![Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Monday night session š¶āļøš» ā with Jessica](https://cdn.statically.io/img/adactio.com/images/uploaded/19704/small.jpg)
Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Monday night session š¶āļøš» ā with Jessica
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Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Monday night session š¶āļøš» ā with Jessica
Oh, my notes have always worked like that. Different to my blog.
Thatās got to be your new profile pic.
The canonical URLs you mean? I only add them to the syndicated versions (they donāt appear in the original note on my own site). I started adding them when Twitter changed its character limit from 140 to 280 characters.
Had coffee and a good chat with a talented young UX/UI designer who recently moved to Lewes from Ukraine:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anaida-bademian/
If you know of a UK-based opening for a junior role, let her know!
I am very excited to announce that UX London will be back in 2023!
Weāre returning to Tobacco Dock. Save the dates: June 22nd and 23rd.
Wait ā¦thatās only two days. Previously UX London was a three-day event and you could either go for all three days or get a ticket for just one day.
Well, thatās changing. UX London 2023 will be condensed into a two-day event. You get a ticket for both days and everyone shares the experience.
Iām very excited about this! Iām planning to make some other tweaks to the format, but the basic structure of each day remains roughly the same: inspirational talks in the morning followed by hands-on workshops in the afternoon.
As for the whoāll be giving those talks and running those workshops ā¦well, thatās what Iām currently putting together. For the second year in row, Iām curating the line-up. Itās excitingālike a planning a heist, assembling a team of supersmart people with specialised skillsets.
I canāt wait to reveal more. For now though, you can trust me when I say that the line-up is going to be stellar.
If you do trust me, you can get your super early-bird ticket, youāve got until this Friday, December 2nd.
The super early-bird tickets are an absolute steal at Ā£695 plus VAT. After Friday, youāll be able to get early-bird tickets for the more reasonable price of Ā£995 plus VAT.
Keep an eye on the UX London website for speaker announcements. Iāll also be revealing those updates here too because, as you can probably tell, Iām positively gleeful about UX London 2023.
See you there!
James describes his process for designing fluid grid layouts, which very much involves working with the grain of the web but against the grain of our design tools:
In 2022 our design tools are still based around fixed-size artboards, while weāre trying to design products which scale gracefully to suit any screen.
If youāre thinking of signing up to Hive or Post:
If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.
Consign that app to oblivion.
Checked in at The Bugle Inn. Sunday afternoon session š»š¶ ā with Jessica
I donāt like making unpaid contributions to a for-profit publisher whose proprietor is an alt-right troll.
Same.
I can see no good arguments for redirecting my voice into anyone elseās for-profit venture-funded algorithm-driven engagement-maximizing wet dream.
Iāve been very guilty of putting all my eggs in the Twitter basket over the last couple of years, especially, and all of that has been destroyed by one bellend billionaire. Iām determined not to make that mistake again and even more determined to make my little home on the internetāthis websiteāas lovely and sustainable as I can make it.
You might enjoy the short, snappy, and witty Murderbot Diaries from Martha Wells:
Whoops! Sorry about thatāshould be fixed now. Thanks for the heads-up!
Wouldnāt it be nice to have a site thatās not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations? Wouldnāt it be nice not to have ads shoved in your face every time you open an app to see what your friends are up to? Wouldnāt it be nice to know that when your friends post something, youāll actually see it without a social media platform deciding whether to shove it down your feed and pump that feed full of stuff you didnāt ask for?
Wouldnāt that be great?
Iām so sorry, Giles. š
Checked in at The Winding Stair. Stopping for lunch in Dublin before flying home ā with Jessica
Whoops! Pardon meāall fixed now; thanks for the heads-up!
Almost no-one has given informed constent to being tracked through spy pixels in emails, and yet the practice is endemic. This is wrong. It needs to change.
Gerry talks about ātop tasksā a lot. He literally wrote the book on it:
Top tasks are what matter most to your customers.
