Tag: web development

React/Next : What Runs When, and What Comes Out

Here's a test. Take this component:

100 Questions for Webmasters

A hundred-question chain meme making the rounds about how and why we make websites. I answer my way through questions on workflow, editors, CSS confidence, webrings, Neocities and Nekoweb, domain names, accessibility, genAI ethics, Gruvbox, and everything else about being a webmaster.

SAD MACHINE

Debian's recent vote to permit genAI contributions, alongside the questions raised by the IndieWeb is Punk manifesto, leads me to reflect on the harm-reduction case, the deskilling of creators, the NFT-like grift of genAI output, and the Potemkin village of an industry that has yet to find profitability.

A Few Small Things

Reflecting on the mental fatigue of posting every day during Blaugust, I share a few small things that cheered me up: a new keyword filter on Bubbles.town, Jan Miksovsky's Origami Projector, and the ongoing, hand-made goodness of the independent web.

A Few Small Things

Reflecting on the mental fatigue of posting every day during Blaugust, I share a few small things that cheered me up: a new keyword filter on Bubbles.town, Jan Miksovsky's Origami Projector, and the ongoing, hand-made goodness of the independent web.

Creating an Open-source Blogging Studies Syllabus

Announcing a new open-source, asynchronous Blogging Studies syllabus that blends writing craft and independent web publishing, built on Codeberg. I trace the decline of free MOOCs, outline my curriculum's anti-capitalist and community-driven pedagogy, and invite contributors and learners to help shape it.

WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone

I'm reclaiming the title of 'webmaster' as the multidisciplinary creator who designs, develops, writes, and advocates for their own corner of the web and will save the world. Tracing the history from 1993 to the present, I argue that anyone can become a webmaster with minimal tools. Webmastery is an act of digital repatriation and human agency against corporate platforms and AI orchestration.

Advanced Webweaving: Auditing Against Specification.Website

I ran brennan.day against The Website Specification's 140-item checklist covering foundations, SEO, accessibility, security, performance, privacy, and resilience. Notes on a broken web manifest I'd never noticed, why I don't have cookie consent banners, CSP debugging with third-party services, service worker CORS issues, a bunch of small improvements, and the list of things I didn't fix.

Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!

Responding to Coyote's critique of Bubbles.town and feed aggregators, I argue that the IndieWeb needs more interlinkers—bloggers who meaningfully synthesize and weave together the writing of others. On the garden/stream/campfire metaphors for the web, the difference between linkdumps and synthesis, Justin Hall's early web work, and how every link out is a stitch that strengthens the fabric of the blogosphere.

Animating Element with Only CSS

This post provides the most straightforward and minimum way to animate the HTML detials element using only CSS.

Fixing Work Imports from Other OTW-based Archives

By default, the OTWArchive codebase blocks all imports from AO3, a problem for every fork. My fix includes removing AO3 from PERMITTED_HOSTS, writing a custom Ruby story parser that extracts only the story content from AO3 work pages, and extending the same parser to support imports from other OTWA-based archives!

Working with CSS Container Queries for the first time today, and they don't quite work how I expected them to work. It's leading to me having to declare selectors in ways that are not natural to me, although the selectors are working as expected. In short, it's making me think, harder than most days.

Every Commit A Sentence: Git Commit Messages for Bloggers

I had 448 `feat:` commits and 417 `fix:` commits. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. Here's why conventional commits were never designed for a writer's blog, and the eleven-type system I built to replace them.

Why Make Your Website Accessible, Anyways?

Web accessibility isn't compliance theatre or checking off a list. It's about designing for everyone. Exploring the curb cut effect, why disability is more common than we think, and practical steps to make your website usable by as many people as possible.

Mo’ Code, Mo’ Problems

One of the truisms I learned early in my career is that every line of code you write is a liability as much as it is an asset. Every line of code you (or your team) writes is a line of code that must be maintained, a line of code that potentially exposes a security...

I Need To Stop Making Promises I Can't Keep

Building fanfiction.lol taught me that some promises are impossible to keep. I wanted canonical tags for everything and 'write whatever you want' as a tagline, but Canadian obscenity laws and the philosophical complexity of tag wrangling forced me to adjust. Here's what I learned about running a community archive, the legal constraints I face, and the promises I can still keep.

Cleaning House: Refactoring My Eleventy Config Into Modules

How I decomposed an 866-line .eleventy.js monolith into four focused modules, fixed some lurking bugs, and eliminated dead CSS and dead dependencies along the way.

Alem Tuzlak - Tanstack Dev Tools and Tanstack AI

Alem Tuzlak breaks down building TanStack Dev Tools and how TanStack AI differentiates itself in the crowded AI library landscape.

