Firehose

Been upgrading and building on this. Pretty happy with it now. It has tons more engines added, a nicer UI (still simple—speed is the priority), and snaps inspired by Kagi which are lovely.

https://vale.rocks/micros/20240721-1249

Pretty convinced jackiechan.com is peak web design.

This has had me thinking about website layouts, and how typically we’ve had navigation situated at the top. Perhaps we need to rethink our designs based on the embrace of sidebars as they become the ‘new normal’?

https://vale.rocks/micros/20241030-0844

A wise man once said “Ogres are like onions. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers.”

Make your CSS like ogres and onions.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “heritage listed websites”. We have buildings that we feel are too important to alter and must keep frozen in time – why not websites?.

I suppose this is less important with the web, as we can ‘simply’ archive copies of things but it’s been playing in my mind nonetheless.

Really interesting seeing what posts get picked up on Fedi, and what posts get picked up on Bluesky. I’m struggling to identify any real pattern.

Part of my diploma at North Metropolitan TAFE was a live-works project redeveloping the website for Public Libraries WA.

My team and I took what was an outdated Joomla site and revitalised it into a sleek, modern experience. The old site was built back in 2009, had security flaws and lacked responsive design, rendering it nigh unusable on mobile devices.

We rebuilt it from the ground up using WordPress paired with a custom theme built using Tailwind and a tailor-made plugin to perfectly fit our client’s needs.

It was awesome working with Emily Drage, Zoe Chan, and Maria Benic on this.

Say what you will, the phrase “hacked up, bastardized simulacra” is genuinely pretty awesome. I suppose we at least got something out of this mess.

The best time for productivity is any abnormal hour of the day when I can sit semi-comatose, powered purely by stimulants.

Saw a guy sprinting through the city with a Sonic the Hedgehog shirt on.

It took a hideous amount of restraint not to yell “GOTTA GO FAST!”

I see a lot of stuff gain traction that I’d have figured is too well known, too obvious, or too low effort. I need to do more stuff.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take after all.

Honestly pretty excited to give Ghostty a whirl with the upcoming v1.0. Looks pretty rad!

I think this is one of the best things I’ve ever read on LessWrong. It perfectly resonates with motivation as I experience it.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JBR6AF9Gusv4u6Fwo/laziness-death-spirals

Coming around to that time of the year when I update and refine all my configs. I’ve got a lot of notes on what needs work.

Should be rad.

I’m always amazed by the cool features I find when I misstype in Vim.

I really hate the term ‘WebFinger’. Stop fingering around for some JSON. Frankly, keep your fingers to yourself.

Perhaps the real enhancement is the progression we made along the way.

How does one represent a dinkus in HTML? A <hr> with some styling? Not sure on the semantics here…

New CSS logo dropped. It looks great! Now, when do I get all those cool unused designs on a shirt?

I’ve been very disappointed with DuckDuckGo results recently. Seems there was a sharp drop in quality ~3 weeks ago.

Kagi gives the best results I’ve found, but at a financial premium. I’m kinda just jumping around search engines looking for a home.

I really appreciate that people in my feeds engage in nuanced AI discussion. Yes, there are negatives. Yes, there are positives. No, flame wars don’t get us anywhere.

Thanks for all being so awesome and eloquent with your words.

Just updated my services page. If you’ve got JavaScript enabled, it’ll now show the service status inline on the page.

https://vale.rocks/services

For anyone wondering, you absolutely can enrol your toe as a fingerprint on a Google Pixel 7a.

I usually steer clear of political posts, but I can’t stress enough how important it is for every American to get out and vote. The world will be a little better for it.

Switched over to using the vertical sidebar in Firefox today. It’s lovely!

People seem to come unstuck at the ‘cascading’ bit of ‘cascading style sheet’.

Embrace the cascade!

‘Username’ is so boring. When can we go back to using handles? Or screennames? Or even gamertags?

Blimey, I’m lovin’ <dialog> and the Popover API. JavaScript free* menus without the need for any hacks.

I used to use some trickery involving CSS’s :target to implement menus…

This is only gonna get cooler when anchor positioning gets more comprehensive support. Top layer elements and anchor positioning go together like butter and toast.

The gap between “works in development” and “works in production” is where dreams go to die.

Remember kids, if it’s written in Java then avoid it like lava.

‘Brittle web technology’ is one of the most perfect phrases I’ve ever encountered. It just perfectly sums up the shattering characteristic of so many dev tools.

It’s the web! It should be the wild west! Chaotic, unstoppable madness! Bodge everything and take no hostages!

Micro-blogging platforms like Bluesky and Fedi are built around following people, not topics. This is good in that I can create meaningful connections with familiar faces, but bad in that I pass up great content because I can’t just follow the parts of people’s feeds that interest me.

Sometimes I wish I could follow someone’s tech posts without their politics, or their design without their hot takes. If you’re wondering why I don’t follow you, it’s probably because of this. I still love ya!

(I’ve come to find this is somewhat doable via word filtering, although it is a bit finicky, not comprehensive, and introduces potential for false positives. I’ll trial it and see how it goes.)

I barely find myself needing CSS ‘hacks’ anymore. Most stuff I need to do is kinda just a thing now.

Thanks to all the many people who’ve made this a reality!

Were I omnipotent ruler of this world, I’d probably delete glitter as my first action.

I found it interesting that WebKit maintains a collection of ‘quirks’ – hardcoded, website-specific fixes and tweaks.

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/page/Quirks.cpp

I’ve spent the past several years thinking Vite is pronounced ‘vite’ rather than ‘veet’. I’ve gotta start watching more dev videos or something…

While fundamentally a flawed format, there is something beautiful about the crunchiness of a .gif.

Took some time today to update my uses page.

https://vale.rocks/uses

The fact that you can use touchscreens with the back of your fingernails really bothers me.

Mullenweg just keeps adding fuel to the fire that’s actively cremating him.

Sorry for being MIA these past few days. Russia and Turkey both banned Discord, so I’ve been tied up with Revolt. We’ve had some 250K users join in the past 4 days, bringing us to over 450K users total!

If you aren’t aware, Revolt is a FOSS chat platform and decent alternative to Discord that I work on.

You can check it out at https://revolt.chat if you’re interested.

Are people implementing lightboxes with <dialog>, custom implementations, or something different? Would love to hear!

The lack of jokes connecting ‘GitHub’ and ‘hub for gits’ is deeply disappointing.

Does it bother anyone else that it is top not inset-top, like margin-top?

I hope you all remembered that tonight is the 21st night of September.