Seems pretty obvious, right? But itās actually pretty rare to see top tasks presented any differently than other options.
Look at the global navigation on most websites. Typically all the options are given equal prominence. Even the semantics under the hood often reflect this egalitarian ideal, with each list in an unordered list. All the navigation options are equal, but I bet that the reality for most websites is that some navigation options are more equal than others.
Iāve been guilty of this on The Session. The site-wide navigation shows a number of options: tunes, events, discussions, etc. Each one is given equal prominence, but I can tell you without even looking at my server logs that 90% of the traffic goes to the tunes sectionāthatās the beating heart of The Session. Thatās why the home page has a search form that defaults to searching for tunes.
I wanted the navigation to reflect the reality of what people are coming to the site for. I decided to make the link to the tunes section more prominent by bumping up the font size a bit.
I was worried about how weird this might look; weāre so used to seeing all navigation items presented equally. But I think it worked out okay (though it might take a bit of getting used to if youāre accustomed to the previous styling). It helps that ātunesā is a nice short word, so bumping up the font size on that word doesnāt jostle everything else around.
I think this adjustment is working well for this situation where thereās one very clear tippy-top task. I wouldnāt want to apply it across the board, making every item in the navigation proportionally bigger or smaller depending on how often itās used. That would end up looking like a ransom note.
But giving one single item prominence like this tweaks the visual hierarchy just enough to favour the option thatās most likely to be what a visitor wants.
That last bit is crucial. The visual adjustment reflects what visitors want, not what I want. You could adjust the size of a navigation option that you want to drive traffic to, but in the long run, all youāre going to do is train people to trust your design less.
You donāt get to decide what your top task is. The visitors to your website do. Trying to foist an arbitrary option on them would be the tail wagging the dog.
Anway, Iām feeling a lot better about the site-wide navigation on The Session now that it reflects reality a little bit more. Heck, I may even bump that font size up a little more.
You gonna go straight for the cranberries?
The stage is set ā¦for MĆ”m!
Checked in at Tigh CĆ³ilĆ. Mary Shannon on banjo! š»šŖš» ā with Jessica
Oysters and Guinness in Tigh Neachtain.
Checked in at Tigh Neachtain. Sitting in a snug ā with Jessica
Delicious Irish sashimi.
Checked in at Tigh CĆ³ilĆ. Listening to my favourite mandolin player everāDeclan Coreyāplaying in a cracking session! š¶ ā with Jessica
Checked in at The Crane Bar. Post-dinner session š¶ ā with Jessica
Checked in at Taaffes. A pint and some tunes š¶ ā with Jessica
This is a superb explanation of flexboxāthe interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!
A directory of blogs, all nicely categorised:
ooh.directory is a place to find good blogs that interest you.
Phil gave me a sneak peek at this when he was putting it together and asked me what I thought of it. My response was basically āThis is great!ā
And of course you can suggest a site to add to the directory.
A personal website is a lovely thing. Nobody will buy this platform and use it as their personal plaything. No advertisers will boycott and send me scrambling to produce different content. No seed funding will run out overnight.
Heading into the west, taking the train from Dublin to Galway.
Going to Galway. brb
Pour a foundation for your own silo or home.
If any of my fellow #mastodaoine play trad music, you can now get updates from https://thesession.org by following @thesession@mastodon.ie
This resonates with me.
Ironically, Matt mentioned it on Twitter in a reply to @seldo@mastodon.social ā¦who isnāt on Twitter any more.
Checked in at Dover Castle. Monday night session š¶š» ā with Jessica
This is a genuinely lovely use of machine learning models: provide a prompt for an illustration to print out and colour in.
Mike explains his motivation for building this:
My sonās super into colouring at the moment and Iāve been struggling to find new stuff for him.
Exactly sixteen years ago on this day, I wrote about Twitter, a service I had been using for a few weeks. I documented how confusing yet compelling it was.
Twitter grew and grew after that. But at some point, it began to feel more like it was shrinking, shrivelling into a husk of its former self.
