Week 5 of 2023

Weeklies are my notes of things not big enough for a blog post but worthy of being mentioned and linked to. Find all of my Weeklies at /weeklies.

Weeklies are back! Last six months has been tough and exhausting but recently I've been reading, watching and listening to a ton of fun stuff I want to share.

• Lateral with Tom Scott

  I was a big fan of Tom Scott's original Lateral game show where the questions were traditional-style but the answers required lateral thinking. Last fall, Tom launched a new Lateral show, this time a podcast and it's amazing. Each episode, he has 3 guests, often fellow Youtubers, artists and creators and they ask each other puzzle-y questions and discuss together to explore what the answer might be.

  It's the kind of show that makes me feel smart when I get the answer before the cast does.

• Hand-thrown frontends by Robb Owen

  I enjoyed this article by Robb Owen where he compares frontend development to the cyclical, iterative process of bowl-making rather than putting Lego bricks together as it's often described as.

• The Patchability of the Open Web by Dave Rupert

  A main reason I enjoy web, especially when interacted through browsers as a "medium" is that things can be modified. In 2020, I wrote about it more in depth and recently spent 6 months working at Mozilla helping developers build extensions for Firefox.

  Dave walks through a use-case he had adding customization features to audio elements in a website.

• Adding webmentions to your static blog by Jan Monschke

  I've been thinking about adding webmentions display to my blog and almost each week, I see a post on my RSS feed about the topic. This week I read this very good post by Jan Monschke.

  A few others to check are Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon by Carl Schwan, Using Webmentions in Eleventy by Max Böch and An In-Depth Tutorial of Webmentions + Eleventy by Sia Karamalegos.

• Subscribe a lot, consume a little by Rach Smith

  Rach has a great approach to content: subscribe to many feeds and then curate your consumption by being picky about what you read/watch/listen. I've started doing similar thing lately but I also unfollow feeds rather easily if I notice that I haven't been reading anything from a source that posts regularly.

  Once reason I really like RSS is that it doesn't matter if you post once a day or once a year: your post will get exactly the same weight on my feed. I'd even like to see a movement where my friends would have an "Important life events" kinda feed that I could follow and it would only share the rare, important stuff that matters.