Reject modernity (Next.js); embrace tradition (PHP).
Micros
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!
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.
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.
I just want everyone to know that I’ve got some really awesome stuff coming really soon. Like, maybe next week.
I’ve been putting so much work into it, and I’m very much on the home stretch. It is the biggest-scale thing I’ve ever done, and I’m getting really excited to get to share it with everyone.
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?
My favourite CSS addition in recent years is a toss-up between light-dark and nesting.
Both have been such game changers and vital to how I build for the web.
All right, I’m calling a timeout. Can everyone please stop writing so many good articles, please? I’ve got work to do, and you all keep distracting me.
Given the recent hubbub regarding Firefox, I know a lot of people are looking for another browser.
I want to take this opportunity to remind you that almost everything out there is based on Chromium and that this gives Google a dangerous power over our web. Google has a near-complete monopoly – don’t play into it.
https://vale.rocks/posts/everything-is-chrome
Further on this topic, I see a lot of people switching to Vivaldi, which, as well as being built on Chromium, isn’t fully open source.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source
I’m currently on an 8mbps connection and it is times like these I am glad I spend hours optimising and refining my websites.
Who is working on porting all the PowerPoint transitions to the browser for use with the View Transition API?
When children express objectionable views, we’re quick to ask, ‘Where did they pick that up from?’, ‘What have they been watching?’, or ‘Who told them this?’.
Perhaps we need to ask the same regarding adults.
I is never me, for me is always us.
Every facet of thought builds on the inspiration and input of others – never forget it.
Let’s put this masonry debate to rest. I propose we replace grid with masonry altogether. Think about how much trendier everything will be.
Something about this makes me uncomfortable in a way I struggle to articulate in words.
If you make a CSS centring joke in the modern era, you deserve to be put in a metal flexbox and centred in the middle of the ocean.
My magnet implant is super sensitive at the moment. I can feel the magnets in my laptop chassis as I type this.
Wonder what is causing it and if it is permanent.
This is really wack. It is so much more sensitive. I can easily sense a field from double the distance I could yesterday.
I’ve palpated the area and can’t feel any physical difference. Really odd.
Speakers of English (traditional) rejoice, for I have fixed CSS. You can sleep easy knowing that there exists an easy way to permit writing ‘colour’ as ‘colour’.
BritCSS is a simple bit of client-side JS that permits using English spellings.
Always fun to put together small things like this because I inevitably learn something I didn’t know.
I’ve got YouTubers reacting to my writing and AI podcasts discussing it.
I’ve really made it now…
I was working with Three.js today, and I noticed they’ve got a navigation item called ‘GPT’ in the sidebar of their site.
Clicking it takes you to a ChatGPT GPT called ‘Three.js Mentor’. First time I’ve seen something like this. Feels odd.
I had a vision.
The CSS Masonry angel came down from the heavens and addressed me. I made to speak, but it reached out a single slender finger and touched it to my lips to hush me. “Soon,” it said with the voice of a choir. “Soon.”
I build on the web but, more importantly, I build for the web.
Tonight, on Hacker News.
Vale posts a comment on a thread about Kindle hacking and writes the word gaol as ‘gaol’ rather than ‘jail’.
Everyone loses their minds. Insults are hurled. Riots in the streets.
More at 9.
My links page has ballooned to some 300+ items – not including the YouTube playlist – so I’ve split it up and added descriptions to some things. Enjoy!
AI is Stifling Tech Adoption has seen response beyond anything I’ve ever written before and has prompted some really interesting discussion.
In particular, I’ve enjoyed Jared White’s take in his article on That HTML Blog.
https://thathtml.blog/2025/02/we-need-to-talk-about-anti-web-coding-assistants
Just redesigned my website’s landing page as it was starting to feel a tad stale. I blame Shellsharks for prompting this with their recent redesign.
That feeling when you setup a custom GitHub Action workflow and it works first time.
Salma Alam-Nayor’s recent writing and discussion of ‘copy codeblock’ buttons and their accessibility benefits has prompted me to finally get around to adding them to Vale.Rocks.
I also finally got around to adding syntax highlighting, which was long overdue.
Have a look on my Lorem Ipsum page:
https://vale.rocks/posts/lorem-ipsum#codeblocks
position: sticky is one of those CSS things I can never get first time. Try as I might, I always end up flubbing around with it.