Great little tool for making pretty screenshots. Drag and drop in any screenshot and you can play with borders/background colours/etc.
Steve accidentally spent twelve years as a web developer before returning to his roots. He now runs an IT company in the North of Scotland and spends nearly all day in his inbox.
Clearing safari favicon cache
https://paco.me/writing/safari-favicon-showing-white-background
Add WordPress Admin User with phpMyAdmin
Reclaiming old content
I’ve spent a little time over the last few weeks gradually reclaiming old blog content from various sources. Some has been pulled from the Wayback Machine, some from old Pinboard archives, some from site backups. Going back over two decades, almost none of it has any value, it’s certainly well beyond being useful, so it’s perhaps entertaining at best.
It’s facinating how much near 25 year old linked content is still available.
Note #1
Hugo have just released v0.141.0 which now includes an alignx
option on images.Text. Slightly neich perhaps, but it’s exactly what I wanted to generate my OpenGraph images and center the text (more on that another time).
Postspark
HTML is for people
HTML isn’t only for people working in the tech field. It’s for anybody, the way documents are for anybody. HTML is just another type of document. A very special one—the one the web is built on.
For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website
Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a lot more bored.
Precision Engineering Desk Toys
Rediculously expensive, but you can’t deny the engineering is impressive.
Tinylytics
Great little privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative with a very sensible pricing model.
QGDPR-compliant with no cookies or user-identifiable data storage. Securely hosted in Europe for your peace of mind.
I’ve installed it on this site (not that there’s much traffic to analyse!).
Friendly Words
I stumbled on this when I was looking for ‘safe’ word lists for using on Pass3words.
The Surprising Truth About Pixels and Accessibility
Really good deep-dive.
The truth is, if you want to build the most-accessible product possible, you need to use both pixels and ems/rems. It’s not an either/or situation. There are circumstances where rems are more accessible, and other circumstances where pixels are more accessible.
P.S. I really like Josh’s website, fairly simple design but so much attention to detail.
Generating opengraph images with hugo
Huge thanks to Aaro Luomanen for this post, this was my starting point for generating OG images on this site when I moved to Hugo.
There are a bunch of cloud services that offer og:image generation, like Cloudinary or Vercel’s og, but I didn’t want to pay for those. I want my whole website to be static and cheap to host. I managed to generate some sweet og:images using Hugo’s image manipulation tools.
Squoosh
Love this. Drop in any image, get an instant side by side comparison slider, and a download link for the optimsed file showing size savings. Free, open source and the images never leave your computer.
How to favicon
It’s time to rethink how we cook a set of favicons for modern browsers and stop the icon generator madness. Frontend developers currently have to deal with 20+ static PNG files just to display a tiny website logo in a browser tab or on a touchscreen.
A guide on what you need (and only what you need) when it comes to generating favicon files for your site. Handy if you want to roll your own, instead of using the generator sites.
LEFREE Touch Wireless Mouse
Add a touch of your inner self to your every day with the Touch series mouse. Embrace a calming soft almond color palette or a soft grey base with warm orange highlights.
I love the retro look of this thing.
I changed my mind, my CMS adventure
Oops…! I did it again.
When I launched this site a few days ago I posted that I’d settled on Kirby as my CMS1 of choice. This wasn’t exactly a spur of the moment thing, it’s a system I’ve been dabbling with for quite a while. In fact, my introduction to Kirby came from the talented Simon Collison when he designed and built my company site some time back.
I’ve since changed my mind.
The Movie Database
The Movie Database (TMDB) is a community built movie and TV database. Every piece of data has been added by our amazing community dating back to 2008. TMDB’s strong international focus and breadth of data is largely unmatched and something we’re incredibly proud of. Put simply, we live and breathe community and that’s precisely what makes us different.
Great alternative to the Amazon owned IMDB. Really nicely designed site and very well populated.
New year, new blog
For the last few weeks Matthias Ott has been running a newsletter about designing and publishing on the web, with a heavy emphasis on owning and running a personal website. There’s an archive available of past issues, well worth a peruse.
Every time a new issue drops, I remember that it’s something I want to (re)launch. I open Sublime Text, try and remember what CMS I was playing with, get lost looking at colours and fonts, and then… oh, shiny thing!
Alfred 2FA Workflow
Really handy for pulling text-based 2FA codes from Apple Messages on your Mac ready to paste. This can be done natively on macOS in Safari, but is not supported in other browsers.
Google Webfonts Helper
Insanely useful tool to help self-host Google fonts. Supplies both the font package to download, and generates the CSS ready to drop in.
A Tailwind colour generator
Handy tool to generate a Tailwind style colour scale from a single given colour.
Find the closest tailwind colour
Another handy Tailwind cool, this one finds the closest native Tailwind colour to the one you supply.
Samsung store opening
The only thing that’s a surprise about this video is that there were actually people outside the store.
Rebuilding broken Gameboy with a Raspberry Pi
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