Paolo Ricciuti - Svelte, TMCP

Paolo Ricciuti, Svelte maintainer and TMCP creator, discusses Svelte 5's new runes system and his journey from fan to core contributor.

Mark Erikson - Redux, Replay.io

Redux maintainer Mark Erikson covers his journey maintaining Redux, building Redux Toolkit, and pioneering time-travel debugging at Replay.io.

Build Awesome's Kickstarter is Cancelled

After only a couple days, Build Awesome's Kickstarter has been cancelled and rescheduled due to email delivery issues that ruined the project's momentum despite reaching their funding goal in a single day.

The End of Eleventy

Build Awesome is a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy, backed by a successful $40k Kickstarter. But this attempt to monetize static site generators repeats the same mistakes that killed Gatsby and Stackbit—and misunderstands who actually builds static sites.

The End of Eleventy

Build Awesome is a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy, backed by a successful $40k Kickstarter. But this attempt to monetize static site generators repeats the same mistakes that killed Gatsby and Stackbit—and misunderstands who actually builds static sites.

How are we preparing for the Long Web?

What will the Internet look like in 2036? 2046? How do we reckon with the challenges of digital preservation, link rot, and building for the Long Web in an age of ephemeral content?

How are we preparing for the Long Web?

What will the Internet look like in 2036? 2046? How do we reckon with the challenges of digital preservation, link rot, and building for the Long Web in an age of ephemeral content?

Jamon Holmgren - Infinite Red, Into the Dawn

Infinite Red founder Jamon Holmgren shares his coding journey, building a React Native consultancy, and creating his new game Into the Dawn.

What is the IndieWeb?

I decide to throw my hat into the ring and define what exactly the IndieWeb movement is, the core principles, and why it matters for the future of the Internet.

Introducing Ⓜ️ Meddler!

I created a Medium export converter for the IndieWeb that converts your Medium archive into clean Markdown for Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, or Astro.js. Available as both a command line tool, and a web interface.

Announcing Three New Free JAMstack Blogging Themes

I've spent the last few weeks working on three new free themes for IndieWeb blogging: Indiepaper, Newsprint, and brennan.jp.net, all of which centre around giving people a place to call their own on the internet.

Dana Lawson - Netlify

Netlify CTO Dana Lawson discusses her journey from the US Army to leading engineering teams and Netlify's evolution into AI-powered developer tools.

Salma Alam-Naylor - Nordcraft

Salma Alam-Naylor introduces Nordcraft's visual web framework and shares her evolution from music teacher to Head of Developer Education.

Creating an Alphabetical Tag Page feat. Nunjucks Pitfalls

I transformed a messy tag list into an organized alphabetical sections, and there were a surprising amount of gotchas I encountered along the way.

Generating Colour Variants in CSS with color-mix

How to generate colour variants using the css color-mix function.

Curated List: Web Platform, CSS, Accessibility

Dylan Piercey - Marko

Dylan Piercey from eBay explores Marko's pioneering streaming and islands architecture features, plus the major innovations in Marko v6's new compiler.

Introducing Cascade

I wrote a lightweight TypeScript library for easily defining smooth, performant animations when elements enter the viewport. It's used on this site! Hopefully it's somewhat useful.

Injecting Chaos into DynamoDB with LocalStack

Chaos engineering is a methodology that helps build more resilient cloud-based applications. In this tutorial, learn how to simulate outages using LocalStack's Chaos Dashboard. This hands-on guide walks through injecting failure into a local AWS stack, observing how your app responds, and building confidence in your system's ability to handle the unexpected.

Injecting Chaos into DynamoDB with LocalStack

Chaos engineering is a methodology that helps build more resilient cloud-based applications. In this tutorial, learn how to simulate outages using LocalStack's Chaos Dashboard. This hands-on guide walks through injecting failure into a local AWS stack, observing how your app responds, and building confidence in your system's ability to handle the unexpected.

Injecting Chaos into DynamoDB with LocalStack

Chaos engineering is a methodology that helps build more resilient cloud-based applications. In this tutorial, learn how to simulate outages using LocalStack's Chaos Dashboard. This hands-on guide walks through injecting failure into a local AWS stack, observing how your app responds, and building confidence in your system's ability to handle the unexpected.

Injecting Chaos into DynamoDB with LocalStack

Chaos engineering is a methodology that helps build more resilient cloud-based applications. In this tutorial, learn how to simulate outages using LocalStack's Chaos Dashboard. This hands-on guide walks through injecting failure into a local AWS stack, observing how your app responds, and building confidence in your system's ability to handle the unexpected.