New Now page using omg.lol! https://now.blakewatson.com
Microblog
Read “Just normal web things” by @hbuchel (https://heather-buchel.com/blog/2023/07/just-normal-web-things/) and I second all of these, especially the scrollbar bit.
There seems to be a terrible trend where the scrollbar gets neglected and forgotten. That’s a shame because it is a useful tried-and-true UI control. More about that:
https://blakewatson.com/journal/neglecting-the-scrollbar-a-costly-trend-in-ui-design/
Is there a site somewhere that gives you color palettes that exclusively consist of named CSS colors?
Asking because I recently discovered that lightblue on black looks amazing. https://codepen.io/blakewatson/pen/QWJoaER
I released A Fine Start v2.4.0 this week. Added two ways to search your new tab bookmarks.
Want to work on NASA projects? My company is looking for a Senior Frontend Developer (US remote). I’ve been here for four years now and love it.
I looked at the clock right at 11:11:11.
Of course everybody knows the best Death Cab album is Give Up by The Postal Service. 😊
📻
I was trying to get to get some work done when suddenly my brain decided that it needed to see a list of all Death Cab for Cutie albums ranked RIGHT NOW.
😩
My wheelchair's joystick stopped working when I got back home from a doc appointment. So I swapped out the joystick for the one on my previous chair. It worked, but turns out the orientation of that one is off by like 45 degrees. So I had to rewire my brain on the fly in the heat just to get out of the van and into the house. Took about 30 minutes.
Related: this is the best Coke Zero I’ve ever had.
I was looking at Firefox’s comparison page and noticed that even though they conclude that Firefox is the winner (obviously), Microsoft Edge actually ticks every checkbox they present.
I was… surprised, to say the least.
(Edit: I shared the wrong URL)
“You don’t hear about TextMate because TextMate is old. What would I tweet? Still using TextMate. Still good.”
Re-reading a post I wrote about going back to WordPress. I’m proud of this excerpt:
“With 30% of the web, we might as well say that it is ubiquitous. And it’s good. Much like Helvetica, WordPress is very seldom the worst choice that you could have made (even if it isn’t always the best).”
That number is in the 40s now.
https://blakewatson.com/journal/switching-to-wordpress-in-2019
I bet if you went back 100 years and described Spotify/Apple Music/Bandcamp to them, they would assume that in the future no one is working and everyone is listening to music all day every day in some kind of utopian paradise.
Prettier just formatted its own configuration file when I hit save. Is this the singularity?
To be clear, though, as much as I can understand the frustrations, my Mastodon experience has been the opposite. I don’t know if it’s because I’m in tech (sup NERDS) or I just lucked out with my instance (https://social.lol).
Everyone is nice. There are lots of creative, interesting people posting art, code, statuses, silly things, serious things—just a good variety of stuff.
When I log into Bluesky, I don’t know who to follow and it looks like mostly just screaming.
This article by @kissane was great but I kept being distracted by the beautiful typography and design (because I’m a nerd, not because it’s distracting).
I also correctly identified the fonts as Matthew Butterick’s Valkyrie and Heliotrope. *chef’s kiss*
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
Who remembers Firebug? ❤️
PHP 8 cost me a new customer. I can see in the logs where they tried to subscribe. But they hit PHP 8’s insidious error, `Warning: Undefined array key…`.
For better or worse, checking an array value using a possibly-non-existent key was a common pattern in PHP code. You could do it in an if statement and count on the result being truthy or falsey. Yeah I know, I know. But still.
This change makes ton of existing code problematic.
Here’s the best fix that I know of: https://www.mattwatson.org/blog/20230716-let-me-live-dangerously-php/
I wish there was a CSS media query for the user’s scrollbar preference. macOS has three options for when to show scrollbars:
- Automatically based on mouse or trackpad
- When scrolling
- Always
I set mine to “Always” (even though many native apps including Setapp and Apple Music ignore it and disappear them anyway).
But it would be nice for web apps to know the user’s preference.
