Journal tags: blog

Gregory Bennett chronicles the enshittification of everything online in his piece Heat Death of the Internet. It makes for grim reading.

There’s a note of hope at the end. It’s the same note of hope that Charles Digges amplifies in his great piece, Viva la Library!:

Rebel against The Algorithm. Get a library card.

Molly White has also chronicled the decline of everything good on the web, but her piece has hope threaded throughout. We can have a different web:

Though we now face a new challenge as the dominance of the massive walled gardens has become overwhelming, we have tools in our arsenal: the memories of once was, and the creativity of far more people than ever before, who entered the digital expanse but have grown disillusioned with the business moguls controlling life within the walls.

And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was.

Like I’ve repeatedly said, having your own website has gone being something uncontroversial to being downright transgressive.

Still, the barrier to entry remains too high for my liking. I wish more smart minds were working on making publishing on the web easier instead of just working on getting people to consume.

But even if you don’t have your own website, Andrew Stephens says you can still Save the Web by Being Nice:

The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this.

The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, being nice “is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” Tell someone that you liked something they put on the web. You’ll feel good. They’ll feel even better.

I was having a discussion with some people recently about writing. It was quite cathartic. Everyone was sharing the kinds of things that their inner critic tells them. We were all encouraging each other to ignore that voice.

I mentioned that the two reasons for not writing that I hear most often from people are variations on “I’ve got nothing to say.”

The first version is when someone says they’ve got nothing to say because they’re not qualified to write on a particualar topic. “After all, there are real experts out there who know far more than me. So I’ve got nothing to say.”

But then once you do actually understand a topic, the second version appears. “If I know about this, then everyone knows about this. It’s obvious. So I’ve got nothing to say.”

In both cases, you absolutely should be writing and sharing! In the first instance, you’ve got the beginner’s mind—a valuable perspective. In the second instance, you’ve got personal experience—another valuable perspective.

In other words, while it seems like there’s never a good time to write about something, the truth is that there’s never a bad time to write about something.

So write! Share! Publish!

Then someone in the discussion said something I always find a bit deflating. They said they had no problem writing, but they’re not so keen on publishing.

“After all”, they said, “the world doesn’t need yet another opinion.”

This gets me down because it’s hard to argue with. It’s true that the world doesn’t need another think piece. The world doesn’t need to hear your thoughts on some topic. The world doesn’t need to hear what you’ve been up to recently.

But you know what? Screw what the world needs.

If we’re going to be hardnosed about this, then the world doesn’t need any more books. The world doesn’t need any more music. The world doesn’t need art. Heck, the world doesn’t need us at all.

So don’t publish for the world.

When I write something here on my website, I’m not thinking about the world reading it. That would be paralyzing. I do sometimes imagine that one person is reading it; someone just like me who hasn’t yet had this particular thought, or come up with that particular idea.

I’m writing for myself. I write to figure out what I think. I also publish mostly for myself—a public archive for future me. But if what I publish just happens to connect with one other person, I’m glad.

So, yeah, it’s true that the world doesn’t need you to write and share and publish. Isn’t that liberating? You’re free to write and share and publish for yourself.

I posted 947 times on my website in 2023.

That’s a bit less than 2022.

March was the busiest month with 98 posts.

August was the quietest month with 57 posts. That’s probably because I spent a week of that month travelling across the Atlantic ocean on a ship, cut off from the internet.

I published 2 long-form articles in 2023—transcripts of talks.

I wrote 96 entries in my journal (or blog, if you prefer).

I shared 393 links.

I wrote 456 short notes.

In those notes, I posted 247 photos during the year.

I travelled to 20 destinations.

Press “play” on my Indy map for the year to see those travels.

Sometimes the travel was for work—speaking, hosting, or attending conferences. Sometimes the travel was to see family. Sometimes the travel was to spend a week working from a different country—Italy and Spain in 2023; I’d like to do more of that in 2024.

I played mandolin in a lot of sessions in 2023. I plan to play just as much in 2024.

I wrote close to a hundred entries in my journal—or blog—in 2023. Here are some entries I like:

• Blood — One hundred duck-sized Christs is better than one horse-sized Jesus.
• Tragedy — Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.
• Reaction — Weekend action, weekend reaction.
• Conduct — Kindnesses and cruelties.
• Lovers in a dangerous time — Europe, 1991.

I wrote some actually useful stuff about web design and development too.

• Three attributes for better web forms — Better UX through better HTML: inputmode, enterkeyhint, and autocomplete.
• Read-only web apps — It’s fine to require JavaScript for read/write functionality. But have you considered a read-only mode without JavaScript?
• event.target.closest — DOM scripting and event handling.
• HTML web components — Don’t replace. Augment.

That last one really resonated with people, which is very gratifying. It was so nice seeing the web mentions come in when people wrote responses on their own blogs.

