☠️ WordPress to Twitter

I’ve long used automation to auto-publish from my WordPress sites to Twitter. I used to work with Automattic as a sponsor for ages, and I’d talk up Jetpack, a WordPress plugin, that handled this social media automation nicely. The Jetpack Blog, 10 days ago: The End of Twitter Auto-Sharing We have attempted to work with Twitter […]

It is not me who is bad, it is the machine, you see.

I think text-generation “AI” will succeed entirely on the merit that most people just don’t like writing. They just don’t wanna do it. They have to do it, because job, but they’d rather not. It’s not a part of their role that they enjoy. It’s certainly not a fun break from other duties. They may […]

Plays on Sci-Fi

I’ve heard a couple of mutations of “Sci-Fi” recently, so I’m documenting them for reference.

What the frick is with the war on trans people?

Here’s one thing. Sometimes there are large-scale political events that leave me utterly baffled. I have this distinct memory from just after 911, where the news shifted to “we’re gonna go to war with Iraq” and I was like, “wait, what the frick does Iraq have to do with 911?”. Nothing, was and is the […]

Summarized Articles as-a-Feature

One thing about this current crop of “AI” tools going around that sticks in my head, I think I got it from a Shawn Wang article, is that “AI” is good at: So type “bernie sanders wearing a blue web standards beanie” into an image generation “AI” tool and those 50 characters of text become […]

Do Logical Properties Make CSS Easier to Learn?

I recently said yes: They make CSS into a more coherent and interrelated system that is easier to learn and reason about. Jim has doubts: top, left, right, bottom, those directional properties are tied to my everyday experience of physical reality so they are easy to understand. They’re intuitive. … … I’m not convinced [logial properties make] CSS […]

What would you do for a living if you weren’t doing what you’re doing now?

I want to think I’d pick some other niche thing and do it myself but also spin off a meta-career, helping people understand it better. I think I’ve got just enough entrepreneurial spirit it would be inevitable. Doing that with playing the banjo would be pretty neat. Fortunately, I picked web design & development, which […]

Stacking Contexts! Get’cher Free Stacking Contexts!

In a recent Kevin Powell video (it’s the first trick of five), he talks about isolation: isolate;. The name is strange, but the point of it is that it gives you a new “stacking context” in CSS without any side effects. Stacking context, as in, a new zone for z-index values. This comes up sometimes […]

A Good Use Case for Container Queries in CSS: A Weekly Events Calendar

One hundred years ago (2018), in the dark ages before Container Queries existed, Philip Walton put together Responsive Components, a JavaScript-based technique for flopping out classes on elements at certain widths (element widths, not viewport widths) such that you could re-style them in CSS. It was a fine technique. A fairly lightweight ResizeObserver flopping out […]

Site Search & Open Search

There used to be this thing called OpenSearch that would provide some level of UX in browsers for searching individual sites. You had to bring-your-own search functionality, this was just getting users to it. I say “used to be” a thing because it seems like it’s been neutered out of being useful anymore. The way […]

“the secret list of websites”

The Washington Post does research to figure out which websites were used to train Google’s AI model: To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 […]

Almost Maximize

Y’all use Raycast? I do, but I’m a little itty bitty baby user. Like I just have it replace Spotlight because it seems to work equally well as Spotlight for finding files and applications. But then has a few bonus features here and there. I use the commands to move windows around once in a […]

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