Links

2023

• Brian Eno
• Judge Tosses Block Shareholder Lawsuit Over ‘Terrible’ Tidal Purchase
• Answered Prayers: England and the 1966 World Cup review – agonising and absorbing
• Premier League and Fifa helpless against Saudi juggernaut’s relentless progress
• ALIENS (1986) Audio Description
• Elon Musk, Once Again, Tries To Throttle Links To Sites He Dislikes
• There’s Meaning in the Ordering of the Web’s Tech Stack
• Meta’s Threads Didn’t Launch In The EU: Is That Showing The Failure Or Success Of The Digital Markets Act?
• In Defense of the Yugo
• Labour byelection activists warned: ‘Show respect to Tory voters or go home’
• More than 1,5 million streams brought me royalties
• The Whiteness of Mastodon
• Pain, No Gain
• The algorithmic anti-culture of scale
• Wild and Tattered Kingdom
• My temporary disability and how I coped with it
• My jeans’ metadata may outlive the company that sold them
• Montana State Library Commission Votes to Withdraw From American Library Association (ALA)
• In defense of Deliverism
• The joyless polity
• John Gruber Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About
• How to enjoy your SecondSelf Skinset Pro
• Isn’t That Spatial?
• Writing, Fragments, and the Memex Method
• Book Club: The Next Chapter review – four go mad in Italy in excruciating comedy sequel
• Why I Retired My Webmention Server
• The problem with sticky menus and what to do instead
• Skinny Guardian
• Updog
• Don’t use custom CSS scrollbars
• No more home makeovers! The horror show of renting in Britain finally comes to TV
• Review of Tidal after a year: hot garbage
• Markdownify Jekyll Titles to Make Them Pretty
• 23 years ago…
• Substack Notes moderation
• Disappearing schools, families forced out – and we call this progress
• The Lifehouse: Distributed community support centers for the Long Emergency
• Beyond daylight ethics
• Nostalgia curdles
• So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish
• Free portraits of Charles III for all public bodies, but £8m cost branded ‘shameful’
• Beware Hunt’s hype. There’s more poverty ahead and his budget did nothing to change that
• I do want to go back to social media
• Netlify CMS to Become Decap CMS: What You Need to Know
• Fandom is fun!!!!
• Re; Reading social streams in feed reader
• Rats, mould, damp: one woman’s story reveals the ugly truth about the UK’s biggest housing association
• Provide Blog Metadata via JSON-LD
• What is simple web design?
• Screen: twice as big. Information: 1/4 of original.
• The disinformation about the disinformation
• Goodbye Mastodon, Hello RSS.
• ‘It’s a homage to what Mark E Smith taught us’: ex-Fall members House of All deny exploiting band’s legacy
• Modern Health, frameworks, performance, and harm
• “Make It Go Woomph!” New Order's Low-Life Revisited
• Reading Tristram Shandy in an Age of Distraction
• Off His Royal Tits
• The End of Writing
• Spotify to cut 600 jobs after CEO admits to expanding too quickly
• How to Review a Web Site
• Sending your First Webmention from Scratch
• Whenever I get a notification for an iOS update I think it’s the last one my iPhone SE will get
• A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth
• How Twitter misleads us about how many people have left — and what to do about it
• The ‘Tumblrification’ of social media
• Forestry.io End of Life
• A global recession may be looming, but there is a way out of this rut
• On Running a Mastodon Instance
• Why I quit Twitter… a decade ago
• Chartbook #184 – Nostalgia for decline in deconvergent Britain
• Benoit Symposium: Writers in the DPRK: The Invisible Stars