It feels like there’s been a resurgence in this kind of blog-to-blog conversation since Elongate. Personal publishing is reviving as Twitter is dying (I’m not going to call it X—if he’s going to deadname his own daughter, I’m going to do the same to his company).

If you have your own website, I’m looking forward to reading your words in 2024.

John Willshire has been pondering web marginilia AKA stuff you put in your sidebar.

He has a particular fondness for the good ol’ blogroll. I’ve still got my analogue equivalent on my homepage—the bedroll. It’s a list of links to people who’ve stayed over. Maybe I should also have a regular blogroll, but I suspect it would just be a reproduction of feeds I’m subscribed to.

Then there’s marginalia at the level of a blog post, rather than a whole blog. Kevin Marks points out that this is something that Vannevar Bush described his theoretical memex doing—a device I was just talking about. Kevin created a proof of concept showing outbound and inbound links.

Outbound links are annoted versions of the A elements in a blog post. Inbound links are webmentions (which should now include this post of mine).

Kevin has those links in the margins on either side of the blog post. I’ve also got links that go with my blog posts, but they’re displayed linearly:

1. the post itself,
2. any responses (webmentions),
3. related posts, something I only recently added, and
4. posts from the same day further back in time.

Do they still count as marginalia when they’re presented vertically rather than alongside? For mobile devices, I’m not sure there’s any alternative.

After two days at border:none in Nuremberg, it was time for two days at Indie Web Camp, also in Nuremberg.

I hadn’t been to an Indie Web Camp since before The Situation. It felt very good to be back. I had almost forgotten how inspiring and productive they can be.

This one had a good turnout of around twenty people. We had ourselves an excellent first day of thought-provoking sessions. Then on day two it was time to put some of those ideas into action.

A little trick I like to do on the practical day is to have two tasks to attempt: one of them quite simple, and the other more ambitious. That way, as long as I get the simpler task done, I’ll always have at least something to demo at the end of the day.

This time I attempted three bits of home improvement on my website.

Autolinking Mastodon usernames

The first problem I set myself was ostensibly the simple one. But it involved regular expressions, so then I had two problems.

I wanted to automatically link up Mastodon usernames if I mentioned one in my notes. For example, during border:none I mentioned Brian’s mastodon username in a note: @briansuda@loðfíll.is.

That turned out to be an excellent test case. Those Icelandic characters made sure I wasn’t making unwarranted assumptions about character sets.

Here’s the regular expression I came up with. It’s not foolproof by any means. Basically it looks for @something@something.something.

Good enough. Ship it.

Related posts

My next task was a bit more ambitious. It involved SQL queries, something I’m slightly better at than regular expressions but that’s a very low bar.

I wanted to show related posts when you get to the end of one of my blog posts.

I’ve been tagging all my blog posts for years so that’s the mechanism I used for finding similar posts. There’s probably a clever SQL statement that could do this, but I ended up brute-forcing it a bit.

I don’t feel too bad about the hacky clunky nature of my solution, because I cache blog post pages. That means only the first person to view the blog post (usually me) will suffer any performance impacts from my clunky database queries. After that everything’s available straight from a cached file.

Let’s say you’re reading a blog post of mine that I’ve tagged with ten different keywords. I make a separate SQL query for each keyword to get all the other posts that use that tag. Then it’s a matter of sorting through all the results.

I loop through the results of each tag and apply a score to the tagged post. If the post shares one tag with the post you’re looking at, it has a score of one. If it shares two tags, it has a score of two, and so on.

I decided that for a post to be considered related, it had to share at least three tags. I also decided to limit the list of related posts to a maximum of five.

It worked out pretty well. If you scroll down on my recent post about JavaScript, you’ll see links to related posts about JavaScript. If you read through a post on accessibility testing, you’ll find other posts about accessibility testing. If you make it to the end of this post about Mars colonisation you’ll see links to more posts about exploring our solar system.

Right now I’m just doing this for my blog but I’d like to do it for my links too. A job for a future Indie Web Camp.

Link rot

I was very inspired by Remy’s recent post on how he’s tackling link rot on his site. I wanted to do the same for mine.

On the first day at Indie Web Camp I led a session on link rot to gather ideas and alternative approaches. We had a really good discussion, though it’s always worth bearing in mind that there’ll never be a perfect solution. There’ll always be some false positives and some false negatives.

The other Jeremy at Indie Camp Nuremberg blogged about the session. Sebastian Greger was attending remotely and the session inspired him to spend the second day also tackling linkrot.

In the end I decided to stick with Remy’s two-pronged approach:

1. a client-side script that—as a progressive enhancement—intercepts outbound links and re-routes them to
2. a server-side script that redirects to the Internet Archive if the link is broken.

Here’s the JavaScript I wrote for the first part.

It’s very similar to Remy’s but with one little addition. I check to see if the clicked link is inside an h-entry and if it is, I pass on the date from the post’s dt-published value.