Just over ten years ago, there was a battle for the soul of Twitter from within. One camp wanted it to become an interoperable protocol, like email. The other camp wanted it to be a content farm, monetised by advertisers. Thatās the vision that won. They declared war on the third-party developers who had helped grow Twitter in the first place, and cracked down on anything that didnāt foster e N g A g E m E n T.
The muskofication of Twitter is the nail in the coffin. In the tradition of all scandals since Watergate, I propose we refer to the shocking recent events at Twitter as Elongate.
Post-Elongate Twitter will limp on, Iām sure, but it can never be the fun place it once was. The incentives just arenāt there. As Bastian wrote:
Twitter was once an amplifier for brilliant ideas, for positivity, for change, for a better future. Many didnāt understand the power it had as a communication platform. But that power turned against the exact same people who needed this platform so urgently. Itās now a waste of time and energy at best and a threat to progress and society at worst.
I donāt foresee myself syndicating my notes to Twitter any more. Iāve removed the site from my browserās bookmarks. Iāve removed it from my phoneās home screen too.
As someone whoās been verified on Twitter for years, with over 140,000 followers, it should probably feel like a bigger deal than it does. I echo Robinās observation:
The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.
Meanwhile, Mastodon is proving to be thoroughly enjoyable. Some parts are still rough around the edges, but compared to Twitter in 2006, itās positively polished.
Interestingly, the biggest complaint that I and my friends had about Twitter all those years ago wasnāt about Twitter per se, but about lock-in:
Twitter is yet another social network where we have to go and manually add all the same friends from every other social network.
Thatās the very thing that sets the fediverse apart: the ability to move from one service to another and bring your social network with you. Now Matt is promising to add ActivityPub to Tumblr. That future we wanted sixteen years ago might finally be arriving.
In order to thoroughly attend to every pertinent aspect of the spec, fantasai asked us each to read one sentence aloud to the group. At which point we were all asked whether we thought the sentence made sense, and to speak up if we didnāt understand any of it or if it wasnāt clear.
Rich documents the excellent and fascinating process used in a recent W3C workshop (though what he describes is the very opposite of groupthink, so donāt let the title mislead you):
Iād never come across the person-by-person, sentence-by-sentence approach before. I found it particularly effective as a way of engaging a group of people, ensuring collective understanding, and gathering structured feedback on a shared document.
TĆ”im ar an teilifĆs!
Blink and youāll miss me and my mandolin at 1:01 and 35:21 (with some subsequent audience shots at the banjo recital) from Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy:
Reading The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers.
Reminder:
em
andrem
work with the userās font size;px
completely overrides it.
That reminds me: time for me to remove the Twitter metacrap from my website (in much the same way that Iām removing Twitter from my life).
Yes, Huffduffer is still ticking away nicely:
Hereās the audio that Iāve been huffduffing:
Checked in at The Bugle Inn. Made it back to Brighton in time for a session š¶š»
Checked in at British Airways Galleries Club Lounge / First Lounge. Transiting through Philly ā with Jessica
Bidding farewell to Florida.
I appreciate Hiddeās reluctance to participate in anything that looks like a pile-on, but in this case, itās important to call out the bad behaviour so it doesnāt happen again.
The specific issues Iāve put in this post cross the line between honest mistakes and bad behaviour. They cross the line, because they consistute fraud (the livestream) and because they impact attendees, sponsors and speakers. The front-end community doesnāt deserve this, and Iām worried for people new to the industry, who get may assume this is normal or ok. Itās not normal.
If you ask me, the construction of a highway to the danger zone was an extravagant waste of taxpayer money in the first place.
A profile of the life and work of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler.
It sounds like Remix takes a sensible approach to progressive enhancement.
More on that shitshow of an event that Jo wrote about, this time from Cassie.
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:
There are also tools like Twitodon to help you migrate from Twitter to Mastodon.
Getting on board isnāt 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, itās also very reminiscent of the early unreliable days of Twitter.
