Internet Voices and Not Doing the Thing
Hey folks!
Another week closer to the annual Wow-Nathan-That's-A-Lot-Of-Pies-Are-You-Sure-You-Want-Another Day...
And yes... Yes, I do... 🥧😈
Thinking Too Hard
I've been thinking about discoverability lately, and it feels that it's harder than it used to be to hear unique voices in the web industry. Part of it is that I'm off of Twitter and have resisted hopping onto the Fediverse and Mastodon or BlueSky or Threads or ... [SOCIAL EXHAUSTION INTENSIFIES] ... But where I HAVE found enjoyment and value is dredging up my RSS reader and slowly hunting down interesting personal websites.
And I think hunting is a good word for it because it requires intentional effort and selection. But now I only really hear from the people I want to, and I get to see things that might not get boosted in other channels. The downside is that it's consumption-based—I don't get to interact with people much in this way.
Messing with my RSS feeds got me thinking though. Awhile ago I found that feeds don't have to be style-less blobs of XML data. Like Dave Rupert's feed you can actually style XML data. Which made me think, if OPML is basically XML, could we style that too?
And we can! I created an XSL stylesheet for direct ingestion of OPML files from Feedly. You can see it here.
I hope as people start taking more to publishing on the web that we can see these types of lists show up everywhere and collectively boost the voices that have something interesting to say!
Interesting Web Bits
- HTMX has a Javascript API that may be all you need for simple tasks.
- New CSS math in rem() and mod(), and that's rem for REMainder, not Relative-EM units...
- Erik persuades us to use the power of the Light DOM inside the Shadow DOM
- Things That Aren't Doing the Thing... so easy to do THESE things instead of THE thing...
- A neat visualization using mapbox to show why we have built our cities vertically