2022

• They don’t only take our labor.
• Can Just Stop Oil make the case for protest?
• The ethics of syndicating comments using WebMentions
• Are personal Mastodon instances bad for discovery?
• Programming is a Pop Culture
• The Age of Social Media Is Ending
• Does Jeremy Corbyn Need the Labour Party?
• I don't want to go back to social media
• Picture perfect images with the modern img element
• Oh! Brother: MARCIA SCHOFIELD — Anecdotes and Antidotes in B#
• ‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today
• In praise of conventional thinking
• Social Media Is Dead
• Big Tech’s Algorithms Are Built With Invisible Labor
• Minimal Dark Mode
• Programming Portals
• Building the main navigation for a website
• CSS Classes considered harmful
• Arts funding in England is a thin gruel that organisations are forced to beg for
• Jah Wobble: In Conversation On Get Carter At 50
• Mick Lynch Is Tired of Workers Getting Screwed
• Pathologically boring men (and girlbosses)
• The Northern Roots of Modernist Sci-Fi
• Handling Long Words and URLs (Forcing Breaks, Hyphenation, Ellipsis, etc)
• Minimal Social Markup
• Some thoughts about blogging and “style”
• You couldn’t write a sentence this bad IF YOU TRIED.
• Striking workers are providing the opposition that Britain desperately needs
• Crossed Rails
• Write HTML Right
• The smallest CSS
• On Ido and Far-Right Subversion
• Hatpin through the Brain
• Atlanta Apple Store Employees Drop Bid for Union Vote Next Week
• The greasy spoon chronicles: a day in the life of the Hope Workers Cafe
• W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles
• A Future City From The Past
• The Blazers have been usurped by the Blokes in cricket’s corridors of power
• Divinely-Inspired Art: John Higgs on William Blake’s Visions of the Sublime
• The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website
• Life on the edge: Land loss on England’s east coast – a photo essay
• ‘I come to the library to keep warm’: Norfolk residents battling fuel poverty
• The Librarians Are Not Okay
• Action, inaction and ‘cancel culture’
• What I learned about markdown from interviewing a bunch of people
• On the Disappearing of Joan Vollmer Burroughs
• 👍👍 A complete failure: The story of Norwich City’s relegation from the Premier League
• Mastodon's Eugen Rochko Talks Decentralization, Blockchain, And Grifters
• Nature writing’s ill-defined, thriving ecosystem
• Applied for Student Aid Online? Facebook Saw You
• The Flanders phenomenon: how Belgian buildings went from joke to genius
• What is it Like to Be a Blind Writer Writing for Sighted Readers?
• That Wasn’t Right, Mark: When Fat White Family Met The Fall
• Klaus Schulze Has Died, Aged 74
• It Took The Night To Believe: Greg “The Lord” Anderson Interviewed
• Mastodon and the future of Twitter
• So Elon Musk Bought Twitter
• So, About That Bug Fucking: A Conversation with Chris Panatier
• Designing Better Navigation With Navigation Queries
• Childish Font Sizes
• The Future of the Web Is Marketing Copy Generated by Algorithms
• The Digital Age is Destroying Us
• Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?
• How Darwin Influenced Marx and Engels
• Meet the Socialist Librarian Running for President of the American Library Association
• Drabinski Wins 2023–2024 ALA Presidency
• The Meaning of Slaughterhouse-Five, 50 Years Later
• The Side Effects of Tailored Digital Experiences
• Farewell to Nakagin Tower
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space
• Bad news
• Optimising Largest Contentful Paint
• The Cult of the Imperfect
• Peak Content is an entropic force
• That big sliding banner? Yeah, it’s rubbish
• Write HTML, the HTML Way (Not the XHTML Way)
• Steve Albini – Didn’t We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are
• Unfortunate, But Not Surprising: Court Blocks Maryland’s Library eBook Law
• The Meaning of Marcelo Bielsa
• Canned web development
• Digital detox tourism: Practices of analogization
• Mark Zuckerberg and team consider shutting down Facebook and Instagram in Europe if Meta can not process Europeans’ data on US servers
• Why I used to build websites
• Strategic impotence
• Designing books for readers with early‑stage Alzheimer’s disease
• Levelling Up the United Kingdom: executive summary
• Newsletter No. 25: ‘Painting the Forth Bridge’
• Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?
• Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue
• Yesterday, I finished reading Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum…

