out the books you might not be able to find on the shelves at your library or school, thanks to the dimwitted dullards who are currently in charge of a truly dismaying number of US states right now. I hope things like this become unnecessary again one day soon, but for now, this is pretty cool.

The Ancient Technology Keeping Space Missions Alive is such a great story. I take just a bit of exception to the work “ancient,” since everything they’re talking about is within my lifetime, but in tech years, I guess it’s still pretty ancient.

MDN (formerly the Mozilla Developers’ Network, I think? It seems to have given itself the KFC treatment and just be “MDN” now) is starting up a front-end developer curriculum. I think this could be a welcome development (ha!) to get students, experienced developers, hiring managers, and maybe even educators on the same page.

August 13, 2023

Here’s what’s open in my tabs right now:

archive.is: Sort of like the Wayback Machine, archive.is downloads and stores a full copy of whatever URL you happen to put in its search bar (if it isn’t already there). The interesting thing about it is that you can put in a link to a paywalled article and read it immediately. It has a Firefox extension, too, for adding pages with one little click.

CodeWord Conf 2023: A free virtual conference focusing on content, taking place on Sept. 21. Looks interesting.

21 Best GoodReads Alternatives for Ethical Book Tracking: I found this list while looking for a simple app to manage my To Be Read list. I use GoodReads and like it well enough, but I mainly use it to find recommendations from people I actually know (IRL or online). I want something without the social component that lets me just make a list of books I want to read and then links to places where I can buy them. Once I get a link to Amazon (or Bookshop, or BN.com, or GoodReads), the Library Extension helps me order them from the library. This list focuses more on social reading, with some solid entries, but I didn’t find exactly what I’m looking for (other than LibraryThing, which I know well and love, but I’d probably need to start over with a new account to do what I want to in this case).

The Golden Age of Web Design: This area of the Web Design Museum covers the early 2000s, which I do consider a kind of Golden Age. Around 2004 CSS got to the point where we could quit using tables for layout, and make horizontal lists for navigation, and it was just lovely and exciting.

Ask a Manager – Our website is being held hostage by an abusive volunteer: The volunteer developed the website IN A LANGUAGE HE CREATED. I’ve seen a lot of problems with volunteers working on websites, but this one absolutely takes the cake. I have been on both sides of this issue, and I have a ton of advice, but to put it very simply: if your nonprofit needs a website and doesn’t have the money to hire a pro, please use SquareSpace or Wix, and make sure more than one person can access your domain host.

June 8, 2021

Top Ten Git Tips and Tricks

Useful tips for using Git, by Julie Kent. I agree with Julie: “Git is not fun. Git is not friendly. No. It’s just infuriatingly useful, so we’re stuck with it.” (There’s an intro article too: How Does Git Work?)

The right tag for the job: why you should use semantic HTML

This is a great explanation of why to use semantic HTML. It covers some of the ways that screen readers read your HTML. I’ve been using semantic HTML for a long time, but there were things in here that I did not know.

The Ablegamers Pride Heart T-shirt

I was going to add a photo of it here, but my CSS and WordPress’s defaults are still battling it out. So until I can figure out where those mysterious auto-added classes are coming from and how to override them, trust me that this is an AMAZING shirt featuring a rainbow heart made up of game controllers, and click on through to see it. Proceeds benefit AbleGamers and GaymerX, two very worthy causes.

A Cornucopia of Container Queries

CSS-Tricks has rounded up all the articles you could want to read (this week, anyway) about CSS container queries.

Who Pays for Open Source?

Mostly… nobody. Morten Rand-Hendrickson (the instructor of some excellent classes I’ve taken on LinkedIn Learning) explains how the dependencies we–and more importantly, huge corporations that make tons of money off those dependencies–are often developed and maintained for free, by the open source community.

June 1, 2021

About once a week, I go through my open tabs and close the ones I’m not interested in anymore, then save the rest with OneTab. Here are some interesting tabs I’ve saved this week:

colorcodes.io

Remember when we used to talk about “web-safe” colors, and there were whole sites devoted to that? Colorcodes.io is like that for the modern age. It doesn’t have every single color you could possibly want, but it’s got the named ones, and it’s a good place to start if you want a color for testing.

How to Design Navigation for Large and Small Screens

A free class from Balsamiq Wireframing Academy with UX designer Donna Spencer. Everything you wanted to know about modern navigation.

Career planning course from 80000 Hours

A free eight-week course to help you plan a “high-impact” career. 80,000 Hours is an international nonprofit that focuses on helping people find fulfilling work solving the world’s problems. Their job board always has lots of interesting opportunities too.

Iconoir

They say it best themselves: “Iconoir is one of the biggest open source libraries with currently 914 SVG Icons. No premium icons, no email sign-up, no newsletters.”

How to make a trellis

Have you SEEN how much trellises cost at the local home improvement store? This guy has made a really nice one with some inexpensive wood, screws and nails, and (compostable!) cotton thread.

And… that’s it for this week. Go have fun!