Here’s the PHP I wrote for the server-side redirector. The comments tell the story of what the code is doing:

• Check that the request is coming from my site.
• There also has to be a URL provided in the query string.
• Make a very quick curl request to get the response headers from the URL. The time limit is set to 1 second.
• If there was any error (like a time out), give up and go to the URL.
• Pick the response headers apart to get the HTTP status code.
• If the response is OK, go to the URL.
• If the response is a redirect, go around again but this time use the redirect URL.
• Construct the archive.org search endpoint.
• If we have a date, provide it. Otherwise ask for the latest snapshot.
• Ping that archive.org URL. This time there’s no time limit; this might take a while.
• If there’s an archived copy, redirect to that.
• There’s no archived copy. Give up and go the URL anyway.

Not perfect by any means, but it works for the most common cases of link rot.

For the demo at the end of the day I went back into my archive of over 10,000 links and plucked out some old posts, like this one from December 2005. It takes a little while to do the rerouting but eventually you get to see the archived version from the same time period as when I linked to it.

Here’s another link from 2005. Here’s another. Those links are broken now, but with a little patience, you’ll still get to read them on the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive’s wayback machine really is a gift. I can’t imagine how would it be even remotely possible to try to address link rot on my site without archive.org.

I will continue to donate money to the Internet Archive and I encourage you to do the same.

I posted 1057 times on adactio in 2022.

That’s a bit more than in 2021.

November was the busiest month with 137 posts.

February was the quietest with 65 posts.

• I blogged 91 times during the year.
• I shared 382 links.
• I posted 583 notes.

That included about 237 notes with photos and 214 replies.

I published one article, the transcript of my talk, In And Out Of Style.

I watched an awful lot of television but managed to read 25 books.

Elsewhere, I huffduffed 130 audio files and added 55 tune settings on The Session in 2022.

I spoke at ten events.

I travelled within Europe and the USA to a total of 18 destinations.

Here’s a highlight reel of some of my blog posts from 2022:

• Today, the distant future — 2022 was once unimaginable to some web folks.
• Installing progressive web apps — How I’m letting people know they can install The Session to their home screens.
• Starting and finishing — Some advice for public speaking.
• Declarative design — Defining the inputs instead of trying to control the outputs.
• Re-evaluating technology — The importance of revisiting past decisions. Especially when it comes to the web.
• Democratising dev — How do we share the means of the web’s production?
• Work ethics — Don’t work hard.
• Accessibility is systemic — The difference between inclusive design and accessibility.
• That fediverse feeling — Mastodon is a vibe shift in the best possible way.

I also published the transcript of my conference talk, In And Out Of Style, a journey through the history of CSS.

Right now, Twitter feels like Dunkirk beach in May 1940. And look, here comes a plucky armada of web servers running Mastodon instances!

Others have written some guides to getting started on Mastodon:

• An oversimplified guide to setting up Mastodon by Sarah Higley,
• An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon by Noëlle Anthony,
• 10 Quick Tips for a Great Mastodon Experience by Jens Oliver Meiert, and
• How to Get Started on Mastodon by Justin Pot for Wired.

There are also tools like Twitodon to help you migrate from Twitter to Mastodon.

Getting on board isn’t completely frictionless. Understanding how Mastodon works can be confusing. But then again, so was Twitter fifteen years ago.

Right now, many Mastodon instances are struggling with the influx of new sign-ups. But this is temporary. And actually, it’s also very reminiscent of the early unreliable days of Twitter.

I don’t want to go into the technical details of Mastodon and the fediverse—even though those details are fascinating and impressive. What I’m really struck by is the vibe.

In a nutshell, I’m loving it! It feels …nice.

I was fully expecting Mastodon to be full of meta-discussions about Mastodon, but in the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed people posting about stone circles, astronomy, and—obviously—cats and dogs.

The process of finding people to follow has been slow, but in a good way. I’ve enjoyed seeking people out. It’s been easier to find the techy folks, but I’ve also been finding scientists, journalists, and artists.

On the one hand, the niceness of the experience isn’t down to technical architecture; it’s all about the social norms. On the other hand, those social norms are very much directed by technical decisions. The folks working on the fediverse for the past few years have made very thoughtful design decisions to amplify niceness and discourage nastiness. It’s all very gratifying to experience!

Personally, I’m posting to Mastodon via my own website. As much as I’m really enjoying Mastodon, I still firmly believe that nothing beats having control of your own content on your domain.

But I also totally get that not everyone has the same set of priorities as me. And frankly, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to have their own domain name.

It’s like there’s a spectrum of ownership. On one end, there’s publishing on your own website. On the other end, there’s publishing on silos like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Instagram, and MySpace.

Publishing on Mastodon feels much closer to the website end of the spectrum than it does to the silo end of the spectrum. If something bad happens to the Mastodon instance you’re on, you can up and move to a different instance, taking your social graph with you.

