Jim Nielsen’s Blog

blog.jim-nielsen.com — You’re Only As Strong As Your Weakest Point

April 20, 2025

In April 1945, as US soldiers overtook Merkers, Germany, stories began to surface to Army officials of stolen Nazi riches stored in the local salt mine....

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Be Mindful of What You Make Easy

April 16, 2025

Carson Gross has a post about vendoring which brought back memories of how I used to build websites in ye olden days, back in the dark times before npm....

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Some Love For Interoperable Apps

April 14, 2025

I like to try different apps. What makes trying different apps incredible is a layer of interoperability — standardized protocols, data formats, etc. When I...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Ductility on the Web

April 10, 2025

I learned a new word: ductile. Do you know it? I’m particularly interested in its usage in a physics/engineering setting when talking about materials. Here’s...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Background Image Opacity in CSS

April 8, 2025

The other day I was working on something where I needed to use CSS to apply multiple background images to an element, e.g. <div> My content with background...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Tag, You’re It

April 6, 2025

I saw these going around, but didn’t think I’d ever see myself get tagged — then Eric assuaged my FOMO. As I’ve done elsewhere talking about how I blog, I’m...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Flow State and Surfing

April 2, 2025

Jack Johnson is on Rick Rubin’s podcast Tetragrammaton talking about music, film making, creativity, and surfing. At one point (~24:30) Johnson talks about...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Don’t Forget the Meta Theme-Color Tag

March 31, 2025

Ever used a website where you toggle from light mode to dark mode and the web site changes but the chrome around the browser doesn’t? To illustrate, take a...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — The Value of Experience

March 27, 2025

Adam Silver has an article titled “Do you trust design advice from ChatGPT?” wherein he prompted the LLM: How do you add hint text to radio buttons? It gave...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Book Notes: “The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli

March 24, 2025

I recently finished Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time” and, of course, had a few web-adjacent thoughts come to mind. Who says lessons from physics...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — A Few Thoughts on Customizable Form Controls

March 22, 2025

Web developers have been waiting years for traction in styling HTML form controls. Is it possible the day has come? Here’s Jen Simmons on Mastodon: My team...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Proving Binaries

March 20, 2025

Heydon Pickering has an intriguing video dealing with the question: “Why is everything binary?” The gist of the video, to me, distills to this insight: The...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Ecosystems vs. Artifacts: Don’t Break the Web

March 17, 2025

Here’s Gordon Brander in an article titled “Don't fork the ecosystem”: Most of our software has been shaped by chance decisions made in haste by people who...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Building WebSites With LLMS

March 4, 2025

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S). I recently shipped some updates to my blog. Through the design/development process, I had some...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — AX, DX, UX

March 3, 2025

Matt Biilman, CEO of Netlify, published an interesting piece called “Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters” where he argues the coming importance of a...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Can You Get Better Doing a Bad Job?

February 28, 2025

Rick Rubin has an interview with Woody Harrelson on his podcast Tetragrammaton. Right at the beginning Woody talks about his experience acting and how he’s...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Limitations vs. Capabilities

February 26, 2025

Andy Jiang over on the Deno blog writes “If you're not using npm specifiers, you're doing it wrong”: During the early days of Deno, we recommended importing...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Sanding UI, pt. II

February 24, 2025

Let’s say you make a UI to gather some user feedback. Nothing complicated. Just a thumbs up/down widget. It starts out neutral, but when the user clicks up...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — CSS Space Toggles

February 19, 2025

I’ve been working on a transition to using light-dark() function in CSS. What this boils down to is, rather than CSS that looks like this: :root { color-...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Aspect Ratio Changes With CSS View Transitions

February 17, 2025

So here I am playing with CSS view transitions (again). I’ve got Dave Rupert’s post open in one tab, which serves as my recurring reference for the question,...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Search Results Without JavaScript

February 13, 2025

I’m currently looking to add a search feature to my blog. It’s a client-side approach, which means I was planning on using my favorite progressive-...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — The Art of Making Websites

February 10, 2025

Hidde de Vries gave a great talked titled “Creativity cannot be computed” (you can checkout the slides or watch the video). In his slides he has lots of...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Software Pliability

February 7, 2025

Quoting myself from former days on Twitter: Businesses have a mental model of what they do. Businesses build software to help them do it—a concrete...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Blown Away By the Unexpected

February 4, 2025

A friend gave me a copy of the book “Perfect Wave” by Dave Hickey. I’ve been slowly reading through each essay and highlighting parts with my red pencil....

blog.jim-nielsen.com — UI Pace Layers

February 3, 2025

Jeremy Keith, Chris Coyier, and others (see Jeremy’s post) have written about the idea of “pace layers” and now I’m going to take a stab at applying it to...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Notes on Google Search Now Requiring JavaScript

January 29, 2025

John Gruber has a post about how Google’s search results now require JavaScript[1]. Why? Here’s Google: the change is intended to “better protect” Google...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Missed Connections

January 28, 2025

Let me tell you about one of the best feelings. You have a problem. You bang your head on it for a while. Through the banging, you formulate a string of...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — HTML Minification for Static Sites

January 27, 2025

This is a note to my future self, as I’ve setup HTML minification on a few different projects and each time I ask myself, “How did I do that again?” So...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Consistency For Who? Thoughts on Overriding Basic Computing Controls

January 23, 2025

A note before we start: I don’t know how much of this I believe. I’m sketching out some feelings in this post and thinking through whether it actually makes...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Relationship Advice for AI

January 20, 2025

You know what’s really helpful in solving my own problems? Writing them down, sending them to someone, and not hearing back. You ever do that? For me, it’s a...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Tools As Ways of Being

January 16, 2025

I took notes from Sean Voisen’s call for more hybrid tools. He speaks for a moment on generative AI and its inclusion into existing tools, but reading...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Using Locally-Installed CLI Tools In Node Projects

January 14, 2025

You have a dependency that provides a CLI tool, how do you use it? Even though you did npm i from your project root, if you run it won’t work because that...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Gotchas in Naming CSS View Transitions

January 13, 2025

I’m playing with making cross-document view transitions work on this blog. Nothing fancy. Mostly copying how Dave Rupert does it on his site where you get a...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Don’t Miss the Product for the Artifacts

January 9, 2025

Ever hear that idiom, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees”? The idea being, you miss the bigger picture because you’re focused on the minutia? Feels like...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Social Inflation

January 7, 2025

Imagine you’re on a social network and you start getting tons of followers. You love it! Your follower count is going up! Instead of a nobody with a couple...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — Push Notifications Are Organizational Marshmallows

January 6, 2025

It’s a notifications’ world, we’re just living in it. Companies can’t help but try and get your attention via email, text, or push notifications and drive...

blog.jim-nielsen.com — You Can Now Subscribe To My Blog via Email

January 5, 2025

I don’t think you should. I think you should use RSS. But if you want posts delivered directly to your email, you can do that now. However, disclaimer: I...