I donāt want to go into the technical details of Mastodon and the fediverseāeven though those details are fascinating and impressive. What Iām really struck by is the vibe.
In a nutshell, Iām loving it! It feels ā¦nice.
I was fully expecting Mastodon to be full of meta-discussions about Mastodon, but in the past few weeks Iāve enjoyed people posting about stone circles, astronomy, andāobviouslyācats and dogs.
The process of finding people to follow has been slow, but in a good way. Iāve enjoyed seeking people out. Itās been easier to find the techy folks, but Iāve also been finding scientists, journalists, and artists.
On the one hand, the niceness of the experience isnāt down to technical architecture; itās 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. Itās all very gratifying to experience!
Personally, Iām posting to Mastodon via my own website. As much as Iām 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, itās unrealistic to expect everyone to have their own domain name.
Itās like thereās a spectrum of ownership. On one end, thereās publishing on your own website. On the other end, thereās 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 youāre on, you can up and move to a different instance, taking your social graph with you.
In a way, itās like delegating domain ownership to someone you trust. If you donāt have the time, energy, resources, or interest in having your own domain, but you trust someone whoās running a Mastodon instance, itās 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? Itās 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 Iām getting:
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!
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 Iāve 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 donāt 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 phoneās home screen.
You can find me on Mastodon as @adactio@mastodon.social
Iām not too bothered about what instance Iām 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 havenāt found much of an Irish traditional music community on the fediverse. Iām wondering if maybe I should start a Mastodon instance for that.
While Iām a citizen of mastodon.social, Iām doing my bit by chipping in some money to support it: sponsorship levels on Patreon start at just $1 a month. And while I canāt offer much technical assistance, I opened my first Mastodon pull request with a suggested improvement for the documentation.
Iām really impressed with the quality of the software. It isnāt perfect but considering that itās an open source project, itās better than most VC-backed services with more and better-paid staff. As Giles said, comparing it to Twitter:
Iām using Mastodon now and itās not the same, but itās not shit either. Itās different. It takes a bit of adjustment. And Iām enjoying it.
Most of all, I love, love, love that Mastodon demonstrates that things can be different. For too long weāve 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 isnāt just a proof of concept either. Itās here now. Itās here to stay, if you want it.
Iāve heard from multiple people about how much of a shitshow this event was. Worth remembering in case they try to pull the same shit again.
The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.
View source on this bit of tongue-in-cheek fun from Terence.
Oh, interesting!
Iāve been contemplating a checkbox. The label for this checkbox reads:
This is a bot account
Let me back upā¦
In what seems like decades ago, but was in fact just a few weeks, Elon Musk bought Twitter and began burning it to the ground. His admirers insist heās playing some form of four-dimensional chess, but to the rest of us, his actions are indistinguishable from a spoilt rich kid not understanding what a social network is.
It wasnāt giving me much cause for anguish personally. For the past eight years, Iāve only used Twitter as a syndication endpoint for my own notes. But I understand thatās a very privileged position to be in. Most people on Twitter donāt have the same luxury of independence. Itās genuinely maddening and saddening to see their years of sharing destroyed by one cruel idiot.
Lots of people started moving to Mastodon. I figured I should do the same for my syndicated notes.
At first, I signed up for an account on mastodon.cloud. No particular reason. But thatās where I saw this very insightful post from Anil Dash:
When it came time to reckon with social mediaās failings, nobody ran to the āweb3ā platforms. Nobody asked ācan I get paid per messageā? Nobody asked about the blockchain. The community of people whoāve been quietly doing this work for years (decades!) ended up being the ones who welcomed everyone over, as always.
I was getting my account all set up and beginning to follow some other folks, when I realised that I actually already had an exisiting account over on mastodon.social. Doh! Turns out that I signed up back in 2017 to kick the tyres, but never did much else because there werenāt many other people around back then. Oh, how times have changed!
