I’m a web designer and developer and my career arc is about helping you get better at those things. Sometimes people talk to me about that.
With Alex Vazquez, I’m the co-founder of CodePen, a social front-end web development environment. With Dave Rupert, I’m the co-host of a podcast called ShopTalk.
I built CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, and ran it for 15 years, from 2007 to 2022.
I’m big on the power of writing as a way to think better and improve yourself.
Another kid’s device we have that we’ve gotten tons and tons of use out of is the Toniebox. It’s this soft padded box with a speaker on it (or plug in headphones). You place a character on it (a “Tonie”) and it plays the audio associated with that Tonie. It basically tells stories. We heard […]
Our little family took a quick trip down to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico — meeting my inlaws there for some fun in the sun. We stayed at the Hyatt Ziva. We actually “won” the trip a few years back at a live auction/benefit for the Boys & Girls Club of Bend, so it felt nice to […]
Quick note that I’m totally going to Frostapalooza (and you can too!) Frostapalooza is a giant one-night-only benefit concert-slash-party-slash-happening featuring an amorphous super group of talented musicians from bands like: Brad Frost is turning 40 and throwing this as a massive party/concert. I’ll be playing banjo in the show for a couple of tunes. You’ll […]
I think it was during the ShopTalk with Blake Watson where “tower defense” games briefly came up and someone recommended Kingdom Rush. It’s not exactly new, coming out in 2011, but it was new to me. I played on iOS. It feels like the total classic of tower defense games. Monsters come at you, you […]
At one time I got interested in the “eye contact”, or lack of it, on video calls. I was going to present at an online conference, and I wanted people watching to have it look like I was looking right at them. Plus, possibly even more importantly, one-on-one calls with people. I ended up buying […]
If you long for a web of yore were things were better, somehow: The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it’s become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating […]
I mostly play old time and bluegrass music. Particularly in old time and fiddle songs, the songs have a fairly rigid and repetitious structure. That’s not to say players don’t do interesting things with it, but unless a song is intentionally crooked, the structure of the song remains the same throughout. A typical structure is […]
Malcolm Coles: 10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence. Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’s still doing it … And […]
Feedbin has custom email addresses now so you can use a unique email address for each newsletter and not worry about a spam leak.
In Bend, you can’t miss the illustration work of Megan Marie Myers. It’s absolutely everywhere. There are murals. There are calendars for sale everywhere. Prints are hung up at coffeeshops, sometimes as whole exhibitions. She’s got books, stickers, hats, postcards, notecards, and heck, even neck gaiters. If her art wasn’t as charming and well done, […]
Most internet travels by wire. Straight through the dang ocean. Josh Dzieza in a feature for The Verge: These fragile wires are constantly breaking — a precarious system on which everything from banks to governments to TikTok depends. But thanks to a secretive global network of ships on standby, every broken cable is quickly fixed. […]
You’re doing yourself a grave disservice if your writing opens with something boring or banal. You’re going to lose me, at least. I’ve got a list of stuff to read and watch as long as your arm. Maggie really digs into this, in an effort to get better. Your challenge is finding the compelling problem […]
I’ve heard the new cooperative version of Scrabble made fun of a few times. These pansy youths just wanna hold hands, drink warm milk, and avoid any conflict. Whatever. Nobody is threatening the value of competition. Me, I think cooperative games are awesome. There are still challenges. You work together to solve them. Like, I […]
The best bit of kids technology that we have, and this has been true from say age three to now six, is the Amazon Fire HD Kids. The operating system on it is fine. It loads up decently quickly. It’s locked down to only kids stuff. It’s not upselling stuff for the most part, there […]
This popup that 1Password does by default isn’t my jam: My problem with it is that it isn’t actually helpful. If you do use the feature and save the login, instead of that popup you just get another one that looks essentially the same that you can click to log in. That’s no better! If […]
I just heard about GitButler from a Discord friend. I’m kind of ripe for toying with Git clients I use, as I just switched to GitHub Desktop. I don’t regret the switch, but I don’t love GitHub Desktop so much I couldn’t imagine another switch. Little stuff bugs me. GitButler is free (the FAQ makes […]
(For clarity, this isn’t sponsored, even though Automattic did sponsor me in the past for quite a long time. I just find it fascinating following the products they put out.) For a long time, the message and branding for WordPress.com was “this is the one you use if you want to use WordPress but don’t […]
Dave mentioned in Discord the other day that he listened to a podcast called Finding Drago. He said: It was recommended to me by a vagrant on the beaches of Chala and it changed my life. I powered through it and it’s a hell of a strange journey. Strongly recommended, if you feel a podcast […]
That was the joke the camel guy made when we went camel riding in Cabo San Lucas on our vacation. The actual camel ride was about 250 seconds long and not something I’d go out of the way to do again, but the dad jokes were impressively thick. Yep — we went to Cabo again! […]
Updated my robots.txt file to what looks like the latest list of User-agents to block. Not that I have any faith that it’s actually going to help prevent my writing from getting into a model without my permission. All it takes is one scraper website that republishes the content and doesn’t have an identical robots.txt […]