My grandfather and great-grandfather were plumbers, and my uncles on that side grew up working for the family plumbing shop. One of my uncles took over that business and runs it to this day. I came across this letter that one of those uncles wrote when they came by my parents house to fix a […]

Check out this layout I wanted to pull off on the current design of this site: See how just the first two boxes in the “sidebar” of the homepage are set side-by-side on narrow (mobile) layouts. One way I could have done that is to target the sidebar, and turn it into a grid at […]

I tried to get into Glass, but it didn’t stick for me. It’s partially because I don’t have many friends on it, and the fact that it’s paid-only means I probably never will. But also because it seems like the community spirit there is: only post really excellent photos. That’s neat but that makes it […]

Listen to Jim: Get a personal domain and start all your side projects as a subdomain of that top-level domain. Do not buy a custom domain for every little idea you have. Save your money, give your project the longevity it deserves, and show off who made the dang thing implicitly. Your personal domain is […]

I posted these to my Instagram, but they could (should) be here. I’m trying to get my “music room” at home in good order and learn to use recording equipment and software. These ones are very rough. Not only am I just not very good, but all I did was turn on Quicktime Player and […]

The Breeders! The “30th Anniversary Edition” makes me feel as old as I am. But check this out. You could have fond memories of the cool megaphone voice check-check intro: Then it’s all like a-ooooo-ooo a-ooooo-ooo which is just unforgettable: Then the drummer is like this is actually gonna be a song get ready: Then […]

Two people have reached out thoughtfully to ask me about where they should host a WordPress site. They just kinda vaguely wanted it to be good (like a nice dashboard, at least), and not break the bank. The answer is… c’mon I’m just one dude! 😵‍💫 I’ve never done an in-depth competitive analysis of the […]

I’m still on that 100 years thing and how it connects to free hosting, and now thanks to a conversation I peeped in on how it relates to the websites of people who have passed and the memorial sites to them. I helped with a memorial site to Christopher Schmitt that I very much hope […]

I think it was a month or two ago when OpenAI published docs on how you can tell their “web crawler” (scraper) to not scrape your site, following a similar syntax to Google’s: The instant I saw it I put it in my sites robots.txt file. I wanted to see how it felt and see […]

Sometimes you need to be doing that. LucidChart When I was in the process of selling CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean, they wanted to understand the stack and basic architecture of the site. I was like: it’s a pretty basic WordPress deal: PHP, MySQL. Wait but there is a bit more to it. It’s hosted on Flywheel […]

I keep thinking about that 100 years of hosting thing. Without some fancy setup like that, this is how it normally works: You pay your hosting bill, you pay to renew your domains, and you stay up to date on the shifting tides of technology well enough that your site doesn’t break. Then theoretically, your […]

There is little fresh coat of paint around here. It’s not a million miles different from before, just some new aesthetic choices for fun. I went for a high-information-density look. I liked what Robin said in his recent redesign notes, so I kinda copied that. The goal here was to merge the about and index […]

Just an old bluegrass song I like. And what popped to mind when I sat down to continue my journey of learning that absolute friggin basics of how to record something. I have all the stuff from years of podcasting you’d think I’d know now to use it by now, but I really don’t. Apparently […]

We only just recently lived through the blockchain and crypto hype. We’re currently living through the AI hype. There is some (anonymous?) person who writes at Bite code! in the first person who remembered a hype cycle I’m too young to remember: When I started programming, XML was going to replace everything. HTML with XHTML, validation […]

If you need a good full-throated argument against this practice, read Garrett Dimon’s Live Coding Interviews. They exist because companies need to know if you can actually code, but as Garrett says: At best, they serve as a tolerable de-risking filter for a company that needs an assembly-line hiring process. It’s clearly fine that a company […]

The Paravel boys just launched Luro publically. 🍾 I suspect it will be an app that means different things to different people and helps teams differently. But brass tacks, it’s a dashboard of meta-information about your website. “Track your components” is just one of many things Luro can do, but it’s a pretty cool one. […]

Chris Brandrick asked me, for Frontend Focus, “to share a few of his favorite tools and services” which of course I’m happy to. Here are my (somewhat random) picks: I’ve seen a couple of these lists recently, like Michelle Barker’s Cool Tools, Christian Heilmann’s The 10 tools I install on every new Mac I get, […]

I saw this new app for note-taking the other day: Capacities. Looks pretty neat to me. In the vein of Notion, a block-based document-making machine kind of thing. But with a twist or two, like it doesn’t lean into databases as much but elevates other content types like links and images more. Plus, “everything is […]

This February, I half-joked: Waiting for headlines about how web searches are now sent through so many AI models the energy consumption is worse than crypto. Mastodon I was hoping that wasn’t true, but the data is starting to come in. Here’s one I saw (via Ethan): In a paper due to be published later […]