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Vale

vale@fedi.vale.rocks

Front-end developer, designer, writer, and avid user of the superpowered information superhighway.

Posts

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    px in CSS ≠ a pixel on a display. This is something that is obvious when you think about it at all, but many people seem to gloss over it. I was explaining it to someone and figured I’d be best to jot it down: https://vale.rocks/micros/20260928-0515

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    My hammer went rogue and started smashing people’s heads in! There was nothing I could do. I tried to stop it, but my arm kept swinging it at people. It isn’t my fault! It is the hammer’s. This is very dangerous. Someone should regulate hammers. (This is a post about AI safety and liability.)

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    @csstricks@mastodon.social is once again stuck in an arbitrary suspension at the hands of DigitalOcean’s radio silence. It is devastating to see such a brilliant publication treated so very poorly. The current situation: https://vale.rocks/micros/20260915-0135 #WebDev #Web #CSSTricks

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    I’ve had quite a number of people tell me to stop bringing up ‘politics’ in my writing. For example, when I’ve decried Elon Musk and DHH when mentioning X (Twitter) and Omarchy, respectively. Plainly, no. I will continue to mention injustices and wrongs. Tech is political – especially now. The only people that are helped by staying quiet about bigotry, racism, fascism, xenophobia, etc, are the bigots, racists, fascists, and xenophobes. I’ll call it out where I see it, and I urge everyone else...

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    Sometimes you look at an old HTML document and see some weird tags and snippets from bygone eras. I’ve compiled many legacy HTML bits I’ve noticed and documented what they were and why there were present. Many of them are rather obscure. Satisfy your curiosity: https://vale.rocks/posts/html-relics #WebDev #HTML

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    Want to spend the next half-hour reading my thoughts on the Halo series? I finished Halo: Campaign Evolved over the weekend, so here is my review and full thoughts. https://vale.rocks/posts/halo-my-thoughts#halo-campaign-evolved #Halo #HaloCE

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    Can’t wait to see AI-driven dementia become a big thing with people offloading all their thinking and their brains thusly deteriorating.

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    Reddit is slowly winding down Old Reddit. Functionality is being removed and features are discreetly disappearing. They’re quite obviously eroding its functionality so that when they finally kill it there is less outrage. Sucks as someone who makes money from Old Reddit stylesheets… RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116841255596329539

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    I love dark mode, but it mustn’t be the only option. For a lot of people, white text upon a dark background is illegible. Common eye conditions like astigmatism, myopia, and presbyopia can make content look foggy, become hard to focus on, and cause eye strain. #a11y #Accessibility

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    With the review I performed today, there are now over a thousand personal sites listed on PersonalSit.es! A thousand! Proper bonkers! What a milestone! 🥳 🎉 #IndieWeb #SmallWeb

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    You can’t put important links exclusively in your site’s footer if you have infinite scroll. You can’t have infinite scroll if you put important links exclusively in your site’s footer. Please stop.

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    A lot of developers mistakenly think that the code is the product. In reality, for most businesses the product is the product, and the code is merely means to an end. I think this explains why so many developers’ efforts are so horribly misguided by modern technologies. They’re building the code, not the product.

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    To all fleeing from Firefox due to their tone-deaf AI fumblings, please don’t move to a Chromium-based browser. Diversity in browser engines is critical for an open web. We must avoid a monopoly at all costs. #Browsers #Firefox #Mozilla

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    I released some 88x31 web buttons/badges for various Git forges which are hopefully useful for folks leaving GitHub. (I also released badges for Stoat and ListenBrainz) All available on Tangled: https://tangled.org/vale.rocks/88x31-Buttons-Badges

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    Currently at 973 sites on PersonalSit.es. Come on! Submit your site! Lets get this thing to a thousand! Haven’t got a personal site? No worries. Go make one (then submit it)! #IndieWeb #SmallWeb

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    Publishing pixel art on the web? Don’t let it get blurred and smushed. Apply the image-rendering: crisp-edges CSS property. Alternatively, export your pixel art at a higher resolution, so each visual pixel is made of many pixels, minimising impact from scaling and compression. Remember to also use a good file format. Formats like JPEG are optimised for photos, not pixel art, and can introduce artefacts. PNG and GIF are good choices. #PixelArt #CSS

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    I’m so tired. #a11y #Accessibility

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    I hate having to ask this. Does anyone know how to get an article removed from Grokipedia? I’ve just discovered there is an entry about me, and I’d really prefer there wasn’t one. Seems my sites are also ‘referenced’ several times.

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    I’m looking for a device I can use for WebKit/Safari testing. However, I can’t justify splashing too much cash on a MacBook that I’ll scarcely use. I’m looking at something with Apple Silicon so that it won’t be dropped by the next software update. Currently considering a 2020 M1 MacBook Air with a broken screen, which I can use headless. Maybe a Mac Mini, but they’re pretty scarce on the second-hand market. People seem to hang onto iMacs long-term, so they aren’t really around. Any thoughts?

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    I had the privilege of penning an article for the latest issue of Good Internet Magazine! It is all about the process of making and experiencing art and how friction and inefficiency needn’t be dirty procurances to avoid and evade. https://goodinternetmagazine.com/rebelling-against-efficiency/ If you enjoy this article, you might consider picking up the physical print copy of the magazine, which you can buy on the site. A proper palpable paper printing of passionate prose for your pleasant pe...

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    It is my true and honest opinion that every logo design process should involve a step of presenting the concept to a 14-year-old boy so they can identify anything phallic.

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    I reckon Wendy Carlos’ website is brilliant. Such a lovely web capsule. https://wendycarlos.com

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    My driver evidently isn’t a logical properties guy as he gave me a weird look when I told him to turn inline-start at the lights.

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    China’s internet is shaped by censorship and strict regulations – insulated from the rest of the world, but not completely isolated. This is the second of three posts I’m publishing this week about China, censorship, and technology: https://vale.rocks/posts/chinas-web #China #Censorship #InternetFreedom

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    My site’s search functionality now supports searching not only content natively on my site but also my writing on other publications. All possible thanks to a mini-site made with WebOrigami that indexes external content and the ever-wonderful Pagefind library. This is useful, because sometimes I get messages asking if I was the one who wrote about a topic. It has long been easy for people to search for content present directly on my site, but it has been tricky to search in one place for my w...

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    Many people with far greater knowledge than I possess have discussed accessibility overlays, but I think the more voices and inputs in the public corpus the better. Accessibility overlays are harmful and make things worse, not better. Avoid them. https://vale.rocks/posts/accessibility-overlays #Accessibility #a11y

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    position: sticky is one of those CSS things I can never get first time. Try as I might, I always end up flubbing around with it. #CSS #FrontEndDev #WebDev

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    I’ve been putting together a collection of web badges/buttons after being nerd sniped by @henry. I plan to make a great deal more, but these are what I’ve got so far. https://vale.rocks/portfolio/88x31-buttons-badges #88x31 #WebBadges #IndieWeb #SmallWeb

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    Game console interfaces used to be detailed and assembled with care. Now they’re nothing more than a collection of rounded squares. I wrote about the death of distinct game console interfaces and how they all feel so empty and clinical now: https://vale.rocks/posts/game-console-interfaces #Gaming #UI #RetroGaming