I’m glad to hear these lads channeling that “Basement Tapes” energy again on their latest release.
This is the personal website of Nick Simson, who writes about books, websites, and plenty more.
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Valley of Abandoned Songs
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A quick note on cross-posting
In IndieWeb parlance, POSSE means Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I like the concept. Today, I’m changing a few things about how I syndicate my content.
All my main feeds (posts, notes, likes) will continue to automatically syndicate to my account over at Micro.blog. Micro.blog is a wonderful platform. While I no longer host my content there, I will still syndicate and interact with the community.
I turned off automatic cross-posting to my Bluesky account and my Mastodon account. The way Micro.blog handles cross-posting is nice, but I want to have a little more control over what my notes and posts look like on these platforms. They are similar to Micro.blog, but different in many ways too. Not just in the way links look and character limits, either.
When I look at my timeline on either of these apps, it…looks like a bot.
So I find myself deleting many of the automatic Bluesky copies and editing the Mastodon ones later, because I’m fickle about how these things look. So I’m going to always post here first, but will try manually cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, and elsewhere. My hope is that this will make me more intentional about what I share and how I share it.
Also, maybe not every post on my website needs to be versioned on another social network. I’m going to try being OK with that, too.
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Mutual aid
Likes https://gregorlove.com/2024/03/mutual-aid/ by .
Charity affirms the existing distribution of wealth and life chances. Mutual aid challenges it. Charity is top-down. Mutual aid is horizontal. Charity is about control, hierarchy, and isolation. Mutual aid is about solidarity, liberation, and participation.
I’ve been thinking more and more about this video gRegor shared earlier this year. Also, his post about the mutual aid group he volunteers with. I love their name and slogan: “We All We Got“.
Instead of falling into a cycle of despair and doomscrolling when it comes to Supreme Court rulings and other events I can hardly control, I’d like to open my heart a bit more, get to know my neighbors and community, and opt-in.
No judgement to anyone who feels the need to either doomscroll or avoid news altogether. When I find myself troubled, the one thing that helps me feel better is to orient myself towards action.
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whack-a-mole
Likes Filters by .
We’ve always needed to filter search results through our own personal lenses, but now it’s like playing whack-a-mole. First we have to find workarounds for avoiding slop, and then when we click through to a web page, we have to evaluate whether it’s been generated by some SEO spammer making full use of the new breed of content-production tools.
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Loves
I added a new page to my site at /loves.
I already have IndieWeb “likes“, but I thought it would be nice to add a site section for things I love, or have meant a lot to me over the past decades. Currently: favorite newspaper comics, sports teams, music, and “Misc.”
Loosely inspired by The Loved List by Ankur Sethi, and anyone else who has something similar on their personal site.
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Overheard on the radio
Olean, New York is not the end of the world, but you sure can see it from there.
Overheard on the WCBS AM Mets broadcast😂
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Four Lost Cities
I recently finished reading Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, by Annalee Newitz. (ISBN: 9780393652666)
By “recently,” I mean I finished this weeks ago, and have been struggling a bit to write a review. Overall, I liked the book. Newitz traveled to the ancient cities of Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia, and interviewed archaeologists and experts at each site. The book is a bit like a travelogue back in time, and I enjoyed learning a little archaeology and anthropology through Newitz’s accessible writing.
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James’ new design
The theme of my new design is let the words stand on their own. I want my words to be elevated visually on the page. I want navigation to be simple. I want pages to be consistent. With this new design, I feel like I am delivering on those principles.
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The song of summer?
Besides playing 12 years in the major leagues and once making an All-Star team, [Jose] Iglesias, a 34-year-old from Cuba, creates Latin pop music under the name Candelita. He first introduced “OMG” to the Mets as his walk-up tune upon joining the club from Triple-A Syracuse on May 31. Since then, the Mets (35-38) have coincidentally won 12 of 17 games.
Story’s from last week, of course: we are 39-39 right now!
Following a team like the Mets for a whole season is a roller coaster. It’s more than just wins or losses; the vibes are important. After such a dismal May, it’s good to see the players, and the fans, having fun.
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The most powerful design tool for the Web
Bookmarked Web Design Engineering With the New CSS by .
The video for Matthias Ott’s CSS Day 2024 talk is up. He reiterates a sentiment he shared in a blog post from June last year, and one I agree with:
CSS is now the most powerful design tool for the Web.
Matthias OttMatthias’ argument, shared by others, is that the features landing in CSS today are outpacing the subset of CSS used in visual design tools like Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD. He backs this up by demonstrating several examples of typography, color, and layout using newer CSS features introduced in the 2020s.
I personally began learning both Photoshop and CSS around the same time (circa 2005), and have certainly mocked up my share of websites and UI in visual tools. Nowadays I spend a bit of time in Sketch and Figma, and occasionally Webflow, but I’ve long been an adherent of designing in the browser.
If we are not using the platform as our design material, we are breaking the feedback loop.
Matthias OttWorking in the browser early gets me thinking about how things should look and behave and (maybe most importantly) fail, as I try to build resilient websites. For that reason, CodePen is a beautiful design tool. Not everything I create in CodePen is production-quality, and that’s OK! I mainly use CodePen to design rough-and-ready working prototypes for isolated components.
…Treat code as disposable, especially when you are learning. You’re just building websites, friend. It’s all good to be rough around the edges. The web is rough around the edges!
One benefit of learning to code is you will find that the more you let the browser do its thing, the better your output will be…
…The thing to remember about learning HTML and CSS is that they are web standards and will long outlive Figma, Adobe XD and Sketch. At worst, learning to code will help you communicate with developers much better. At best, your design skills will be much more rounded and relevant in an ever-changing and expanding industry.
Andy Bell, The time for designers to learn to code is nowAfter watching Matthias’ talk, there are plenty of new features I need to get acquainted with and am excited to begin trying out. And I may need to brush up on my high school math, too.
The best artists are deeply knowledgeable of the material they work with. Their tools may not be much more sophisticated that what you have in your home or garage. For too long in my career I’ve watched designers and developers (and job descriptions) obsess over their tooling, rather than understanding and knowing the web platform deeply.
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A new color tool
Bookmarked Theme Machine by .
The Theme Machine is two tools in one: a color picker and palette generator. You can build custom color palettes in the browser, then export them as CSS custom properties. Keith has a helpful blog post describing the tool he built.
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Code is a design tool.
With design tools further commoditising and sanitising expected creative output, the time for designers to be able to stand out is very much here. I think for some, learning to code is a good route for that.
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Further thoughts on a short ramble
Likes Professional Space / Personal Space by .
There’s certainly a tension between wanting to contain a sprawling web presence or fragmenting my activity and behavior online. Sitting with that tension, for now, is how I will approach things.
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CMS enuii
I’m finding WordPress so obtuse and vaguely enshittified that it‘s not worth the hassle. This falls into stark relief when I start playing with Kirby. Its templating system is simple, logical and flexible enough that I got it to ouput exactly what I wanted in a post template and header and footer snippets in an hour or so.
I’m really curious to try out Kirby more and more. I have a blog post brewing about what exactly I want in a blogging platform/content management system these days.
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WYSIWTF
WordPress’s block editor, or “Gutenberg” has come a long way since December 2018, when it officially arrived in the WP 5.0 release.
I know many people still hate it, and it took close to five years for me to really get comfortable with it. That said, I still have plenty of WYSIWTF moments with the editor, particularly the Query Loop block.
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Impressions of an American university
Likes American impressions: Elon University by .
Cennydd shares his experiences and impressions of teaching at Elon University in North Carolina as a Fulbright scholar.
