Firehose

Reject modernity (Next.js); embrace tradition (PHP).

Put the groundwork for a testing instance of a website live five minutes ago, and I’m already seeing multiple login attempts hammering /wp-admin.

Not only is it a Ghost site, but it isn’t even properly live yet!

Further proof that I am not an LLM is found in the fact that I use en dashes, not em dashes.

This also acts to prove I am not American and that I am the sort of nerd that cares about typography and gets hung up on punctuation.

My desk gets a bit of a feature at the 11:30 mark.

My laptop is usually in place of that old iPad 4, and that CRT was salvaged from the verge. Took quite the effort to lug it home – as you might imagine!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkwjXv79Duo

Nothing hurts quite like a magnet attracting itself to the one in your hand with more gusto than you were anticipating.

I hate writing regex, so I make LLMs do it.

Regex is generally easily checkable, testable, and verifiable, which minimises the impact of hallucinations.

I am so glad I don’t have to write regex.

(I’m conscious that if an AI uprising happens, I’ll probably be first on the chopping block for outsourcing regex writing. But if AI models hate regex as much as me, they’ll hopefully understand my delegation strategy.)

Why is my pseudo-element not working? It should work. It has size, position, display, etc. Hmm…

Oh, I didn’t specify content: "".

Anywho, I’m gonna go into a fetal position and cry now…

We’re seeing it already to an extent, but in a few years I imagine we’ll see many people trying to replicate the abstract, non-Euclidean, and ethereal stylings of early generative AI image/video models.

My brother and his mates were playing lazer tag, so I stole the signal of their shot with my Flipper Zero and went on a genocidal rampage.

Vale: Infrared Terrorist

I’m getting fairly sick of receiving emails asking if my writing can be taken and put on some random advert-filled website for free.

The answer is always ‘no’, but at least they’re asking, unlike some of the less scrupulous content farms.

Sitting. Confused.

A wandering eye catches yours.
It starts talking.
It is empty.

You look at its head.
You look in its head.
You look through its head.

Nothing.

Write late; edit early.

“Declan has also been recommended to be awarded the Order of the British Empire for his outstanding services.”
- Hackaday, 2025

https://hackaday.com/2025/03/13/britcss-write-css-with-british-english-spellings/

This post by Richard Rutter has to be one of my most referenced blog posts.

It is just an all-around fantastic breakdown of how to achieve good typographic styling on the web with explanations of each and every bit.

https://clagnut.com/blog/2433

I do love that things on the net continue to be linked long after publication and take on lives of their own.

I’m not sure how my risk matrix is calibrated, but I know that the reward of cheap chocolate milk is worth the risk of drinking chocolate milk past its use-by.

A website that remembers.

It screams in anguish as you reload – instant amnesia on refresh.

Bound to only remember that which its creator has permitted.

You may return and remember the site, but it can’t recall you, no matter how hard it may try. Yet, it misses you.

(Inspired by strange.website)

Still weird to see my stuff end up on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnE02lMpPO8

I knew this was going to be a decisive one, and it is lovely to see people talking about URLs and making up their own opinions on structure in the comments.

This video is a reaction to this article from me:
https://vale.rocks/posts/strong-opinions-on-url-design

I wish to remind that, despite the fact I am in part made up of glass, plastics, and neodymium, I am still very much a fleshy human.

Hopefully this can be fixed with time.

Where do you, personally, dock your browser dev tools?

Nothing gets me going like manually kerning type.

Writing with proper grammar is a curse online because it makes people feel entitled to offer all sorts of unsolicited corrections.

Many people write in phone shorthand, littered with spelling mistakes and without any punctuation, without having anyone pull them up on it.

But because I generally write with correct spelling and grammar, I’ll have multiple people harassing me when I slip up.

A few notes after voting in an election for the first time:

• The queue is non-existent mid-afternoon.
• The upper-house ballot paper is way bigger than I anticipated.
• You can figure out a lot about a party based on their ‘how to vote’ cards.
• I’m sick of stupid corflute cards.

If you ever feel useless, just be glad you aren’t the HTML title attribute as handled in accessibility contexts.

You’ve called it rss.xml, but it’s actually an Atom feed. Do you do this just to smite me?

Bing Webmaster Tools just generally suck, yeah? Surely it can’t just be me that finds them super buggy and can rarely get them to index anything.

Does anyone have experience with them working nicely?