In a way, it’s like delegating domain ownership to someone you trust. If you don’t have the time, energy, resources, or interest in having your own domain, but you trust someone who’s running a Mastodon instance, it’s the next best thing to publishing on your own website.

Simon described it well when he said Mastodon is just blogs:

A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.

Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.

And rather than compare Mastodon to Twitter, Simon makes a comparison with RSS:

Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!

A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.

Lots of other folks are feeling the same excitement in the air that I’m getting:

Bastian wrote:

Real conversations. Real people. Interesting content. A feeling of a warm welcoming group. No algorithm to mess around with our timelines. No troll army to destory every tiny bit of peace. Yes, Mastodon is rough around the edges. Many parts are not intuitive. But this roughness somehow added to the positive experience for me.

This could really work!

Brent Simmons wrote:

The web is wide open again, for the first time in what feels like forever.

I concur! Though, like Paul, I love not being beholden to either Twitter or Mastodon:

I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff I’ve felt compelled to write down or point a camera at over the years. When a social network disappears, goes out of fashion or becomes inhospitable, I can happily move on with little anguish.

But like I said, I don’t expect everyone to have the time, means, or inclination to do that. Mastodon definitely feels like it shares the same indie web spirit though.

Personally, I recommend experiencing Mastodon through the website rather than a native app. Mastodon instances are progressive web apps so you can add them to your phone’s home screen.

You can find me on Mastodon as @adactio@mastodon.social

I’m not too bothered about what instance I’m on. It really only makes a difference to my local timeline. And if I do end up finding an instance I prefer, then I know that migrating will be quite straightforward, by design. Perhaps I should be on an instance with a focus on front-end development or the indie web. I still haven’t found much of an Irish traditional music community on the fediverse. I’m wondering if maybe I should start a Mastodon instance for that.

While I’m a citizen of mastodon.social, I’m doing my bit by chipping in some money to support it: sponsorship levels on Patreon start at just $1 a month. And while I can’t offer much technical assistance, I opened my first Mastodon pull request with a suggested improvement for the documentation.

I’m really impressed with the quality of the software. It isn’t perfect but considering that it’s an open source project, it’s better than most VC-backed services with more and better-paid staff. As Giles said, comparing it to Twitter:

I’m using Mastodon now and it’s not the same, but it’s not shit either. It’s different. It takes a bit of adjustment. And I’m enjoying it.

Most of all, I love, love, love that Mastodon demonstrates that things can be different. For too long we’ve been told that behavioural advertising was an intrinsic part of being online, that social networks must inevitably be monolithic centralised beasts, that we have to relinquish control to corporations in order to be online. The fediverse is showing us a better way. And this isn’t just a proof of concept either. It’s here now. It’s here to stay, if you want it.

Speaking of in-person gatherings, I’ve got some exciting—if not downright nervewracking—events coming up soon.

Next week I’ll be in London for Leading Design. Looking at the line-up that Rebecca is assembled, I’m kind of blown away—it looks fantastic!

You’ll notice that I’m in that line-up, but don’t worry—I’m not giving a talk. I’ll be there as host. That means I get to introduce the speakers before they speak, and ask them a question or two afterwards.

Then, one week later, I do it all again at Clarity in New Orleans. I’m really honoured that Jina has invited me to MC. Again, it’s a ridiculously fantastic line-up (once you ignore my presence).

I really, really enjoy hosting events. And yet I always get quite anxious in the run-up. I think it’s because there isn’t much I can do to prepare.

During The Situation, I had something of an advantage when I was hosting UX Fest. The talks were pre-recorded, which meant that I could study them ahead of time. At a live event, I won’t have that luxury. Instead, I need to make sure that I pay close attention to each talk and try to come up with good questions.

Based on past experience, my anxiety is unwarranted. Once I’m actually talking to these super-smart people, the problem isn’t a lack of things to discuss, but the opposite—so much to talk about in so little time!

I keep trying to remind myself of that.

See, it’s different if I’m speaking at an event. Sure, I’ll get nervous, but I can do something about it. I can prepare and practice to alleviate any anxiety. I feel like I have more control over the outcome when I’m giving a talk compared with hosting.

In fact, I do have a speaking gig on the horizon. I’ll be giving a brand new talk at An Event Apart in San Francisco in December.

It was just a month ago when Jeffrey invited me to speak. Of course I jumped at the chance—it’s always an honour to be asked—but I had some trepidation about preparing a whole new talk in time.

I’ve mentioned this before but it takes me aaaaaaaages to put a talk together. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s worth it. I may not be good at much, but I know I can deliver a really good conference talk …once I’ve spent ridiculously long preparing it.

But more recently I’ve noticed that I’ve managed to shorten this time period. Partly that’s because I recklessly agree to prepare the talk in a shorter amount of time—nothing like a deadline to light a fire under my ass. But it’s also because a lot of the work is already done.

