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In 2016, I built my very first gaming PC, armed with a PCPartPicker list and a ton of Reddit research.

There have been various blog posts and social media posts in the last couple of years about people rejecting streaming services and going back to buying music, listening on handheld devices that - gasp - aren't phones.

When was the last time I did one of these?

I've given my website a bit of a refresh!

There are many things that make me extremely uncool, but one of my particularly nerdy interests is the London Underground.

Throughout my career, I feel like I’ve done a pretty decent job of staying top of new developments in the industry: attending conferences, following (and later befriending!)

Skip to bits you care about: The year in... ...furry friends ...retreating into my cave ...conferences ...gardening ...books ...music ...video games ...blog posts The year in... ...furry friends We got a dog!

Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search.

I meant to post this in May, but then I went back to work after my final (sob) sabbatical, and I also lost a lot of time to Blue Prince at some point, so here we are in July.

This is an updated & abridged version of the talk I gave at several conferences throughout 2022/23, including Beyond Tellerrand, CSS Day and FFConf.

This takes me back to my teenage years, doing Friday Five on my blog and later on the sets of questions on LiveJournal that were known as memes.

You Are Not Meant To Scale - Keith Kurson - “Take a deep breath, and say out loud: I am not a machine, I am not meant to scale.

Everyone knows your location - It’s quite jarring to see the kind of information that gets sent to the highest bidder from seemingly innocuous apps.

After 4 (cumulative) years of service at my job in late 2023, I became eligible for a 3-month paid sabbatical (honestly what a perk).

For Christmas 2022, I bought my husband a Steam Deck.

It’s Boxing Day and I’m a small pile on the sofa.

modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics - every word of this post resonates, and you should read it.

A roundup of fun things and projects.

I was very fortunate to speak at another excellent Beyond Tellerrand last week, alongside some brilliant and wonderful people.

Nic Chan - Nic has just finished rebuilding her website and it’s INCREDIBLE!

Those of you who know me (or who have been reading my posts for a while) will know that I'm often at conferences.

How to Monetize a Blog - Just read it, ok?

I've built a new theme for this site, inspired by my love of gardening as well as one of my favourite video games.

The area element - I’m really enjoying Heydon’s HTML element safari, from the better-known to the lesser-known.

After an initial burst of blogging energy January followed by a series of automated posts featuring good things I’d read recently, it fell off a cliff towards the end of March.

Heat Death of the Internet - takahē - “The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information.

A few years back I got so bored of taking attendance for my choir that I wrote a Slack integration to do it for me (I got us on Slack in 2014).

Say hello to the Mykeyclub MKC75!

First conference of the year is done, and what a conference it was!

Mastodon has often been touted as some kind of grassroots utopia compared to the bro-niverse that is Twitter.

On having no visual memory - Rachel Andrew shares her experiences of what it’s like to have aphantasia.

You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist - I am BARRY HESS - “You don’t need to labor over your posts.

It's rhubarb season!

Two years after All Day Hey made me realise I missed the web, I'm really excited to be speaking there myself!

"a proper cup of tea" by Terry - An absolutely joyously chaotic tea-making game.

Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again - Jared White reflects on his early experiences of the web, and suggests maybe we’re ready to do the 90s web again…

This isn't going to be a tech post, mainly because I haven't really been enjoying tech things recently.

Some little ways I’m using CSS :has() in the real world - Piccalilli - Some great tips for one of my favourite recent CSS features.

Tailwind vs Semantic CSS - Found via Andy Bell's site - as he puts it, this post is pretty clearly biased towards semantic CSS but I think it's pretty evident fromt his that bare-bones HTML with "plain old CSS" is a lot more performant than stuffing a page

It's OK to abandon your side-project - Robb Owen - "We hear about all the side-project success stories, but what if we talked more openly about the ones that tanked?"

The Midnight Pub - A tiny forum in the form of a virtual pub.

Please, don’t force me to log in - It feels like every website or connected device wants you to sign up before you can use it these days… It feels like React is getting a bit of a kicking recently - Piccalilli - There's a lot of React criticism floating a…

At university I worked at Manchester Academy, and would often end up behind the bar at all sorts of gigs from pop, to metal, to folk.

Old'aVista - Altavista was my first search engine (or should I say altavista+was+my+first+search+engine) and this is a delightful trip down memory lane.

This is a dangerous path you're about to walk down.

Edit 04/02/24 to change the comparator date from midnight on previous Saturday to midnight on previous Sunday to prevent duplicate links being published.

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit - Aftermath - How AI-generated content is ruining search engines for everyone.

It occurred to me this week that even though I’ve been using webmentions as comments for a really long time, I hadn’t actually been sending them myself.

Skip to the bit you care about: About Neocities Hosting a static site on Neocities Continuous deployment to Neocities with Github Actions Scheduling builds I’ve hosted this website in a few different places since I started it in 2019.

I came across Sara Joy's (very cool) demo of CSS theming without classes today, and looking through the code spotted a couple of elements I hadn't come across before: <progress> and <meter>.