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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...
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