When I have a thought or an opinion about something, I write it down here on my own website. They’re brain farts, but their my brain farts. I consider them half-baked, semi-formed ideas.

For a conference talk, I need something fully-baked and well-formed. But I can take a whole bunch of those scrappy blog posts and use them as raw material.

There’s still a lot of work involved. As well as refining the message I want to get across, I have to structure these thoughts into a narrative thread that makes sense. That’s probably the hardest part of preparing a conference talk …and the most rewarding.

So while I’ve been feeling somewhat under the gun as I’ve been preparing this new talk for An Event Apart, I’ve also been feeling that the talk is just the culmination; a way of tying together some stuff I’ve been writing about it here for the past year or two.

It’s still entirely possible that the talk could turn out to be crap, but I think the odds are in my favour. I’ve been able to see how the ideas I’ve been writing about have resonated with people, so I can feel pretty confident that they’ll go down well in a talk.

As for the topic of the talk? All will be revealed.

I’ve added five more faces to the UX London line-up.

Irina Rusakova will be giving a talk on day one, the day that focuses on research. Her talk on designing with the autistic community is one I’m really looking forward to.

Also on day one, my friend and former Clearleftie Cennydd Bowles will be giving a workshop called “What could go wrong?” He literally wrote the book on ethical design.

Day two is all about creation. My co-worker Chris How will be speaking. “Nepotism!” you cry! But no, Chris is speaking because I had the chance to his talk—called “Unexpectedly obvious”—and I thought “that’s perfect for UX London!”:

Let him take you on a journey through time and across the globe sharing stories of designs that solve problems in elegant if unusual ways.

Also on day two, you’ve got two additional workshops. Lou Downe will be running a workshop on designing good services, and Giles Turnbull will be running a workshop called “Writing for people who hate writing.”

I love that title! Usually when I contact speakers I don’t necessarily have a specific talk or workshop in mind, but I knew that I wanted that particular workshop from Giles.

When I wrote to Giles to ask come and speak, I began by telling how much I enjoy his blog—I’m a long-time suscriber to his RSS feed. He responded and said that he also reads my blog—we’re blog buddies! (That’s a terrible term but there should be a word for people who “know” each other only through reading each other’s websites.)

Anyway, that’s another little treasure trove of speakers added to the UX London roster:

• Irina Rusakova
• Cennydd Bowles
• Chris How
• Lou Downe
• Giles Turnbull

That’s nineteen speakers already and we’re not done yet—expect further speaker announcements soon. But don’t wait on those announcements before getting your ticket. Get yours now!

A while back I wrote a blog post called Web Audio API weirdness on iOS. I described a bug in Mobile Safari along with a hacky fix. I finished by saying:

If you ever find yourself getting weird but inconsistent behaviour on iOS using the Web Audio API, this nasty little hack could help.

Recently Jonathan Aldrich posted a thread about the same bug. He included a link to my blog post. He also said:

Thanks so much for your post, this was a truly pernicious problem!

That warms the cockles of my heart. It’s very gratifying to know that documenting the bug (and the fix) helped someone out. Or, as I put it:

Yay for bugblogging!

Forgive the Germanic compound word, but in this case I think it fits.

Bugblogging doesn’t need to involve a solution. Just documenting a bug is a good thing to do. Recently I documented a bug with progressive web apps on iOS. Before that I documented a bug in Facebook Container for Firefox. When I documented some weird behaviour with the Web Share API in Safari on iOS, I wasn’t even sure it was a bug but Tess was pretty sure it was and filed a proper bug report.

I’ve benefited from other people bugblogging. Phil Nash wrote Service workers: beware Safari’s range request. That was exactly what I needed to solve a problem I’d been having. And then that post about Phil solving my problem helped Peter Rukavina solve a similar issue so he wrote Phil Nash and Jeremy Keith Save the Safari Video Playback Day.

Again, this warmed the cockles of my heart. Bugblogging is worth doing just for the reward of that feeling.

There’s a similar kind of blog post where, instead of writing about a bug, you write about a particular technique. In one way, this is the opposite of bugblogging because you’re writing about things working exactly as they should. But these posts have a similar feeling to bugblogging because they also result in a warm glow when someone finds them useful.

Here are some recent examples of these kinds of posts—tipblogging?—that I’ve found useful:

• Eric wrote about flexibly centering an element with side-sligned content using CSS.
• Rich documented how to subset a variable font on a Mac.
• Stephanie wrote about a CSS technique for animating in a newly added element.

All three are very handy tips. Thanks, Eric! Thanks, Rich! Thanks, Stephanie!

I’ve already had some thoughtful responses to yesterday’s post about trust. I wrapped up my thoughts with a request:

I would love it if someone could explain why they avoid native browser features but use third-party code.

Chris obliged:

I can’t speak for the industry, but I have a guess. Third-party code (like the referenced Bootstrap and React) have a history of smoothing over significant cross-browser issues and providing better-than-browser ergonomic APIs. jQuery was created to smooth over cross-browser JavaScript problems. That’s trust.

