It's been mind-boggling to watch the commercial internet accelerate in an ever more user-hostile direction over the last year and change. It's no longer about offering users a "free" service in exchange for their data — companies now want everything. You get a service that's stil … | Continue reading
I wrote (fairly) recently about implementing my own scrobbler using Plex webhooks, edge functions and blob storage. So far — so far — this has worked quite well. In doing this, I was keeping listens as JSON blobs with Netlify, stored under keys for the week they belonged to. Arti … | Continue reading
Take a step back look around at the tech products you use, the industry and its impact on society more broadly and ask yourself: does its track record warrant optimism or have they earned a healthy degree of skepticism? The web started out premised on and promising open connectio … | Continue reading
When I was a kid — I want to say 5 or younger — my family went to the local cemetery. My father's sister had passed away at a young age and we made regular visits to clean up her headstone and those of family members nearby. My brother and I were tasked with refilling jugs of wat … | Continue reading
You open your browser, you go to check sports scores. The page shifts down to show you an ad, you click to close it and open the page by accident. You close the tab, you close the ad, you scroll down and you see sponsored content from a gambling partner. You head over to a news s … | Continue reading
I saw this carved into a table in Austin once and it — like many songs — has been stuck in my head ever since. I'll get hooked on a song and circle back to that roughly carved message. I've had songs and albums stuck in my head dating back to my childhood, primarily tracks from T … | Continue reading
I've spent a while hosting and fetching images from bunny.net when my 11ty builds. I had multiple pull zones configured and wanted to leverage bunny.net's transforms, but the pricing of $15/month per zone wasn't feasible. My site is hosted on Netlify and they've had an image CDN … | Continue reading
I updated some things on my site and then I started to lose track of all of said updates. Menu I added a proper mobile menu: it's all written in CSS and leverages a hidden checkbox input to maintain the menu state. The CSS is a bit verbose and flips my preferred min-width media q … | Continue reading
I've been shuffling more of the data I display and present on my site around recently and I've been thinking about the agency or lack thereof associated with that data. I've moved my music data into my own storage and generated my own primitive charts.[1] I've moved my reading da … | Continue reading
I like to tell myself that I enjoy minimalism, that it's a preference and an aesthetic that I choose and pursue. I believe that's true, but I also believe that I've adopted it as an approach I take for self-preservation and a hedge towards always taking a conservative approach to … | Continue reading
AI models can generate output modeled on input. They can respond to prompts and generate vaguely intelligible text — provided the right inputs, the right human-generated inputs. Rather than engaging with content created by modeling human input, my request is this: model better be … | Continue reading
It's trite, but it's true and maybe, just maybe, the phrase has been burned into my brain from my kids watching Daniel Tiger on repeat. I've found it to be the best way to approach interactions in life and online — you can and should be kind to yourself too. I struggle with the b … | Continue reading
I'm getting older, I'm definitely getting older (everyone is), but I remember when we made things that users wanted. We don't seem to doing much of that anymore. Build a product, hope it provides value enough for a user to pay for it, earn a profit. You'd succeed by providing val … | Continue reading
I often apply this thinking to development work but I’ve found it holds true in many other situations. I’ve dealt with imposter syndrome for my whole career and still battle with it. I’m a self-taught developer and am confident that there’s more I don’t know than I do know. I’ve … | Continue reading
I wrote, roughly a year ago, about wanting to stream my own music and I've spent that time exploring and settling into options. I still don't want streaming music and I don't miss it, but I've learned a few things along the way. Let's get one thing out of the way up front: stream … | Continue reading
If you're offering a service online, you should only collect data from users that is strictly required to operate service. I don't care what you're building. If you need my email to log me in, fine — don't send me anything I didn't ask for[1]. And do not use it to try and sell me … | Continue reading
Name a search engine and it will have integrated AI — but can you name one that's any better for it? I'm at a loss and I can't help but wince every time another announces some sort of LLM integration. | Continue reading
I've made a change to my site's pagination wherein I've enhanced the page count displayed at the bottom of my home and links pages to display the page count in a select element. The select displays a list of all the pages and navigates to the selected page. | Continue reading
As the AI hype cycle continues and continues to take on ever more characteristics of a bubble, we should be making an ever more concerted effort to block, confound and frustrate the crawlers they use to trawl the public internet for data. They've operated under the assumption tha … | Continue reading
I've written before about embedding music into my site and I've largely used Last.fm to do so. Their API is rather extensive, though it is showing its age — the default response format is XML, they've dropped artist images and have intermittently failed to return album art. Liste … | Continue reading
I've tried all the browsers (not Arc, but that's a big stack of nonsense dressing up Chromium) and I always return to Safari. I've been a longtime resident of Apple's walled garden/prison, my grandmother bought stock during Apple's IPO and my whole family uses, well, all of it. I … | Continue reading
I think a lot about permanence — both as a broader concept and how it applies to myself, my life and my work on a more personal level. It's a comforting concept when you're seeking stability, but it's never truly attainable. It's aspirational, but unachievable — nothing is perman … | Continue reading
Are you short on things to read? Things to watch? Things to listen to? Things to scroll through? Me neither. | Continue reading