Anyway, I thought I had really screwed up by having two accounts but this turned out to be an opportunity to experience some of the thoughtfulness in Mastodonās design. The process of migrating from one Mastodon account to anotherāon a completely different instanceāwas very smooth! It was clear that this wasnāt an afterthought. This is an essential part of the fediverse and the design of the migration flow reflects that.
This gives me enormous peace of mind. If I ever want to switch to a different instance and still keep my network intact, I know it wonāt be a problem. Mastodon is like the opposite of the roach-motel mentality that permeates most VC-backed so-called social networks.
As I played around some moreāreading, following, exploringāmy feelings of fondness only grew stronger. I like this place a lot!
I definitely wanted to syndicate my notes to Mastodon. At first, I implemented a straightforward RSS-to-Mastodon syndication using IFTTT (IF This, Then That), thanks to Matthiasās excellent tutorial.
But that didnāt feel quite right. When I syndicate to Twitter, I make a conscious choice each time. Thereās a āTwitterā toggle that I can enable or disable in my posting interface. Mastodon deserved the same level of thoughtfulness.
So I switched off the IFTTT recipe and started exploring the Mastodon API. Itās going to sound like a humblebrag when I tell you that I got cross-posting working in almost no time at all, but thatās not a testament to my coding prowess (Iām really not very good), but rather a testament to the Mastodon API, which was a joy to work with.
/settings/applications
.New Application
.write:statuses
(and probably write:media
) from the Scopes list.Your access token
to use in API calls.I did hit a wall when it came to posting images. That took me a while to get working, and I couldnāt figure out why. Was it something at Mastodonās end while it was struggling under the influx of new users? As it turns out, no. It was entirely down to me being an idiot. (You know that situation where youāre working on a problem for ages and youāve become convinced itās an extremely gnarly rocket-science problem, but then turns out to be something stupid like a typo? Yeah. That.)
Then thereās the whole question of how to receive replies, likes, and reboosts from Mastodon here on my own site. Luckily, that was super easy, thanks to Brid.gy. One click and I was done. I love Brid.gy!
Take this note, for example. Thereās a version on Twitter and a version on Mastodon. The original version on my own site gets responses from both places.
If Iām replying to a response on Twitter, I do not syndicate that to Mastodon.
Likewise, if Iām replying to a response on Mastodon, I do not syndicate that to Twitter.
Oh, one thing worth mentioning: if youāre sending a reply to something on Mastodon using the API, thereās an in_reply_to_id
field for you to provide. But you should also include the full @username@instance of the person youāre replying to at the beginning of the message to ensure that itās displayed as a reply rather than showing up as a regular post. Note the difference between this note on my site and its syndicated version on Mastodon.
Anyway, now Iām posting to Mastodon, but Iām doing it through the the interface of my own website. Which brings me to that checkbox in Mastodonās profile settings:
This is a bot account
The help text reads:
Signal to others that the account mainly performs automated actions and might not be monitored
If I were doing the automatic cross-posting from RSS, Iād definitely tick that box. But as Iām making a conscious decision whenever I syndicate to Mastodon, I think Iām going to leave that checkbox unticked.
My cross-posting is not automated and Iām very much monitoring my Mastodon account ā¦because Iām enjoying my Mastodon experience more than Iāve enjoyed anything online for quite some time. Highly recommended!
An internet-enabled kettle sounds stupid, but this is a genuinely thoughtful piece of hardware.
This extract from Baldurās new book is particularly timely in light of the twipocalypse.
Two weeks ago I was on stage for two days hosting Leading Design in London.
Last week I was on stage for two days hosting Clarity in New Orleans.
It was an honour and a pleasure to MC at both events. Hard work, but very, very rewarding. And people seemed to like the cut of my jib, so thatās good.
With my obligations fulfilled, Iām now taking some time off before diving back into some exciting events-related work (he said, teasingly).
Jessica and I left New Orleans for Florida on the weekend. Weāre spending a week at the beach house in Saint Augustine, doing all the usual Floridian activities: getting in the ocean, eating shrimp, sitting around doing nothing, that kind of thing.