Very true! jQuery is the canonical example of a library smoothing over the bumpy landscape of browser compatibilities. But jQuery is also the canonical example of a library we no longer need because the browsers have caught up …and those browsers support standards directly influenced by jQuery. That’s a library success story!

Charles Harries takes on my question in his post Libraries over browser features:

I think this perspective of trust has been hammered into developers over the past maybe like 5 years of JavaScript development based almost exclusively on inequality of browser feature support. Things are looking good in 2022; but as recently as 2019, 4 of the 5 top web developer needs had to do with browser compatibility.

Browser compatibility is one of the underlying promises that libraries—especially the big ones that Jeremy references, like React and Bootstrap—make to developers.

So again, it’s browser incompatibilities that made libraries attractive.

Jim Nielsen responds with the same message in his post Trusting Browsers:

We distrust the browser because we’ve been trained to. Years of fighting browser deficiencies where libraries filled the gaps. Browser enemy; library friend.

For example: jQuery did wonders to normalize working across browsers. Write code once, run it in any browser — confidently.

Three for three. My question has been answered: people gravitated towards libraries because browsers had inconsistent implementations.

I’m deliberately using the past tense there. I think Jim is onto something when he says that we’ve been trained not to trust browsers to have parity when it comes to supporting standards. But that has changed.

Charles again:

This approach isn’t a sustainable practice, and I’m trying to do as little of it as I can. Jeremy is right to be suspicious of third-party code. Cross-browser compatibility has gotten a lot better, and campaigns like Interop 2022 are doing a lot to reduce the burden. It’s getting better, but the exasperated I-just-want-it-to-work mindset is tough to uninstall.

I agree. Inertia is a powerful force. No matter how good cross-browser compatibility gets, it’s going to take a long time for developers to shed their suspicion.

Jim is glass-half-full kind of guy:

I’m optimistic that trust in browser-native features and APIs is being restored.

He also points to a very sensible mindset when it comes to third-party libraries and frameworks:

In this sense, third-party code and abstractions can be wonderful polyfills for the web platform. The idea being that the default posture should be: leverage as much of the web platform as possible, then where there are gaps to creating great user experiences, fill them in with exploratory library or framework features (features which, conceivably, could one day become native in browsers).

Yes! A kind of progressive enhancement approach to using third-party code makes a lot of sense. I’ve always maintained that you should treat libraries and frameworks like cattle, not pets. Don’t get too attached. If the library is solving a genuine need, it will be replaced by stable web standards in browsers (again, see jQuery).

I think that third-party libraries and frameworks work best as polyfills. But the whole point of polyfills is that you only use them when the browsers don’t supply features natively (and you also go back and remove the polyfill later when browsers do support the feature). But that’s not how people are using libraries and frameworks today. Developers are reaching for them by default instead of treating them as a last resort.

I like Jim’s proposed design princple:

Where available, default to browser-native features over third party code, abstractions, or idioms.

(P.S. It’s kind of lovely to see this kind of thoughtful blog-to-blog conversation happening. Right at a time when Twitter is about to go down the tubes, this is a demonstration of an actual public square with more nuanced discussion. Make your own website and join the conversation!)

I posted to adactio.com 968 times in 2021.

That’s considerably less than 2020 or 2019. Not sure why.

March was the busiest month with 118 posts.

I published:

• 4 articles,
• 99 blog posts,
• 397 links, and
• 468 notes.

Those notes include 170 photos and 162 replies.

Elsewhere in 2021 I published two seasons of the Clearleft podcast (12 episodes), and I wrote the 15 modules that comprise a course on responsive design on web.dev.

Most of my speaking engagements in 2021 were online though I did manage a little bit of travel in between COVID waves.

My travel map for the year includes one transatlantic trip: Christmas in Arizona, where I’m writing this end-of-year wrap-up before getting back on a plane to England tomorrow, Omicron willing.

On this day twenty years ago I wrote the first entry in my online journal. In the intervening two decades I’ve written a further 2,817 entries.

I am now fifty years old, which means I’ve been blogging for two fifths of my lifetime.

My website has actually been around for longer than twenty years, but its early incarnations had no blog. That all changed when I relaunched the site on September 30th, 2001.

I wrote at the time:

I’m not quite sure what I will be saying here over the coming days, weeks, months and years.

Honestly I still feel like that.

I think it’s safe to assume an “anything goes” attitude for what I post here. Being a web developer, there’s bound to be lots of geeky, techy stuff but I also want a place where I can rant and rave about life in general.

That’s been pretty true, although I feel that maybe there’s been too much geeky stuff and not enough about everything else in my life.

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep. Hopefully, I’ll be updating the journal on a daily basis.

