Posts

2023

• Some notes on moving from Jekyll to either Kirby or WordPress
• Webmentions can help create small networks around websites rather than social media
• 50 days of Krautrock
• Reading your social media stream in an RSS reader
• When humans write for machines
• Choosing a headless CMS for my simple static blog
• Make 2023 the year you help destroy Twitter

2022

• The Arc browser sounds interesting, but I can’t tell how it’ll make its money
• Webmentions and privacy
• Mastodon should remove follower and following counts to stop it becoming like Twitter
• Some thoughts on the fediverse and Mastodon
• Implementing comments without javascript on a static, Jekyll-powered site using Welcomments
• TIL: Netlify stops processing redirect rules as soon as one is applied
• Minimalism as narcissism
• What is website minimalism?
• Two things I learned by validating my HTML again
• Don’t make your body text font-weight light
• Mourning through boredom
• Creating three international Skinny Guardian editions
• (Re)introducing Skinny Guardian, a fast, minimal version of The Guardian
• Making RSS readable in a browser
• My text editors
• Six social media commenting principles, how they don’t work and an alternative broadcast system
• Bunny Fonts: an apparently GDPR-compliant, privacy-respecting alternative to Google Fonts
• Time to move on from Jekyll
• Some notes on using clamp and vw to set font size
• 9 April is CSS Naked Day
• Make your website quicker and improve UX by not placing an image at the top of the home page
• Logic on static sites (and the advantages of failing catastrophically but knowably)
• A barebones Underscores WordPress child theme
• TweetDelete deletes all your old tweets
• A book on the web: Sherlock Holmes and the never completed text
• The shareable, indie charm of Wordle
• 50
• The only thing stopping me from using WordPress is the lack of a truly barebones, unopinionated parent theme
• Imagining WordPress without themes

2021

• Four things I learned by validating my HTML
• Experimenting with short lines of text: the ideal width for whom?
• Notes on line length revisited: Does recent research debunk the idea of an ideal line length?
• Julian Cope on Faust and Jim Kerr, and the term “Krautrock”
• Notes on marking up two navigation lists on the same HTML page
• You are your phone’s AdID
• Notes on files and folders, and how platforms killed them
• Automating webp production in Jekyll
• Should I use… webp?
• Intention not tech
• Indieweb as state of mind
• How to write old-fashioned CSS
• Applying the principle of proximity to improve your web article typography
• Some notes on leading (or line height) on websites
• Setting responsive font sizes in CSS
• Notes on the design of Nabokov’s Butterflies and blogs
• Integrating the Nord colour scheme into a Jekyll site using custom properties
• Some notes on measure (or line width) on websites
• The phantom life of the section element and the mess of headings
• The perfect blogging platform: crossposting, conversing on social media and monetisation(!)
• The perfect blogging platform: customising typography rather than theming
• The perfect blogging platform – some principles
• Why doesn’t Labour like people who live in cities?
• The state of the Labour Party in 2021
• Notes on the “indieweb” #4: four months in – community, difficult discussions and the end of the web
• Edit your RSS feed to control your site’s output to micro.blog
• Four reasons to delete at least 95% of your website
• Navigation submenus – what’s the best approach? Dropdown, hovers, clicks or keeping it flat?
• Notes on the “indieweb” #3: Who’s it for?
• Adding webmentions to Jekyll (an overview)
• Four reasons it’s worth paying $5 a month for Feedbin, an RSS reader
• Notes on the “indieweb” #2: Where do I find things to read?
• world@hey.com launches and it can edit posts, which sounds clunky
• A reminder: Publishing to a website is easy
• Email churns out bad HTML
• A note/post on notes and posts
• Why brand web pages?
• Stormborn and the tyranny of choosing a Netflix series
• Labour Needs A Big Idea
• The Investigation – the best Scandinoir drama for ages
• Ronnnie and Maggie, Ted and Bet
• You should try the blogging platform called WordPress
• k-punk and Peep Show
• English Scheme: Annotated Fall analysis
• Notes on the “indieweb” #1: Where do I publish and discuss?