But last night we got to experience something very unusual indeed.
We stayed up late, fighting off tiredness until strolling down to the beach sometime after 1am.
It was a mild night. I was in shorts and short sleeves, standing on the sand with the waves crashing, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.
We were looking to the south. Thatās where Cape Canaveral is, about a hundred miles away.
A hundred miles is quite a distance, and it was a cloudy night, so I wasnāt sure whether weād be able to see anything. But when the time came, shortly before 2am, there was no mistaking it.
An orange glow appeared on the ocean, just over the horizon. Then an intense bright orange-red flame burst upwards. Even at this considerable distance, it was remarkably piercing.
It quickly travelled upwards, in an almost shaky trajectory, until entering the clouds.
And that was it. Brief, but unforgettable. We had seen the launch of Artemis 1 on the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever launched.
This is so coolāAriel was on BBC World TV News live during the Artemis launch!
- A film acknowledges that some people menstruate
- without any characters being ashamed of it
- or being shamed by someone else (without resolution)
There was no way I was going to insert a phone between my eyes and that spectacle! š
Phwoar! Thank you, James Webb Space Telescope, for another beautiful shot!
Got to see the bright burn of the Artemis launch even from Saint Augustine beach far to the north, and even with cloudy skies! š
I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff Iāve 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.
Or, Why wasnāt the Telegraph Invented Earlier?
A wonderful deep-dive into optical telegraphy through the ages.
š¤
I had a delicious crawfish ƩtouffƩe in New Orleans last week!
Shrimp night! š¤ š½
Ooh, I donāt know any of those ā¦yet! Time for me to get practicing.
Instagram clichƩs gone wrong.
You betcha! How about you? Got a banjo that travels well?
Glad itās not just me, then.
(Also, hi! Good to see you here!)
A lovely fansite dedicated to the life and work of Paul Rand.
I often use the word quality when referring to apps, products and services I hold in a high regard but another word that often comes up in this context is craft. Craft, as in something that is handcrafted where something someone spent a lot of time on and maybe even embedded their own personal touches and personality in it. Often something handcrafted feels more premium.
Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? Itās back!
A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.
I really like Simonās description of the fediverse:
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.
This is spot-on:
Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.
What happens if the āpace layersā get out of sync?
A very thoughtful post by Miriam on how tools can adversely affect the pace of progress in the world of web standards.
When tools intervene between you and your access to the web platform, proceed with caution. Ask not only: How well does it work? But also: How well does it fail? Not only: What features do they provide? But also: What features do they prevent?
Hereās a remarkably in-depth timeline of the webās finest programming language, from before it existed to todayās thriving ecosystem. And the timeline is repsonsive tooālovely!
So saddened to hear of @caroluneās passing. Iāll always remember her being so excited and enthusiastic at the very first Science Hack Day. A true champion of science and wonder.
My deepest sympathies to her family.
Saint Augustine Beach, mid November.
Happy #mondog from Ellie!
Paracetamol.
Flattery will get you everywhere, Tejas! š
Yeah, I picked mine up from the man himself when I was in Braga, Portugal a few years back. I use it as my travel mandolin and Iām impressed with the sound given its affordable price!
Sitting on the porch, playing tunes on my mandolin.
At Clarity last week, I had the great pleasure of introducing and interviewing Linda Dong who spoke about Appleās Human Interface Guidelines. I loved the way she looked at the history of the HIG from 1977 onwards. This collection of videos is just what I need to keep spelunking into the interfaces of the past:
A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002.
Spot-on analysis by Max:
Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.
I really hope that this when smart folks start putting their skills towards making the ideas of the indie web more widely available:
I think weāre at a special moment right now. People have been fed up with social media and its various problems (surveillance capitalism, erosion of mental health, active destruction of democracy, bla bla bla) for quite a while now. But it needs a special bang to get a critical mass of users to actually pack up their stuff and move.
