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Posted February 14, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes We ❤️ RSS In the last issue of Own Your Web, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which probably everyone with a personal website should do: adding an RSS feed. What’s RSS? RSS, which stands for either “Really Simple Syndication” or also “RDF Site Summary” or “Rich Site Summary”, is a way to distribute the content of your site through a feed that people can subscribe to. Basically, you provide a feed... #rss #personal websites #websites #syndication #open web 27 Webmentions
Posted January 10, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes All Things Being Equalized For my birthday, I got a new pair of speakers for my home office / home studio. After looking around for quite some time, I settled on the ADAM Audio T5V in the end. The T5Vs are affordable, entry-level studio monitors with a 5“ woofer that are optimized for smaller rooms. And it doesn’t make sense to blast much more bass into my 3 by 3 meter office anyway. I’m still far from being experienced when it comes to judging the sound quality coming out of professional speakers, but I wanted something that would allow me to reliably judge occasional... #audio #sound #studio monitors #headphones #equalization #apps #music 14 Webmentions
Posted January 8, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes 42 for 42 I’m turning 42 today and yes, I am as surprised about that number as you are. If 42 really is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, then maybe it makes sense to look back on what the old lad actually learned in all those years. So, here is a list of 42 life lessons, similar to the one Chris wrote when he was still 40. Incomplete and mostly unstructured. For my younger self as much as for my children and anyone reading this. Don’t panic. Love yourself. Take care of yourself. You can only help others if you are strong... #lists #life lessons 68 Webmentions
Posted January 7, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes Tour De-Noise Whether you are running online workshops, hosting a live stream, or recording audio or video content, optimal audio quality is absolutely essential. People in your audience might tolerate if your video is noisy or not perfectly sharp. But if your audio quality is poor, for example when something is constantly crackling or whooshing in the background or your voice is distorted, it gets irritating and annoying for your listeners pretty quickly. I’m therefore constantly experimenting with various ways to improve the audio (and video) setup and the acoustics in my little home office in the attic. Last year, I added a... #audio #video #recording #gear 2 Webmentions
Posted January 4, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes What’s Too Good to Be True? The web platform is changing rapidly these days. With every major browser release, more and more powerful features get added, many of which are based on previous input about what web developers need to build better for the web. One way for browser vendors and developer advocates to get this useful input is to ask web developers about what features they are interested in or where their biggest pain points are. Last year, for example, many people shared their CSS wishlists. Brian Kardell, developer advocate at Igalia, just asked the opposite question: which of the features that got shipped in the last... #web #platform #html #css #browsers No webmentions yet
Posted January 3, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes The Best Comment Section on the Internet Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, recently sat down with Tim Ferriss to talk about a bunch of different things. One of those things: blogging. It might not come as a surprise, but Matt described blogging as one of the most rewarding things he did last year. Not only because blogging, or writing in general, forces you to clarify your thinking, or because publishing is such a vulnerable, scary, and thus brave act, but in particular because of what happens afterwards and how much you learn from it. All the comments, the interactions, the follow-ups that make blogging... #blogging #personal websites #comments #webmention #blogs #ux 2 Webmentions
Posted January 1, 2024 by Matthias Ott in Notes 2024: The Year of the Personal Website At the beginning of 2023, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website: And, looking back at 2023, did we deliver? You bet. 😁 It all started with articles like Bring back personal blogging by Monique Judge for The Verge or the Bring Back Blogging project by Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam, who encouraged us all to get into the habit and publish at least three blog posts until the end of January 2023. Throughout the year, fueled by the further decay of Twitter and the ongoing reshuffling of power on the internet, heaps of us... #personal websites #websites #publishing #web #indieweb #ownyourweb 15 Webmentions
Posted November 22, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes Climate Optimism It’s not going well. After all-time heat records were shattered worldwide during heat waves across all continents and ongoing wildfires eradicated 5 % of the entire forest area of Canada, 2023 will be the hottest year ever recorded (1.43°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average to date). At the same time, it feels like nobody is really listening to the scientists who have been warning about the consequences of burning fossil fuels for decades. Greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than ever, the fossil fuel industry is making record profits (I don’t need to look for a link for that one,... #climate #climate change #climate action #hope No webmentions yet
Posted October 30, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes No Borders Where were you in 2013 and what were you doing back then? What have you done over those last ten years? How have the last ten years changed your life, your work, or what’s important to you? I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t often pause to reflect about the past decade like that. Far too often, we are too busy and caught in the here and now. Now, imagine you get asked by two conference organizers to not only reflect about the last ten years but to actually give a talk about what has changed for you over... #conferences #change #purpose #community No webmentions yet
