Firehose

I’ve decided that, henceforth, I shall no longer go by the title of ‘front-end developer’, but instead by the traditional title, ‘webmaster’.

Please update all bylines and attributions appropriately.

My Stoat bot AutoMod had a major outage that I’ve spent several hours working to fix. It has eaten half my weekend and been quite the ordeal.

Just now it has started working perfectly again. It is fixed, but I have no idea what broke in the first place nor what fixed it.

There is no code difference between the working and non-working versions. The most awful solution to a problem is one that happens out of chance and for reasons unknown.

The onset seemed to be related to having some 180K users, 64K channels, and 6K servers cached.

🫠

So cool to see that SVG filters seem to be catching on. So many cool effects are possible on the web with them and it is high time people start embracing them.

Living in the world’s most isolated city, looking at front-end conference prices, plus the price for several connecting flights spanning multiple days of travel, plus accommodation and expenses…

Yikes.

I think the only way it’d be viable is if I can string a few together and attend a few at once.

I don’t suppose anyone has collated a list of good front-end or web conferences worth attending somewhere? Ideally with information such as dates and ticket prices.

Growing increasingly frustrated as I attempt in vain to explain how one can modify the browser chrome of a browser that isn’t Chrome to look like chrome. That is, to change the chrome of a non-Chrome browser to look like chrome, without making it look like Chrome.

Taking my ‘Adobe’s Creative Cloud has broken itself again, and I’ve got to wait for it to sort itself out’ mandated break.

We’re past any pretence or keeping up of appearances now. The United States of America is invading foreign countries, overthrowing leaders, and threatening what were previously allies, all while disappearing and murdering its own citizens. This has been the case for months, but it seems we’ve reached a tipping point in recent days.

Given that it is unclear if there will even be another election, I think it can be said without hyperbole that the United States is now a dictatorship until proven otherwise.

Things are really bad. I don’t know if it is worse that it is happening or worse that there are so many human people willingly making it happen.

One of the most horrific codebases I’ve ever seen is one in which all the styling was done using Tailwind’s @apply. No utility classes in markup, just CSS files full of selectors and @apply. They had inexplicably reinvented CSS in Tailwind, and it struck fear into my very heart.

Anyone had any luck getting past the final boss in CSS Backgrounds Module Level 4? I can never seem to dodge that final attack. I’ve been stuck on the level for months.

Look at this little woollen version of me made by my talented grandmother! Complete with unicycle and computer! What a proper-looking little fella!

Haven’t got an Apple device but need to test your site in Safari? Go into the Apple Store and test on their demo computers.

They probably won’t kick you out. It usually takes them a while to catch on.

We used to be Explorers of the Internet. We used to be Navigators of the Netscape – Browsers, Communicators. We admired the Moasic. It was the WorldWideWeb. We admired the Nexus. What happened?

Was at the doctor’s, and a trap remix of Frère Jacques was playing on loop. Simultaneously, Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping was playing from another speaker.

Needless to say, I engaged in some ethical hacking by use of my Flipper Zero.

Are you a 500ms or 0.5s sort of person?

Taking a break from my writing to go to a content aggregation site to enjoy somebody else’s writing, only to find my own writing staring back at me there.

There are worse problems to have, but I’m not cut out for ‘success’.

Instead of measuring time with standard units, I’ve taken to using CVEs as my measure.

Say not: ‘I went to the shops last week.’

Instead say: ‘I went to the shops 879 CVEs ago.’

I love when you say something in a forum, someone replies with a retort that entirely shuts you down, and then a random keyboard cowboy swings by the thread and says, ‘Actually, they meant X’, saving your skin.

Why yes, that far better thought-out argument is certainly the one I was trying to make.

Hacker News commenter: Couldn’t even read the article because the website wouldn’t load in my copy of Internet Explorer 5 on Windows ME. The modern web sucks.

I have a rouge instance of NVDA running somewhere because I continue to hear the dulcet tones of Windows OneCore whispering little somethings to me.

And now, without further ado…

(Ados further)

Your author is an idiot. You thought them sharp and quick.

But then they spoke of facts you know and outed themselves a prick.

Linkless LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a silo, and daring to so much as suggest one temporarily leave it is punished.

The currencies of this platform are engagement and ad impressions. If you aren’t actively using LinkedIn, you cannot be served advertisements. You are not engaging with content, and you can be tracked far less.

To dare to share a link which might drag people away is condemned by the algorithm to the nth degree.

I knew this. I’ve seen the ‘Link in comments’ verbiage, but never did I expect links to be as vilified as they are. A post with a link is dead on arrival. Posts containing links are sent into the ether by LinkedIn’s algorithm.

This is the World Wide Web, an interconnected network, not a lone strand that should be dominated by a few major platforms. Links are the backbone of this place, and they matter, yet I’m forced to relegate them to a footnote of my posts if I want any return from this platform.

I’m disappointed, but that is the way it is. The algorithm’s link-suppression policy is just one of many reminders that LinkedIn doesn’t have your best interests at heart.