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Posted October 7, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 The History of the Web A wonderful newsletter by Jay Hoffmann about the web's history, the incredible people that built it, and all the websites, code, and browsers you've never heard of. #web #history #newsletters #World Wide Web
Posted October 6, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Visual Regression Testing for External URLs With Playwright We’ve all been there: You write a bit of CSS, check whether everything looks right. You deploy. Then someone sends you a screenshot: the mobile navigation is broken. And why is the size of those headings just a bit off? And where has that button gone? Especially when you are working on a larger codebase together or you are refactoring your CSS or consolidating redundant styles, seemingly small changes in one corner of your CSS (or JavaScript) can have repercussions in a seemingly unrelated component. If you ever changed your base typography styles, you know what I mean. The Cascade and... #testing #playwright #css #blogtober 20 Webmentions
Posted October 5, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Jane Goodall’s Famous Last Words Jane Goodall, the scientist, conservationist, and educator who died last Wednesday at 91, will always be remembered for her singular, field-defining work on wild chimpanzees. She lived with wild chimpanzees to study them, befriended them, and made a groundbreaking discovery: that they could make and use tools, a trait that, up until then, had been thought to be uniquely human. But more importantly, by helping the world see chimps as the socially and cognitively sophisticated creatures they are, that they are thinking and feeling beings, she transformed our understanding of the animal world. She then found her purpose in advocating... #interviews #climate action #earth #blogtober 11 Webmentions
Posted October 5, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 Footer — The only footer gallery on earth. A really nice gallery with a lot of footer design inspiration in all forms and colours, sorted by type and style. The footer often is a neglected part of a design. But it doesn’t have to be this way. #web #web design #design #inspiration #footer #gallery
Posted October 4, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes European Tech Alternatives 🇪🇺 For a European with lots of friends and like-minded web folks in the US, it is both heartbreaking and bewildering to see how the political and societal climate in the country is changing right now. All of this is not only worrisome from a political perspective, but also poses very real risks in areas such as data protection, surveillance, legal frameworks, regulatory compliance, taxes, and (random) tariffs. The more digital economies outside of the US – and we as users – are intertwined with the US economy and Silicon Valley’s infrastructure, the more we will feel the repercussions of political,... #technology #europe #software #blogtober 112 Webmentions
Posted October 3, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Tweaking the Circuits When the people at EMI ordered a bunch of Altec 436B compressors in the late 1950s for Abbey Road Studios, they were hoping for that legendary American sound they had heard at their sister studio Capitol Records in Los Angeles. But when the units arrived in London and the engineers at Abbey Road gave the freshly installed units a thorough going over, they didn’t really like what they heard. So, they started re-designing the unit from the ground up. First, they added an output attenuation, so that the output signal, which will often be louder after compression, could be turned down... #blogtober #web #design #engineering #audio 14 Webmentions
Posted October 2, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Age Quod Agis Age quod agis. This Latin phrase, attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, translates to “do what you are doing.” Do what you are doing. Like in: dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to whatever you engage in. Do what you are doing. Not the thing over there. Not that thing on your phone. Not the thing you will do tomorrow. That thing right in front of you. That thing you are doing right now. We live in a world full of distractions, emails, and notifications, and a culture that applauds juggling several things at once. Being busy is seen... #blogtober #blogging #writing 2 Webmentions
Posted October 1, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Blogtober 2025 — Day 1 It’s Blogtober again. And this time, I’ve (more or less spontaneously) decided to take part in it. For those of you who don’t know what it is: Blogtober is a writing challenge that takes part every Oktober (similar to Bloguary, Blobuary, Blarch, Blapril, Blay, Blune, Bluly, Blogust, Blogtember, … 🤓), in which bloggers commit to writing and publishing a new post every day throughout the entire month. So just like Inktober for artists, Blogtober is a good excuse to start to sit down and create a little piece of work every day. The posts you publish in Blogtober don’t have... #writing #blogging #blogtober 8 Webmentions
Posted July 24, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Best Free Synthesizer Plugins in 2025 I am convinced that it makes total sense to spend a certain amount of your (spare) time on this planet tinkering around and exploring stuff that seems totally useless or silly compared to what you normally do. And without having a real explanation for why it happened, I’ve been starting to get interested in software synthesizers lately. I can barely play proper melodies on my Arturia MiniLab – seems like 10 years of playing the piano as a kid somehow mostly vanished from my brain cells – and I haven’t recorded anything that would be remotely useful or even worth... #audio #music #synths #synthesizers #plugins 47 Webmentions