I made no promises but I think I’ve done a pretty good job. Many’s the blogger who has let the weeds grow over their websites as they were lured by the siren song of centralised social networks. I’m glad that I’ve managed to avoid that fate. It feels good to look back on twenty years of updates posted on my own domain.

Anyway, let’s see what happens. I hope you’ll like it.

I hope you still like it.

Here are some of my handpicked highlights from the past twenty years of blogging:

• Hyperdrive, April 20th, 2007

  Last night in San Francisco.

• Design doing, November 11, 2007

  The opposite of design thinking.

• Iron Man and me, December 1st, 2008

  The story of how one of my Flickr pictures came to be used in a Hollywood movie.

• Seams, May 12th, 2014

  There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

• Web! What is it good for?, May 28th, 2015

  Not absolutely nothing, but not absolutely everything either.

• Split, April 10th, 2019

  Materials and tools; client and server; declarative and imperative; inclusion and privilege.

I mentioned recently that there might be quite a difference in tone between my links and my journal here on my website:

’Sfunny, when I look back at older journal entries they’re often written out of frustration, usually when something in the dev world is bugging me. But when I look back at all the links I’ve bookmarked the vibe is much more enthusiastic, like I’m excitedly pointing at something and saying “Check this out!” I feel like sentiment analyses of those two sections of my site would yield two different results.

My journal entries have been even more specifically negative of late. I’ve been bitchin’ and moanin’ about web browsers. But at least I’m an equal-opportunities bitcher and moaner.

• Mozilla, I complained about your Facebook Container extension for Firefox.
• Apple, I complained about the ridiculous way Safari’s update cycle is tied to operating system.
• Google, I complained about the way a breaking change was rolled out in Chrome (and the implications for future breaking changes).
• Microsoft, you got off lightly. But please consider any of my criticisms of Chrome to apply to Edge too, seeing as they’re basically the same now.

I wish my journal weren’t so negative, but my mithering behaviour has been been encouraged. On more than one occasion, someone I know at a browser company has taken me aside to let me know that I should blog about any complaints I might have with their browser. It sounds counterintuitive, I know. But these blog posts can give engineers some ammunition to get those issues prioritised and fixed.

So my message to you is this: if there’s something about a web browser that you’re not happy with (or, indeed, if there’s something you’re really happy with), take the time to write it down and publish it.

Publish it on your website. You could post your gripes on Twitter but whinging on Jack’s website is just pissing in the wind. And I suspect you also might put a bit more thought into a blog post on your own site.

I know it’s a cliché to say that browser makers want to hear from developers—and I’m often cynical about it myself—but they really do want to know what we think. Share your thoughts. I’ll probably end up linking to what you write.

When I post a link, I do it for two reasons.

First of all, it’s me pointing at something and saying “Check this out!”

Secondly, it’s a way for me to stash something away that I might want to return to. I tag all my links so when I need to find one again, I just need to think “Now what would past me have tagged it with?” Then I type the appropriate URL: adactio.com/links/tags/whatever

There are some links that I return to again and again.

Back in 2008, I linked to a document called A Few Notes on The Culture. It’s a copy of a post by Iain M Banks to a newsgroup back in 1994.

Alas, that link is dead. Linkrot, innit?

But in 2013 I linked to the same document on a different domain. That link still works even though I believe it was first published around twenty(!) years ago (view source for some pre-CSS markup nostalgia).

Anyway, A Few Notes On The Culture is a fascinating look at the world-building of Iain M Banks’s Culture novels. He talks about the in-world engineering, education, biology, and belief system of his imagined utopia. The part that sticks in my mind is when he talks about economics:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual immaturity and — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil.

Those three paragraphs might be the most succinct critique of unfettered capitalism I’ve come across. The invisible hand as a paperclip maximiser.

Like I said, it’s a fascinating document. In fact I realised that I should probably store a copy of it for myself.

I have a section of my site called “extras” where I dump miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is unlinked. It’s mostly for my own benefit. That’s where I’ve put my copy of A Few Notes On The Culture.

Here’s a funny thing …for all the times that I’ve revisited the link, I never knew anything about the site is was hosted on—vavatch.co.uk—so this most recent time, I did a bit of clicking around. Clearly it’s the personal website of a sci-fi-loving college student from the early 2000s. But what came as a revelation to me was that the site belonged to …Adrian Hon!

I’m impressed that he kept his old website up even after moving over to the domain mssv.net, founding Six To Start, and writing A History Of The Future In 100 Objects. That’s a great snackable book, by the way. Well worth a read.

I’m subscribed to a lot of blogs in my RSS reader. I follow some people because what they write about is very different to what I know about. But I also follow lots of people who have similar interests and ideas to me. So I’m not exactly in an echo chamber, but I do have the reverb turned up pretty high.

Sometimes these people post thoughts that are eerily similar to what I’ve been thinking about. Ethan has been known to do this. Get out of my head, Marcotte!