It me (or at least, this is what I like to tell myself):
A lot of the time, it looks like Iām fucking about, but Iām really just internalising the problem at hand, and clearing space for it in my brain.
Yay! š
W00t!
The internetās town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.
I share Brentās optimism:
The web is wide open again, for the first time in what feels like forever.
Back on the beach.
Iāve got that working for my notes, but I canāt seem to get images to work.
Going to Saint Augustine. brb
Bidding farewell to New Orleans, @wordriddenās city of birth.
Had to be done.
(But Morning Call is still tops)
It was an honour and a privilege to MC the in-person portion of #Clarity2022āI had a blast!
Simultaneously having a great time at #Clarity2022 in New Orleans while also feeling FOMO for #FFconf back home in Brighton.
Despite growing pains and potential problems, I think this could be one of the most interesting movements on the web in recent years. Letās see where it goes.
Iām getting the same vibe as Bastian about Mastodon:
Suddenly there was this old Twitter vibe. 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!
Checked in at Sazerac Bar. Sazerac ā with Jessica
Had a lovely evening enjoying live music outdoors in a New Orleans courtyard at the #Clarity2022 speakersā gathering.
Got a sneaky tour of the National WWII Museum from our old friend Kim whoās a senior curator there!
Crypts!
Beignets for breakfast.
Going to New Orleans. brb
Checked in at Dover Castle. A full house of fiddles! š¶š»š»š»š»š¶ ā with Jessica
In a way, I find these picturesātaken by someone from the ground with regular equipmentājust as awe-inspiring as the images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
A beautiful meditation on Christopher Alexander by Claire L. Evans.
Eventually, it becomes second nature: jot down some thoughts and hit publish. Until then, think of it like starting a running habit. The first few days you run, itās awful and you think itāll never feel any better. But after a few weeks, you start getting antsy if you donāt run. If youāre not used to writing, it can feel like a slog, but itās worth getting over that hump.
When Dan wrote this a week ago, I thought it sounded very far-fetched. Now it sounds almost inevitable.
Listening to Low.
A very timely post on using If This Then That to automatically post notes from your own site (via RSS) to Twitter and Mastodon.
Iāve set this up for my Mastodon profile.
Excellent advice from Stuart.
Watchāand more importantly, listenāto this five minute video to get the full effect.
A good olā rant by Vasilis on our design tools for the web.
So saddened by the passing of Mimi Parkerāweāve lost a beautiful voice.
When it came time to reckon with social mediaās failings, nobody ran to the āweb3ā platforms. Nobody asked ācan I get paid per messageā? Nobody asked about the blockchain. The community of people whoāve been quietly doing this work for years (decades!) ended up being the ones who welcomed everyone over, as always.
Checked in at The Bugle Inn. Sunday session š¶š»
Youāre quite right!
Hereās a short fifteen minute video (and transcript) of an interview I did about accessibility and inclusive design. I quite like how it turned out!
When I wrote about my hopes and fears for the View Transitions API, a few people latched on to this sentiment:
If the View Transitions API only works for single page apps, it could be the single worst thing to happen to the web in years.
But I also wrote:
If the View Transitions API works across page navigations, it could be the single best thing to happen to the web in years.
I think itās worth focusing on that.
Part of the problem is that I gave my hopes and fears an equal airing. But theyāre not equally likely.
Take the possibility that the View Transitions API only ships for single page apps, but never ships for regular page transitions. The consequences of that would be bigāthe API would act as an incentive to build single page apps. But the likelihood of that happening is small. In fact, according to Jake, thereās already an implemention for page transitions in the works at Chrome.
Now what if the View Transitions API ships for pages? The consequences would be equally bigāthe API would act as an incentive to ditch single page apps and build in a more performant, resilient way. Best of all, the chances of that happening are very large indeed (pretty much a certainty now, given Jakeās update).