Posted October 22, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes My New Newsletter: Own Your Web I just sent out the first issue of my new newsletter Own Your Web. Own Your Web is a newsletter for anyone who wants to design, build, create, and publish on the Web. Every other week, I’ll send out an email full of actionable insights, best practices, hacks, links, books, tools, and other high-quality insights I found or explored. Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. Having a personal website in 2023 is... #newsletters #ownyourweb 6 Webmentions
Posted September 11, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes My Favorite Mac Apps in 2023 After three years, I finally replaced my old Intel MacBook Pro – and its cracked screen – with a new machine. I’m still holding back a bit with my excitement for this 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro, just because I was really disappointed with my previous Mac. But thus far, it has been amazing. While I’m writing this, I’m sitting in bed, with the computer on my lap, and everything is running so smoothly and blazingly fast. This is as close as it gets to working at the speed of thought – and all this without any fan noise. Whenever I... #mac #macOS #apps #tools 49 Webmentions
Posted September 7, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes WOFF Has Left the Building In a recent project, the web fonts I bought and downloaded were only available as WOFF2 files. Staring in disbelief at the unpacked folder full of WOFF2 files, I wondered: Why did they not include WOFF files as well? Isn’t WOFF still needed? Or is it finally time to ditch WOFF? At least building for the Web includes regularly reevaluating how you do things. So, I asked the people of Mastodon. The unanimous answer: It’s WOFF2 or nothin’! I still vividly remember how a post by Zach at the end of 2016 made me abandon the “bulletproof” @font-face syntax that also... #web #design #development #design engineering #web fonts #formats #css #font-face 134 Webmentions
Posted August 31, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes Pointing Fingers Don’t use your finger!” Regardless of which country and school system you grew up in, chances are you have heard this sentence at least once from one of your teachers. I, for one, remember my elementary school teacher rebuking pupils who were pointing at the lines of words in their books. And thirty years later, as my son just confirmed to me, this hasn’t changed a bit. At a certain age, students are told to not read with their fingers anymore. The idea behind this is that fluent readers don’t have to rely on their fingers anymore and that pointing will... #reading #education #speed reading #books 44 Webmentions
Posted August 30, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 Dark Mode: How Users Think About It and Issues to Avoid An in-depth look at dark mode. Summary: it is popular, but not essential. Users like dark mode but maintain similar behaviors without it. They think about it at the system level, not the application level. If you choose to support dark mode, test your design to avoid common dark-mode issues. #ui #design #a11y #accessibility #ux #dark mode
Posted August 18, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 Green Web Directory For every country, the Green Web Directory lists the hosting providers that provided evidence of their green services. #climate #climate change #web #hosting #energy transformation #renewables #climate action
Posted August 18, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 Gravity Gravity is a platform for carbon management, purpose-built for companies with complex value chains. It lets you calculate the carbon footprint of your organization and helps you identify areas to reduce emissions effectively.“Gravity's platform quickly ingests, calculates, and distributes key emissions data about our businesses.” #tools #platform #climate #climate change #economy #data #carbon management
Posted August 18, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 Observable With 200,000+ community examples, Observable is the fastest way to build custom data visualizations, apps, and dashboards to uncover deeper insights. From the creators of D3. #tools #data #dataviz #dashboards #data visualization
Posted August 18, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Links 🔗 Accessibility Developer Guide The «Accessibility Developer Guide» is an initiative of «Access for all», Swiss Foundation for technology adapted to people with disabilities. It is developed and maintained in collaboration with a number of acclaimed web agencies. The vision behind the Accessibility Developer Guide is to bridge the gap between providers of websites and users with special needs. #a11y #accessibility #Web #development #inclusive design #tools
Posted August 9, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes Good Riddance, GPTBot Just like Google is constantly indexing the Web, OpenAI is now crawling the open Web to scrape content from websites for free to train their LLM (lucrative language model) “AI” products. But, as I learned from a post by Ethan on Mastodon, you can disallow GPTBot to get its tiny robot hands on your writing by adding those two lines of code to your website’s robots.txt: Good riddance, GPTBot! 👋 #robots #crawlers #websites #AI #content #Web 43 Webmentions
Posted June 18, 2023 by Matthias Ott in Notes The New CSS Alright, let’s write more about CSS! CSS! CSS! Change I’ve been writing CSS since the early 2000s, shortly after we ditched building web layouts with tables and spacer GIFs in favor of hacking our designs together with floats. CSS has since become my favorite programming language and, looking back on how the language has developed in all those years, one thing is certain: CSS is not the same anymore. The CSS we were writing in 2003 was different from the CSS we were writing ten years later in 2013. Fast forward another ten years, and the CSS we are writing today is... #css #CSS Day #tools #process #design #Web #design engineering #development 115 Webmentions
