I've watched the Whimsical Web slowly grow over the last few days and it's been excellent. There's a lot of sites (and developers/designers) that I already know on the list but plenty more I would never have come across. From the brilliant connect-the-dots on Timo Becker's site, to the utter madness of Luke Towers' chaos button, it's great fun.
An IndieWeb alternative to Instapaper, Pocket, etc. that lets you save web pages to read later via your own microsub server.
Recoil is a new state management library from Facebook (though note this isn't an official React project). Doesn't seem to do anything too fancy, but does use a similar mental model to hooks and feels particularly easy to grok. Nice writeup with examples.
A neat little tool that can allow you to annotate a web page, comment on annotations, and then save/share/export that information. Spotted in an IndieWebCamp show-off session where one user has combined it with IFTTT and Micropub to push annotations directly to a notes section on their site. Unclear how well supported it is.
The Object.is() function is pretty much identical to the old "strict equality operator" (===), with two notable differences:
Object.is(NaN, NaN) // true);Object.is(-0, +0) // false).Personally, I agree with 1) and not 2), so guess there still isn't an equality check which is intuitive to me 😂 Getting close though!
Very informative beginner's guide to testing React websites using Jest and the React Testing Library.
A great talk from Jackie about the potential future evolution for the IndieWeb, with some exceptional quotes. Feels like it hit on my own worries/interests around the movement, in particular with the idea of lowering the barrier of entry for being part of it.
Our mission isn't necessarily to replace social media, but to acknowledge that the web is the initial social network and that we should be complementing and extending it versus closing it off.
There's a way to speak to your plumber and a way to speak with the person who needs to live in the house with the plumbing.
Also, damn this is a great slogan for the IndieWeb movement:
We build for ourselves so we can interact with one another.
Sarah has put into words some feelings I've had recently about the web (and uses two sites as examples that I keep returning to as well: Josh W Comeau and Cassie Codes) :
The small delights and touches, the little a-ha moments, make me STAY. I wander around the site, exploring, learning, feeling actually more connected to each of these humans rather than as if I’m glancing at a PDF of their resume.
Basically, the web should be joyous. It's a space unlike any other, where creativity can take multiple forms, yet it increasingly feels like a collection of corporate cookie cutters. It's not just about personal impact, either. Sites that make you enjoy using them keep you coming back. They increase engagement. They decrease bounce rates. It's win-win. Plus, you can start small, as Sarah says, by just introducing little easter eggs or moments of flair.
If something is meaningful to you, the audience you’ll gather will likely be the folks that find it meaningful, too.
Brilliant resource for the identification of dragonflies, damselflies, and demoiselle species found in the UK with excellent reference photography.
Neat little app and citizen-science project, eBird looks like it could be a useful way of tracking twitching sightings. Wonder if they have an API?
...the NYPD currently has a $6bn budget, let next year's be $300m, and let them fight over it. Bonus! You've got $5.7bn for decarbonization efforts.
What... 😯
That means the NYPD has almost one-third of NASA's budget ($22.8bn). How?! The rest of Pablo's article is a great summary of why we need to rethink the justice systems that are in place, particularly in the US (though the UK is far from innocent). He also makes some excellent points about working at companies like Facebook and how far walkouts actually work.
Next time? Take down the site and APIs until Mark and Sheryl come to the table.
That people can be bought into brutalizing others sucks, but it's a reality I accept; if you're going to do it, it's insulting to have our future sold for so fucking cheap.
An enhanced version of the <datalist> element that uses a tiny amount of additional CSS and JS to modernise the element and bring additional functionality to it.