Posts and articles from around the internet that I enjoyed reading.
It goes without saying that none of these articles are my work. All copyrights and whatever remain with the original authors.
Patriotic Alternative: The town fighting the far-right with Welsh cakes
From BBC News - Home When Patriotic Alternative started targeting a Welsh town, the community found a way to push back.
“AI” should be doing our boring work, not the fun stuff
From Andy Bell I’ll give “AI” credit: it’s bloody good at boring menial stuff I can’t be arsed with. That’s what it should do: save time wasted on stuff that grinds you down, so you’ve got more energy for the stuff you actually like doing. I have no interest in the “creative” stuff it does— well, maybe the image generators can help me with a bit of creative...
Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading
From theatlantic.com March 22, 2023, 11:53 AM ETThese days, when I explain to a fellow parent that I write novels for children in fifth through eighth grades, I am frequently treated to an apologetic confession: “My child doesn’t read, at least not the way I did.” I know exactly how they feel—my tween and teen don’t read the way I did either. When I was in elementary school,...
What we've learned about designing for accessibility from our users • Slack Design
From slack.design Slack’s accessibility team recently launched a series of changes to make navigating around Slack more reliable and efficient for keyboard-only and screen reader users. While our accessibility had significantly improved over the last few years, we were still hearing from blind and low-vision users that moving around the interface felt disorienting and...
Smoke screen
From A Working Letter One of the questions I always ask of stories is how they work. Who do they serve? Who benefits? Who, if anyone, is burdened or harmed by them? Who is uplifted? What modes or methods or structures do they employ? Stories—and metaphors, which are often just stories in miniature—are never neutral actors. They always seek some change, whether through resistance...
A clean codebase is a happy codebase
From Paul Armstrong How do so many people just ignore cruft in their projects and keep moving forward? I was fighting with a bunch of `package.json` files recently that had 10s of dependencies that were completely unused. Why was it left this way? Continue reading…
Biffy Clyro side-project Empire State Bastard share blistering debut single ‘Harvest’
From NME Empire State Bastard have released their debut single ‘Harvest’ – you can listen to it below. The group, which is the side-project of Biffy Clyro frontman Simon Neil and Mike Vennart (Biffy live guitarist, solo artist, and ex-Oceansize singer), teased the track earlier this month after announcing a brief UK tour. READ MORE: The NME Big Read – Biffy...
.env files in Eleventy
From Cory Dransfeldt
Disclosure
From Adactio: Journal You know how when you’re on hold to any customer service line you hear a message that thanks you for calling and claims your call is important to them. The message always includes a disclaimer about calls possibly being recorded “for training purposes.” Nobody expects that any training is ever actually going to happen—surely we would see some improvement...
New Shoes
From Set Studio Today is a special day in the studio, because after months of work, we’ve just put our brand new website live. Check it out! I thought I’d cover some of the key aspects of the site and why we made the choices that we made, to give you all a bit of insight into how this sort of project gets put together. Look and feel We were pretty...
Using regex with find-and-replace in VS Code
From Rach Smith The context for how and why is too niche for me to go in to here, but I had a bunch of files where I needed to change all instances of this: 'FileClient:1643853467530' to this: 'PenVersionFileClient:{"cpid":"1643853467530"}' Except for each instance, the id value (the number) was different. I wanted to keep the number in there, but change...
Why the Internet Archive faces destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers
From The Register Digital lending is only fine when we do it On Monday four of the largest book publishers asked a New York court to grant summary judgment in a copyright lawsuit seeking to shut down the Internet Archive's online library and hold the non-profit organization liable for damages.…
The End of Front-End Development
From joshwcomeau.com Over the past few months, I've spoken with lots of early-career devs who are getting more and more anxious about AI. They've seen the increasingly-impressive demos from tools like GPT-4, and they worry that by the time they're fluent in HTML/CSS/JS, there won't be any jobs left for them.This sentiment is all over Twitter right now:I couldn't disagree...
On writing regularly
From ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Herman's blog It has been a while (perhaps too long) since I’ve written publicly. My notepad is, however, filled with half jotted down ideas, semi-written essays, and the scratchings and sketches of a madman re-learning algebra and Spanish. I once knew a man who lived by the somewhat questionable principle that if you don’t use your teeth, you don’t need to brush...
The venture capitalist’s dilemma
From Robin Rendle Molly White: Recent weeks have drawn a bold underline beneath what has been clear to many for a long time: that those controlling massive amounts of capital and power in our society are not the smartest, or most level-headed, or most altruistic among us. Venture capital may be the best way to serve the interests of capital, but we need to consider...
John Cooper Clarke on the Arctic Monkeys-inspiring ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ being streamed a billion times
From NME John Cooper Clarke has spoken about his poem, I Wanna Be Yours, becoming a worldwide hit after the Arctic Monkeys‘ song adaptation of it has pushed listening into the billions. READ MORE: The full story of Arctic Monkeys’ album ‘AM’ The punk poet’s 1982 creation, which featured on his album ‘Zip Style Method’, was covered by the Monkeys for their...
Conditionally rebuild a site on Netlify, based on a webhook payload
From Melanie Richards: blog Disclosure: I am currently on the Product team at Netlify. My blog displays webmentions using Webmention.io, and brid.gy for social media-based activity. With webmentions, other people can respond to an article via their own sites or social media profiles. That interaction can be displayed on my blog, similarly to comments (or pingbacks, if you remember...
Rhiannon A. Grist, The Queen of the High Fields
From The Middle Shelf - A Scifi and Fantasy Reviews Blog - REVIEWS Rhiannon A. Grist, The Queen of the High Fields, Luna Press, 2022.The Queen of the High Fields is a contemporary fantasy novella that'll take you deep into Welsh myths. Carys and Hazard only ever wanted to escape their lives. Carys has always been drawn to the sea, to something just off the coast. Hazard, only caring about her grandmother,...
Native CSS nesting landed
From pawelgrzybek.com If you asked me a few years ago about my favourite Sass features, I would tell you about variables and nesting at the top of my list. Then, in 2016, CSS Custom Properties landed, massively changing my workflow. So, fast forward to 2023, and I am stoked to tell you that native CSS nesting has landed! Remember that while writing this article, the browser...
Relaunching my site in Eleventy
From sebduggan.uk When I last rebuilt my personal site, back in 2017, I was full of good intentions. It was built on Hugo, which was the SSG I chose at the time (a coin flip between Hugo and Jekyll). It had a basic theme, and could be published by simply committing to a Git repo. What could possibly go wrong? Jump forward 6 years, and the only content I posted was three...