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Introducing ū— A Distraction-Free Writing... kung fu grippe

I have been looking for this link for a very long time! I thought it was taken down for whatever reason and kept kicking myself for not saving it. I think it's a very good read as we start a new year

Experience “ū—”: The Last Distraction-Free Writing Environment You’ll Buy. Today.

The Ourobouros Fun Factory, LLC is proud to announce a revolutionary new tool for serious artists doing serious work. It’s a distraction-free writing environment that we call “ū–” (pron. “YOOOoooouuuuu…”).

End of the Year Web Development Fun

Near the end of the year, I look forward to two sites that release some amazing articles about web development.

HTMHell Advent Calendar 2024

In 2022, I launched the HTMHell Advent Calendar, which was a great success. Since then, dozens of authors worldwide have contributed fantastic articles on security, accessibility, UX, and performance every year. This year, we’re back again with twenty-four more posts.

When I was in college, I had a web development class where the teacher would start off every session with websites that had questionable decisions about the design. This site seems to be a continuation of that but shows you how to correct it.

12 Days of Web

A year-end celebration of fundamental web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In addition to the articles, the authors post links to charities that they are raising money and awareness for.

Two different kinds of “focusable” UI elements · Eric Eggert

This was a pretty nice article about things getting focus and how that plays with accessibility.

In accessibility, “focusable” UI elements are represented by two separate yet equally important concepts: the elements who can be focused sequentially and those who can only receive focus programmatically. These are their stories. Dun-Dun

I’ve been taking a small break from OmniFocus to figure out who I am when I’m not ignoring my task list.

Currently, I’m trying out a couple things and I think add this to my list of experiments.

TIP: Using a Task Scratchpad

Have transient errands and tasks you don't want to clutter your task manager? A scratchpad draft combined with Drafts’ Task Widget can help. Includes example actions for moving tasks you captured in the scratchpad on to Reminders or Things, too.

Details: forums.getdrafts.com/t/tip-usi

Image 113425202139861391 from toot 113425202363303092 on indieapps.space
Card image from indieapps.space toot 113425202363303092

TIP: Using a Task Scratchpad

Task managers are great, but I sometimes find myself with short-term, transient tasks that I need somewhere to jot down and keep up with, but that I don’t feel need all the additional metadata around formal tasks, and I don’t feel fit into the curated hierarchy of projects in my task management system. These are often little things to remember to pick up, or to tell one of my kids when I see them, etc. For tasks like this, I keep a task scratchpad draft in Drafts and use it in combination with ...

How to Monetize a Blog

This was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to link to it, but it was sitting in the backlog as I was trying to make something else perfect.

I don’t remember what I was waiting for, but I’m hoping that you enjoy it.

So let's talk about monetizing a blog, starting with the most obvious and perhaps easiest avenue: display advertising.

Be sure to tap/click on the image for a good time.

Another reason that I don’t like QR codes.

Public Warning.

If you EVER, and I do mean EVER see a QR code for anything... not just some things, ANYTHING.

Treat it as a scam, do not scan it, they can easily be covered up with malicious redirects to fake sites to steal your financial details. Direct you to malware sites to try and infect your device.

Treat them all the same... as toxic, potential harmful to your identity and security.

Never trust them... EVER!!!

If you 100% must use one, do what you should be doing at any (ATM) cash machine, check for devices that have been installed by crooks. See if you can peel the code off, not just at the area around the code, but the whole sign... look for anything unusual and if you have any doubts... even if it's 1% doubt... DON'T USE IT

This isn't scaremongering, scammers and thieves are out there every day, placing fake QR codes on signs all over the place. No where is safe from them. The way to win is not to play. Don;t buy into the enshitification of everything, don;t be told that you can ONLY do it one specific way (legally they have to offer more than one way to pay for a service).

Please boost and spread the word.





Image 113307327301142897 from toot 113307355974852973 on beige.party

A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites - GreyCoder

There is a _lot_ of content out there. Some of it's news, some of it is propaganda. I hope that this helps you get to whatever you want to read faster.

Text-only websites are quite useful, especially today, because web pages are increasingly filled with ads, videos, and bandwidth-heavy content.

Found via Neblib

A Tour Of My New Self-Hosted Code Setup | Leon Mika

I really enjoy how Leon steps us through the journey of setting up self-hosting as well as giving us his reasons on why he's doing it.

Avatar picture of Leon Well, if I was going to do this at all, it was time to do it for real. I decided to set up my own code hosting properly this time, complete with CI/CD runners, all hosted under my own domain name.

Leon even includes some price breakdowns, design diagrams and links to get some more information.

Don’t have time to read the post? He also has it narrated in his wonderful Australian accent.

I really recommend that you follow his RSS feed!

BrettTerpstra.com - Web Excursions for April 22, 2024

Brett holding a map

I enjoy and appreciate Brett Terpstra and what he's brought to the internet. I was going over my posts and I don't seem to have ever linked to one of his posts about what he finds on the internet.

Web Excursions are select bookmarks from my travels around the interwebs, because I'm always thinking about you while discovering other people's cool stuff. You mean that much to me. You can see all of my (public) bookmarks on Pinboard, and visit the bookmarks archive for curated lists across the last few years.

How we’re approaching theming with modern CSS - Piccalilli

We've started a new project which requires heavy, creative theming, so I made a prototype to test some ideas out.

I really like this article as it breaks down the reasoning of why they are doing what they are doing. It has some examples that you can follow along with and leaves me thinking about how I can take this knowledge into my own development.

Discovered via Andy Bell

Why I Care Deeply About Web Accessibility And You Should Too - DEV Community

This article by Schalk Neethling talks about the access portion of accessibility. It's something that I think about for the base portion of my theme and I hope that you'll read it and spread the message.

Technical Writing Chat with Ally Sassman | James' Coffee Blog

This is the first interview in Technical Writing Chats, a series where I speak with technical writers about their day-to-day role and how they got started in their career. Today's interview is with Ally Sassman, a Senior Technical Writer at New Relic. I sincerely hope you enjoy!

This is the first post in James' series.

I'm hoping to pick up a couple tips throughout the series to improve the writing that I do on my blog.

Conundra, indeed: Using curly braces in English | James' Coffee Blog

This got me thinking: how are curly braces used in English today? Many English keyboards, such as the Macbook Air keyboard on which I am typing this blog post, have curly braces as a character you can type with the shift key pressed. If curly braces are on our keyboards, they would have to either have some use in language, or sufficient use as a punctuation in computational contexts?

I can't recall ever seeing these outside of the context of programming.

json.blog sees an issue

I keep getting older, and the text size on Daring Fireball keeps staying the same.

I feel this soo much. It's part of the reason that I make the default font as big as it is. I understand that a user might have a default style sheet or setting. I feel that designing for a larger initial font, makes this particular theme more flexible.

Serving my blog posts as Linux manual pages | James' Coffee Blog

Earlier this week, with a spark for building but no particular idea in mind, I started to think about the Linux manual page. Could I serve my blog posts as Linux manual pages? Herein lay an adventure.

WHOA! This completely blew my mind!

Tailwind vs Semantic CSS

This study compares two websites with identical design: the commercial Spotlight template from developers of Tailwind vs the same site with semantic CSS

I found this via Robb Knight's mastodon/website and laughed to myself when I read No Comment.

I've been using tools that help developer things faster for years. It feels like all the time we save accrues interest and we have to payback in other costs.

How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS

As you can imagine, we spend a lot of our time working on really, really old books. So why not create a website out of really, really old technology?

A pretty interesting read. It's part of what got me interested in static website generation. Also, came across the word "paean" which I haven't seen in so long that I thought it was a typo.