2021

• Add a Service Worker to Your Site
• This distraction-free editor is the best writing tool you aren’t using
• Choosing [the] least CO2-emitting form of digital communication
• Your CSS is an interface
• Adrian Chiles Does Not Miss
• Matthew Le Tissier and the Cosmic Right
• Less of “Less”
• Chatbots and the cult of technology
• So Long, Firefox
• The Bright Magic Podcast (Public Service Broadcasting on Berlin)
• Britain’s Mental Health Crisis Isn’t an Accident – It’s a Political Choice
• A thrilling encounter on the most inauspicious of days
• Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
• The internet was built for connection – how did it go so wrong?
• Ready, steady …oh. Can a life coach shake me out of my pandemic-induced ennui?
• When others stay silent about the ills of British capitalism, liars like Johnson rush in
• Seven principles of effective digital navigation
• QAplomb
• Turning a Little Blue
• Are we there yet?
• Making algorithmic dog food for the content factory
• Oliver Dowden: creating our own data laws is one of the biggest prizes of Brexit
• In a climate crisis, text should be default option for communication
• No share list
• CSS Hyphenation
• Dev builds perfect note-taking system which only stores info about building note-taking systems
• Redesign: Everything Broke
• The smartest 1-2%
• 123. Constructing the Golem
• A People’s Architecture
• No Social Media Club
• Together in Electric Dreams
• Give Us a Three-Day Weekend at the Beach, Every Week (an interview with Héctor Tejero)
• The Open-Source Software bubble that is and the blogging bubble that was
• The Strangers’ Case
• Everything Was Dreadful And Then It Was Saved: Richard King Interviews Owen Hatherley
• My cross to bear: what it means to support England in these divided times
• CSS System Colors
• Man in Black at 50: Johnny Cash’s empathy is needed more than ever
• The Labour Party website
• Gadgets have stopped working together, and it’s becoming an issue
• If Apple is the only organisation capable of defending our privacy, it really is time to worry
• On The Ball & Off To The Ballet: Pat Nevin’s The Accidental Footballer
• Mother of Perl
• Is the stereotypical image of ‘Red Wall’ residents actually accurate?
• Satanic bikers, time portals and the Fall: the story of Mark E Smith’s secret screenplay
• The Mistake of A New Laptop
• Book review: ‘Suppose a Sentence’ by Brian Dillon
• Kobo Libra H2O: Liberated from Amazon?
• An open letter to Jason and David
• England’s Fan-Owned Clubs Show that Another Football Is Possible
• SOUNDWAVE : 57 : ROEDELIUS
• Get the FLoC out
• Second Beat Songs Hey Ya!
• When the queen dies
• After the Apocalypse
• Being an Opportunist Has Worked Well for Johnson. Why Not for Starmer?
• I Was Never in The Fall
• Modern G4 Cube is Working 🧊
• Nerdy in the extreme
• Bob Pape was a beloved father and foster carer. Did ‘eat out to help out’ cost him his life?
• Fear in your ear: the unstoppable rise of the horror podcast
• “We call it RSS” — an ambitious founder raises $400M at $8b valuation
• Emoji under the hood
• Improve the readability of the content on your website
• Silence about my race kept my family apart. Could a rescue dog bring us together?
• Ditch the elevator pitch
• Newsletters
• The Guardian view on Europe by train: virtue signalling
• Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper
• A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling
• The problem is poverty, however we label it
• Character, context and work
• The Stasi Game, by David Young – book review
• The Radicalization Of Giggle Palooza
• Next Gen Static Blogging
• In Critical Defense of Frontend Development
• On Brexit, grief and moving on
• All I want for 2021 is to see Mark Zuckerberg up in court
• Should I build the feature request from customers?

2020

• Why the Germans Do It Better by John Kampfner review – notes from a grown-up country
• The Unbearable: Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic
• Drone Music History To Be Focus Of New Book
• Poverty causes obesity. Low-income families need to be better off to eat well.
• The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free
• The Lost History of Socialism’s DIY Computer
• JAMstack is fast only if you make it so

2019

• Tory Landslide, Progressives Split
• Reflections from the doorstep
• This Labour meltdown has been building for decades
• Twitter to decentralize… something
• Static or database? Our love of complexity
• Thoughts on the State of the Web
• WordPress funding and market dominance
• How to put an HTML page on the internet
• We’re doing it wrong: there is no ‘one perfect design’ or layout
• Boris Johnson, tough on the economic causes of Brexit? Not likely
• Writing HTML in HTML
• Against Polling
• HTML is the web
• Uber’s Path of Destruction
• Ipswich (Australia) Libraries home page
• ‘Nostalgia Serves No Purpose’: An Interview with Michel Barnier
• A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting
• Structured data and Google
• Stereolab Transient Random-Noise Bursts / Mars Audiac Quintet
• «Make sure you have a good idea that can survive, even badly designed» – Interview with Erik Spiekermann, Part I
• Notes on AI Bias
• Alt-texts: The Ultimate Guide