Posted March 16, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes An Internet Archive Plugin for Craft CMS 5 Now that the Webmention plugin is finally Craft 5 compatible after last week's update, I jumped at the chance and updated another plugin I had once written for my personal site. The Internet Archive plugin automates the archiving of your posts to the Wayback Machine. Each time you publish or update a post, the plugin submits the URL to the Internet Archive, so that a new snapshot is saved. It’s a great way to preserve your posts for the – hopefully unlikely – event that your personal website is going offline one day, but it also creates a historical archive of... #internet archive #Craft CMS #plugins #indieweb #Web 32 Webmentions
Posted March 13, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Webmention for Craft CMS 5 Imagine my surprise, when, roughly two weeks ago, I received a direct message on Mastodon from Brandon Kelly, the founder and head of the team behind Craft CMS, opening with: 👋 I spent today working on a Craft 5 port of your Webmention plugin. My Webmention plugin? The one I always meant to rewrite? The one that was still stuck on Craft 2? The very reason why my personal site was missing all Webmentions after I had upgraded to Craft 5 towards the end of 2024? Yes, that Webmention plugin. So, naturally, I was thrilled! What followed were several days messaging... #indieweb #webmention #plugins #Craft CMS 30 Webmentions
Posted January 6, 2025 by Matthias Ott in Notes Owning It For the second time now, someone mentioned to me that it is kind of paradoxical that my newsletter, which is called “Own Your Web”, is not hosted on my own server or under my own domain but on Buttondown. And yes, they are right. I realize that this is kind of not walking the talk. Do I really own my Web in this case? I thought about this as well and my plan is – and actually always has been – to first move the archive over my own domain and, eventually, to a completely self-hosted solution. In the past, I... #ownyourweb #ownership #web #newsletters 6 Webmentions
Posted November 21, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Free Audio Plugins: Accusonus ERA 6 Bundle I’ve been down in an audio plugin rabbit hole lately. More on that in a later blog post. But I just stumbled upon a set of free plugins that might be of interest to you, if you are doing voice recordings of any kind – be it a podcast, voice over, or, let’s say, video tutorials. There are, of course, many more free plugins for that use case. Again, I might cover more of them in separate blog posts, also to document my own research. Let me know if that sounds remotely interesting. But back to the plugins I wanted to... #audio #plugins #voice #recording #podcasting #video #internet archive 2 Webmentions
Posted November 1, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes How to Set Your Domain as Your Bluesky Handle As Twitter is (far too) slowly falling apart and more and more people are looking for alternatives, Bluesky is enjoying a surge in popularity at the moment. One neat little feature is that you can use your own domain as your handle on Bluesky. In a way, this is the perfect handle for this new era of decentralized social media. Your personal domain is part of your digital identity on the independent Web and uniquely yours. Your domain is owned by you and is under your control, which also makes impersonation much harder. And if you ever decide to switch servers,... #social media #Bluesky #domains No webmentions yet
Posted July 3, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Highlighting Blogging on Mastodon In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or MacRumors, the official Mastodon app as well as the web version will now show a direct link to an author’s fediverse profile. What is primarily aimed at journalists and news organizations for now, is a feature that might soon work for bloggers and anyone sharing posts on their personal sites, too. And it makes a lot of sense... #Mastodon #fediverse #publishing #blogging #personal websites 49 Webmentions
Posted March 19, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Fixing the Logitech Spotlight The Logitech Spotlight presentation remote is a sleek piece of hardware. It is comparatively small, fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and the buttons come with a very satisfying, albeit for my taste a tiny bit too loud, click. But most importantly, the brushed aluminium design feels sturdy, high-quality, and elegant. Exactly the piece of gear that you buy because you want a reliable, long-lasting device that does not fail you. Imagine my irritation, when I pulled out my Spotlight after several months of not using it – and it just didn’t charge anymore. Not with the supplied USB-C... #Logitech Spotlight #hardware #fixit 15 Webmentions
Posted March 16, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Making Own Your Web More Sustainable I just published the 11th issue of Own Your Web, my newsletter about designing, building, creating, and publishing on the Web. When I started the newsletter back in autumn of 2023, I didn’t yet know what form the newsletter would take on, if people would like it, and also whether I would like doing it or not. Eleven issues in, I can say with confidence that I enjoy researching and writing those issues a lot! And with more than 1700 subscribers via email and RSS after just a few months and after all the feedback I received via social media... #ownyourweb #newsletters #sponsors #supporters 18 Webmentions
Posted March 14, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Welcome to the IndieWeb Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down and all user data gets deleted after a few months. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine that a site you poured all your thoughts and writing into decides overnight that it might be a good idea to sell access to all user data to a... #indieweb #ownyourweb #open web #personal websites 26 Webmentions
Posted March 14, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Links Worth Sharing Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interest still is to create a good old bookmark. And there are many different ways to do this. First of all, you could save your bookmarks in your browser. While there is generally nothing wrong about that and I know many people for whom this solution works well, it can still be a bit cumbersome to... #links #personal websites #ownyourweb 4 Webmentions