So I made a comparison between both of the consequences, which are equally large, but I didnāt make a corresponding comparison of the likelihoods, which are not equally large. Mea culpa!
I shouldāve made it clearer that, although the consequences would be really bad if the View Transitions API only supports single page apps, the actual likelihood of that is pretty slim.
Thatās probably my negativity bias showing through. (The reason I have a negativity bias is because I am a human. Like, have you ever noticed that if you get feedback on something and 98% of it is positive, you inevitably fixate on the 2%?)
Anyway, the real takeaway here is that if the View Transitions API ships for pages, then the consequences will be really, really good! It would be another nail in the coffin for monolithic JavaScript frameworks slowing down the web. And best of all, the likelihood of this happening is very high!
So let me amend my closing sentences from my previous post:
If the View Transitions API only works for single page appsāwhich is very unlikelyāit could be the single worst thing to happen to the web in years.
If the View Transitions API works across page navigationsāwhich is very, very likelyāit could be the single best thing to happen to the web in years.
The glass is half full and itās only going to get fuller. Time to start planning for a turbo-charged web now.
If youāve got a website with full page navigations, start thinking about how youāll be able to apply the View Transitions API as a progressive enhancement to improve the user experience.
If youāve got a single page app, start thinking about how to ditch a whole bunch of uneccessary dependencies to make a more lightweight foundation of HTML instead of JavaScript, and still get all those slick transitions you get in a single page app!
Thatās such a good idea! Itās like two layers of progressive enhancement: first Turbo, then View Transitions!
Hereās what I wrote at the time about how I set up my syndication to Twitter from my own site:
Very, very good news indeed! ššš
Excellent!
I am simultaneously very excited and very nervous about the View Transitions API.
You may know it by its former nameāShared Element Transitions. The name change is very recent.
Iāve been saying for years that some kind of API like this would be brilliant:
I honestly think if browsers implemented this, 80% of client-rendered Single Page Apps could be done as regular good olā-fashioned websites.
Miriam Suzanne describes the theory of View Transitions succinctly:
Shared-element transitions are designed to work with standard web navigation across multiple page loads, as well as page transitions in āsingle-pageā apps (often called SPAs).
This all sounds brilliant. But the devil is in the implementation details. Right now, the API only works for single page apps. This is totally understandable. For purely pragmatic reasons, single page apps are a simple use case to solve for. Itās going to take a lot more work to get this API to work for multi-page apps (or as we used to call them, websites).
If we get a View Transitions API that works across page navigations, it could potentially turbo-charge the web. It will act as a disencentive to building single page appsāyouād be able to provide swish transitions without sacrificing performance or resilience at the alter of a heavy-handed JavaScript-only architecture.
But if the API only ever works for single page apps (which is the current situation), then it will act as an incentive to make any kind of website into a single page app, regardless of whether itās actually the appropriate architecture.
That prospect has me very worried indeed.
Iām making my feelings on this known just in case any of the implementators out there are thinking, āHey, maybe itās fine that this API only works for single page appsāIām sure most people would be happy with that.ā
If the View Transitions API works across page navigations, it could be the single best thing to happen to the web in years.
If the View Transitions API only works for single page apps, it could be the single worst thing to happen to the web in years.
Update: Jake says:
Weāre currently landing code in Chrome for the MPA version.
Very happy to hear that! Itās already in the spec, but itās good to hear that the implementation isnāt going to lag too much.
Also, read this follow-up.
I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth from orbit.
ā Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude
All the speakers at #LDconf today were wonderful!
Time to introduce another trio of wonderful design leaders at #LDconf.
Getting ready to introduce the next trio of designers at #LDconf.
Ah, I see my better half got in there first:
https://twitter.com/Wordridden/status/1587503150361108486
Never mind. Carry on.
The Imperial Radch series by @Ann_Leckie and the Teixcalaan series by @ArkadyMartine are both excellent. Oh, and the Machineries of Empire series by @DeuceOfGears. All good galaxy-spanning space opera.
Going to London. brb