If I haven't made it clear enough recently, I love where the open web is heading and the indie web's part in it. This has grown out of the opportunity created by the ongoing fragmentation of the corporate social web and renewed interest in staking out personal spaces on the web. … | Continue reading
If I haven't made it clear enough recently, I love where the open web is heading and the indie web's part in it. This has grown out of the opportunity created by the ongoing fragmentation of the corporate social web and renewed interest in staking out personal spaces on the web. … | Continue reading
Wikipedia (emphasis mine) In the most general of terms, music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content. I'm going to harp on this again but, yes, yes AI-generated content is derivative. Music is appea … | Continue reading
I've been using Pagefind for my site search for a while now and would readily recommend it, but I wanted to throw together something a bit lighter weight and customizable. | Continue reading
Whenever I'm looking at a service, a product or a tool I like to look for longevity or evaluate the potential for it. It's easy to get caught up in the hype around something new but, so often, we fail to evaluate whether it can sustain itself or stick around over the longer term. | Continue reading
Whenever I'm looking at a service, a product or a tool I like to look for longevity or evaluate the potential for it. It's easy to get caught up in the hype around something new but, so often, we fail to evaluate whether it can sustain itself or stick around over the longer term. | Continue reading
No, not that kind. I'm thinking of the indie web kind we're seeing lately. The kind that incorporates content from around the web that the creator of the site cares with and engages with. I find this to be complementary to the popular and well-explained POSSE concept. I've adopte … | Continue reading
No, not that kind. I'm thinking of the indie web kind we're seeing lately. The kind that incorporates content from around the web that the creator of the site cares with and engages with. I find this to be complementary to the popular and well-explained POSSE concept. I've adopte … | Continue reading
Ok, maybe some of it's dying. I believe it's too far reaching and too deeply-embedded to really, truly be dying. What we're seeing is a bust cycle for commercial social media and information-driven platforms. It's pretty clear that traditional social media is on the wane — growth … | Continue reading
Ok, maybe some of it's dying. I believe it's too far reaching and too deeply-embedded to really, truly be dying. What we're seeing is a bust cycle for commercial social media and information-driven platforms. It's pretty clear that traditional social media is on the wane — growth … | Continue reading
It's easy to pick on AI, because, well, it's costing a whole lot and providing, at best, dubious benefits. One of the easiest criticisms to lob at it is that it's extractive — whether you're pointing at public knowledge, creative work or resources and I think that's all quite fai … | Continue reading
It's easy to pick on AI, because, well, it's costing a whole lot and providing, at best, dubious benefits. One of the easiest criticisms to lob at it is that it's extractive — whether you're pointing at public knowledge, creative work or resources and I think that's all quite fai … | Continue reading
I follow and subscribe to a whole bunch of blogs and less and less high-volume news via RSS. It's one of my absolute favorite mediums for keeping up with and reading content on the web. It's distributed, open and decentralized and remains one of those under-appreciated layers tha … | Continue reading
I follow and subscribe to a whole bunch of blogs and less and less high-volume news via RSS. It's one of my absolute favorite mediums for keeping up with and reading content on the web. It's distributed, open and decentralized and remains one of those under-appreciated layers tha … | Continue reading
My site leverages a number of web component for functionality on my site. Namely: mastodon post embeds, search, my now playing component, my theme toggle, post sharing and YouTube embeds. It's all loaded on pages only as needed but, I wanted to make sure it was all minified. | Continue reading
My site leverages a number of web component for functionality on my site. Namely: mastodon post embeds, search, my now playing component, my theme toggle, post sharing and YouTube embeds. It's all loaded on pages only as needed but, I wanted to make sure it was all minified. | Continue reading
I made some lightweight design changes to my site, keeping things simple but moving the date up above post headers, surfacing tags below and restoring Read more links. | Continue reading
I made some lightweight design changes to my site, keeping things simple but moving the date up above post headers, surfacing tags below and restoring Read more links. | Continue reading
I think, I think I've found a music workflow I'm happy with for 2024 and it looks like this. | Continue reading
This applies to full-time employment, but still. I've encountered all of these (all in the same role — and yes, hindsight is 20/20!). I've had several excellent roles since and experienced none of this since. | Continue reading
I think, I think I've found a music workflow I'm happy with for 2024 and it looks like this. | Continue reading
This applies to full-time employment, but still. I've encountered all of these (all in the same role — and yes, hindsight is 20/20!). I've had several excellent roles since and experienced none of this since. | Continue reading
Marketing, solicitations, advertising, political contact, direct mailers, email campaigns, cookies, ads — it's all opt out. It puts the burden on you to opt out of each communication each message, each outreach from a loyalty program. It can feel like weeding a garden, but that g … | Continue reading
Marketing, solicitations, advertising, political contact, direct mailers, email campaigns, cookies, ads — it's all opt out. It puts the burden on you to opt out of each communication each message, each outreach from a loyalty program. It can feel like weeding a garden, but that g … | Continue reading
AI companies are crawling the open web to, ostensibly, improve the quality of their models and products. This process is extractive and accrues the benefit to said companies, not the owners of sites both small and large. | Continue reading