If I wrote it, it should be here. I went into software, not literature and my writing reflects that.
I don't want world peace or a stable functioning democracy. I want offline mode for a sudoku game. Starting with too much context upfront is always a warning sign so prepare for a whole host of warnings. I regularly enjoy…
You can usually identify a programmer at a party by asking for their opinion on date formats. Before long someone is arguing for ISO-8601, someone else is defending locale-specific formats, and another is explaining why Unix timestamps are the purest…
It’s a step toward a more direct, sustainable relationship with our audience. This post was originally written by myself and Jane Seidel for Rest of World and related to our work there. The original is here. Ten years ago, interesting…
I've been spending some time building a bookmarking service on ATProto and, as part of that, trying to understand how people think about lexicons and interoperability. In talking it though at last weeks Side Project Saturday, Jared was kind enough…
I don’t reach for these every day, but they fascinate me. Some are old, some new, and all of them feel like hidden corners of the spec worth exploring. What I like about digging into HTML attributes is that they…
I learned to build websites on a Windows machine that had Homesite, Notepad.exe, and not much else. No version control. No devtools. No frameworks. The screen was 800 pixels wide (1024 is you were blessed) and that was that. People…
This summer I took my first sabbatical. It was a relatively new policy and I didn’t have much time to plan unless I wanted to push it into next year. By the time it was official, the kids already had…
Most people don’t spend time thinking about CSS selectors, and honestly, even most developers probably don’t have “favorites.” But every now and then, I catch myself appreciating a few of the lesser-used pseudo-elements. They’re easy to overlook, but I like…
Back in 2009, I submitted a project to The New York Times’s internal Tech Challenge: a demo called Times Now, later renamed to Times Wire. The idea was simple: a clear, reverse-chronological stream of every story published to the homepage. It was…
Looking back at the beginning of Quartz In early 2012, I was living in Seattle. I'd left The New York Times less than a year earlier after a long stint but I was missing media. I was on a quick…
URLs are the most overlooked part of web design. People obsess over page speed, conversion rates, and SEO rankings, but then let their CMS generate URLs that look like they were created by a stranger they met on the subway.…
I have a notebook. I spent a long time searching for it, the right paper, the binding, the ideal shade of off-white. The plan was simple: a place for ideas, projects, and inspiration. The reality has been mostly empty pages.…
You might want to create an anonymous website for all kinds of reasons. I'm a strong believer in personal privacy, not in supporting anything illegal. I enjoy thinking through scenarios I don’t actually need to worry about, like how I’d…
I am not the seasoned traveler that many of my friends and colleagues are but I travel enough to have an entrenched routine that works for me. I've always been one to optimize what I carry with me - from…
It’s very in coming, but we’re slowly getting the means to indicate that our site content should not be used in training sets for generative AI models. It’s still unclear whether existing web crawlers were used to train current LLMs…
[■,●,■,▲].every(●→true) ⇒ false [■,●,■,▲].filter(■→true). ⇒ [■,■] [■,●,■,▲].find(●→true) ⇒ ● [■,●,■,▲].findIndex(●→true) ⇒ 1 [■,●,■,▲].fill(●) ⇒ [●,●,●,●] [■,■,■,■].map(■→●) ⇒ [●,●,●,●] [■,●,■,▲].some(●→true) ⇒ true
The default slug is generated from the initial title. If the title is long, this can be annoying. I prefer short URLs without common filler words like “the,” “and,” or “I.” This setup also limits slugs to a maximum of…
humans.txt is a simple but meaningful way for web developers (and other contributors) to take credit for their work and leave a trace of their presence on the web. Given enough time, everything a web developer touches tends to disappear. The…
A collection of useful functions, actions, and other ways to alter WordPress. Change default slug for Posts The default slug is based on the initial Title. If the title is long htis can be very annoying as I personally like…
Twitter was a really important service for me, but that’s changing quickly and I’m not too sure what comes next. What I do know is that I’ve been on it for 16 years, and that means something to me. As…
Mastodon allows you to add up to five links to display on your profile. You can easily verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata if you have full control of the page. However there are…
Favicon of any domain via DDG const imageUrl = `https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip3/${domain}.ico`
Rather than re-inventing this every few months, or years, I'm sticking it here for posterity. Nothing here is sensitive. vi ~/.bash_profile The file # Library Paths # ===================== # These variables tell your shell where they can find certain #…
I love this plugin, The SEO Framework for WordPress. Aside from SEO benefits and managment options it adds criticial controls for the editorial team in managing the various META tags we rely on for social previews. It has numerous hooks and actions, though…
Disable Dictionary.app Disable the Dictionary.app so it doesn't always pop-up when you accidentally highlight something, or sneeze. Make these changes in the System Preferences but note that you may need to adjust settings on some apps too. Open System Preferences > Keyboard…
Terminal & Network iTerm Charles Transmit Transmission TunnelBear Fonts & Typography BirdFont Platform News Preview IDE & Rleated utilities Xcode Vagrant Manger VirtualBox VSCode Image ImageOptim Acorn Design & Wireframes Figma (and Font Installer) Video & Encoding VLC MetaZ HandBrake Utilities…
My usage of sudo has gone down over the last couple of years, but enabling Touch ID on my Mac for use with sudo has been a huge win. Yes, you have to take your fingers off the keyboard for this so…
Collection of code fragments and useful notes for WordPress Basic word-count by post, from databse SELECT `ID`, `post_date`, `post_name`, `post_type`, `post_status`, `post_title`, `guid`, SUM( LENGTH(`post_content`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`post_content`, ' ', '')) + 1 ) AS 'Wordcount' FROM `wp_posts` GROUP BY `ID`…
Nothing earth shattering, just a collection of code fragments and functions I keep re-writing and re-using... Basic compression of CSS for output // Remove comments $cssText = preg_replace('!/\*[^*]*\*+([^/][^*]*\*+)*/!', '', $custom_css_field); // Remove space after colons $cssText = str_replace(': ', ':',…
The realm of web performance goes deep into the perceived user experience of load time and the actual load time. My specific interest is in media and presenting information to readers - typically article pages. For any given news site,…
Your mileage will vary depending on age and disposition but this is what works for me. TSA Pre-Check via Global Entry I hate this in principle but here I am. If you don't have this get Global Entry which includes…
As the new template for The San Francisco Chronicle rolls out to a wider audience, I wanted to take a step back and talk a little about web page performance. Over the years we've asked a lot of our web pages, and…
When the GDPR privacy regulations came into effect, a lot of the discussion focused on consent banners, privacy policies, and legal obligations. What received less attention was the practical reality of implementation. I suspect many of the pundits had never…
I first started reverse-engineering the .puz file format about 6 years ago. Its a very efficient crossword format that goes to great lengths to compact the data into a small payload. (Update: In September 2021 the NYT no longer uses this file format)…
a.k.a. “I found an old bunch of screenshots” Quartz launched on September 24th, 2012 at 9:55am EST. As it comes up on 5 years of age, I thought it was overdue to test my l33t medium typing skillz. Quartz started…
You've registered a domain with Dreamhost and you might even be hosting a site there. In an ideal world you'd use Gmail with the domain for your email but you don't really want to shell out the money and have…
To be fair, these are not properly formatted Haikus but they are fun to extract and search for. This demo focuses on a current article from The New Yorker by pulling one from a JSON feed. However you can easily adapt this…
With the relaunch of Time.com, I've had a number of people comparing it to Quartz. This happened when The Daily Beast made updates last year too, but it's been more pronounced this time. Either way, it's something I still feel…