But even if Ethan wasn’t some sort of telepath, he’d still be in my RSS reader. We’re friends. Lots of the people in my RSS reader are my friends. When I read their words, I can hear their voices.

Then there are the people I’ve never met. Like Desirée García, Piper Haywood, or Jim Nielsen. Never met them, don’t know them, but damn, do I enjoy reading their blogs. Last year alone, I ended up linking to Jim’s posts ten different times.

Or Baldur Bjarnason. I can’t remember when I first came across his writing, but it really, really resonates with me. I probably owe him royalties for the amount of times I’ve cited his post Over-engineering is under-engineering.

His latest post is postively Marcottian in how it exposes what’s been fermenting in my own mind. But because he writes clearly, it really helps clarify my own thinking. It’s often been said that you should write to figure out what you think, and I can absolutely relate to that. But here’s a case where somebody else’s writing really helps to solidify my own thoughts.

Which type of novelty-seeking web developer are you?

It starts with some existentialist stock-taking. I can relate, what with the whole five decades thing. But then it turns the existential questioning to the World Wide Web itself, or rather, the people building the web.

In a way, it’s like taking the question of the great divide (front of the front end and back of the front end), and then turning it 45 degrees to reveal an entirely hidden dimension.

In examining the nature of the web, he hits on the litmus of how you view encapsulation:

I mention this first as it’s the aspect of the web that modern web developers hate the most without even giving it a label. Single-Page-Apps and GraphQL are both efforts to eradicate the encapsulation that’s baked into the foundation of every layer of the web.

Most modern devs are trying to get rid of it but it’s one of the web’s most strategic advantages.

I hadn’t thought of this before.

By default, if you don’t go against the grain of the web, each HTTP endpoint is encapsulated from each other.

Moreover, all of this can happen really fast if you aren’t going overboard with your CSS and JS.

He finishes with a look at another of the web’s most powerful features: distribution. In between are the things that make the web webby: hypertext and flexibility (The Dao of the Web).

It’s the idea that the web isn’t a single fixed thing but a fluid multitude whose shape is dictated by its surroundings.

This resonates with me because it highlights two different ways of viewing the web.

On the one hand, you can see the web purely as a distribution channel. In the past you might have been distributing a Flash movie. These days you might be distributing a single page app. Either way, the web is there as a low-friction way of getting your creation in front of other people.

The other way of building for the web is to go with the web’s grain, embracing flexibility and playing to the strengths of the medium through progressive enhancement. This is the distinction I was getting at when I talked about something being not just on the web, but of the web.

With that mindset, Baldur then takes us through some of the technologies that he’s excited about, like SvelteKit and Hotwire. I think it’s the same mindset that got me excited about service workers. As Baldur says:

They are helping the web become better at being its own thing.

That’s my tagline right there.

I posted to adactio.com 1442 times in 2020.

March was the busiest month with 184 posts.

This month, December, was the quietest with 68 posts.

Overall I published:

• 2 articles,
• 110 blog posts,
• 518 links,
• 812 notes.

In amongst those notes are 128 photos. But the number I’m happiest with is 200. From to March 18th to October 3rd, I posted a tune a day for 200 days straight.

Elsewhere in 2020:

• I huffduffed 187 pieces of audio,
• made 1,139 contributions on Github, and
• published 6 episodes of the Clearleft podcast.

For obvious reasons, in 2020 I had far fewer check ins, did far less speaking and almost no travel.

Once again I wrote over a hundred blog posts this year. While lots of other activities dropped off significantly while my main focus was to just keep on keepin’ on, I still found solace and reward in writing and publishing. Like I said early on in The Situation, my website is an outlet for me:

While you’re stuck inside, your website is not just a place you can go to, it’s a place you can control, a place you can maintain, a place you can tidy up, a place you can expand. Most of all, it’s a place you can lose yourself in, even if it’s just for a little while.

Here are some blog posts that turned out alright:

• Architects, gardeners, and design systems. Citing Frank Chimero, Debbie Chachra, and Lisa O’Neill.
• Hydration. Progressive enhancement. I do not think it means what you think it means.
• Living Through The Future. William Gibson, Arthur C.Clarke, Daniel Dafoe, Stephen King, Emily St. John Mandel, John Wyndham, Martin Cruz-Smith, Marina Koren and H.G. Wells.
• Principles and priorities. Using design principles to embody your priorities.
• Hard to break. Brittleness is the opposite of resilience. But they both share something in common.
• Intent. Black lives matter.
• Accessibility. Making the moral argument.
• T E N Ǝ T. A spoiler-filled look at the new Christopher Nolan film.
• Portals and giant carousels. Trying to understand why people think they need to make single page apps.
• Clean advertising. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising.

I find it strangely comforting that even in a year as shitty as 2020, I can look back and see that there were some decent blog posts in there. Whatever 2021 may bring, I hope to keep writing and publishing through it all. I hope you will too.