Notes

TIL there’s a media query for display-mode, triggered i.e. when a PWA is launched from the homescreen in standalone mode.
via Google Developer Web Fundamentals

While I applaud the new wave of people publishing on their own blogs, I still feel this is too hard to do for non-tech folks. Here’s what I’d love to see:

A platform that includes

• free hosting
• the ability to buy a custom domain
• a simple CMS for writing posts
• an integrated RSS feed reader to “follow” your friends
• a “content stream” showing recent posts of blogs you subscribed to
• webmention support - see reactions to your post
• the ability to get it all up and running without ever touching code

I think Netlify / NetlifyCMS checks a lot of these boxes, but still requires some tech knowledge, i.e. you need to have a git repo and understand some of the basic concepts (“deploy”, “build”, “static”…)

Ideally, I’d like a page with a big “start your own blog” button, and a process that’s just as easy as signing up for Facebook.

Ever wanted to inspect some UI that only appears on specific interactions? Run window.setTimeout(() => {debugger}, 5000) in the devtools console: page will freeze in 5 seconds.

The internet used to be a weird funny place, and a lot more people just hacked stuff together. Can we get that back? https://jarredsumner.com/codeblog/

Sometimes I wonder if any other profession fights as much as developers. You think bakers frequently get into arguments on how everybody “is doing flour wrong”?

“Called ‘a map of deadbeat debtors’, this app allows users to find out whether there are any people in debt within 500 meters.” … China is really running with every dystopian idea they can find. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201901/16/WS5c3edfb8a3106c65c34e4d75.html

Using CSS to track user data: https://www.templarbit.com/blog/2018/03/20/tracking-users-with-css/ - once again proving that any technology can and will be exploited for bad intentions.

Support for CSS Custom Properties is really good, so I want to start using them more! I’m getting my feet wet by building a dark mode for my blog - looks good! (click the 🌙 in footer to switch)

Very interesting post about the privacy implications of indieweb techniques, especially backfeeding. TBH I hadn’t thought about that yet. 🤔 https://sebastiangreger.net/2018/05/indieweb-privacy-challenge-webmentions-backfeeds-gdpr/

I did some housekeeping over the holidays and ported my website to Eleventy! The previous version was based on Jekyll - which is fine but got a bit slow, and since I don’t know Ruby, the generator was always a bit of a mystery to me. Eleventy runs on node / Javascript, so I have more control over whats going on.

I have also switched to Netlify for hosting - it’s super developer friendly and makes a lot of difficult tasks just work out of the box. Loving it so far!

I have some ideas for the notes section, the webmentions and a few other #indieweb features I’d like to explore, but for now I’m pretty happy with how the site turned out.

As always, the source code is public on Github, if anyone is interested in the specifics. 😉