2020

• Moon in a Dead Eye by Pascal Garnier
• Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany
• Endless Utopia
• Static works
• The Yale School of Art School website

2019

• Building a web that lasts
• Losing the election, strategy and hope
• NetNewsWire: Free, open source (and very good) RSS reader for Mac
• Styling Twitter, and HTML with soul

2018

• Taking a break from blogging as I know it
• In defence of view page source
• Hiding accessibility on web pages
• Using Staticman for comments on a Jekyll site
• If users aren’t bothered about griddy layouts, why are we?
• For RP: Ditch your accent and your regional pride
• Inclusive web design is web design for everyone, including you

2017

• Basic income, realism and wasteful pessimism
• Why modular CSS is better than using ‘semantic’ class names: An example
• The end of The Deck
• Improving where filters in Jekyll
• General Election! 2017!
• The Uniqlo website’s fixed header makes it unusable

2016

• Getting to grips with Contentful and Jekyll
• Your most comfortable reading colours depend on who you are (or: how accessibility is a tricky business)
• Design habits: Being a CSS API user rather than an API author
• How to display a blog listing page
• Work if you want to
• It's easy to make fast static pages without Google AMP
• Using presentational classes makes web design easier
• Meaning, separation and using lots of classes freely
• Why we'll be using a CSS framework like Tachyons to rebuild our website
• Using Tachyons and keeping your markup dry
• Running a library website on Jekyll (maybe)
• Living in Nigel Farage's dream
• Fight and Challenge Everything (yourselves)
• Notes on (hyper)local journalism
• Belief and apostasy
• Delicious and how every excellent web service ends up eating itself
• WordPress, me and Oxmetifan 20
• Creating WordPress sub navigation menus that only appear where you need them

2015

• The dangers of automation (or making a visit to the library worth it)
• The vacant centre (part III)
• Container housing – Right solution, wrong problem
• Unstyle and looking at naked HTML
• Why my website looks so plain
• How the Observer used dubious research and shoddy reporting to promote a Blairite Labour leader
• The last liberal and how the centre broke
• Generating page specific classes in WordPress templates to keep code DRY and extensible
• Labour
• In defence of blogging
• The Swedish universal versus austerity
• They went and broke citizens income, so what's next?

2014

• Cast the 2015 election runes
• Newcastle, Sports Direct and Wonga – a working class club
• 30 days a blogger
• In praise of Georgia (again)
• Friday reading – Google, Stanford, DC, liberals and gentrification
• The minimum wage legalises low pay
• The art of linking
• Scotland
• Why restaurants publish images of their menus online (and why they shouldn't)
• Lowestoft
• In praise of universality
• Write edit build publish edit build republish
• Matthew Parris only said what most British people think about places like Clacton
• Households, deficits and belief
• The morality of work
• Mozilla, money, adverts and corporate speak

2013

• 3 right wing reasons for a Basic Citizens' Income
• Basic citizen income—two examples of how it would work
• Basic citizen income—genius idea the UK will never adopt
• Evening Edition looks good but has an audience problem
• A few notes on moving from WordPress to Jekyll
• Tschichold, democratic design and the politics of typefaces
• Google’s infantile big brain
• A world without work

2012

• The rhetoric of hard work
• Debt
• The great Readability conundrum (Or – If you provide a service, charge for it)
• Evening Edition and making readable news
• How the iPad makes coffee table books
• ITV News website redesign

2011

• Hard working
• Obama shows Ed Miliband how to do blogging
• 16 pixels
• Reading newspaper articles involves looking at words
• Why justify?
• Adding em or en dashes to Google docs
• Scherzo, mobile first (and what that means for you)
• An HTML5 challenge (which lead me to think – Why bother with HTML5 sectioning elements?)
• Why business writing is rubbish
• Putting content and meaning first
• Lord Ashcroft, floating voters and 2015
• Nabokov on other writers
• An ode to Firefox
• Short attention spans, mobile phones and the future of reading

2010

• How to write a blog post
• Good web copy is boring
• Why I don't like Tumblr and Posterous
• An aside really isn’t a sidebar
• Vertical navigation and not making users think

2009

• Good copy redeems bad layout and typography
• Introducing the Scherzo theme for WordPress
• Two blog formats – magazines and journals
• How print and web are different
• Simple, complex, ordered, butchered

2008

• Writing great articles – anatomy of a BBC news story
• Times for print, Georgia for screen