Tagged “twitter”

I just deactivated my Twitter (X) account. Within the wider current context of other small, positive changes I’m making, it feels like the time is right.

I gave it a little thought, but not much. There were plenty of reasons to deactivate (for my own good and because X under Elon is x-crutiating) and not many good reasons to stay.

I used their download your archive feature before deactivating.

I guess I might lose a bit of touch with some web and music folks but I’m sure I’ll catch up with them in other ways.

And I s’ppose someone might try to get in touch via Twitter and find I’m no longer there, but if they want to find me online, I’m sure they will.

One less avenue for procrastination!

A handy tool which lets you type in a URL then inspects that page’s meta tags and shows you how it will be presented on popular websites.

This is really useful for testing how an article will look as a Google search result or when shared on Facebook, Slack and Twitter based on different meta tag values.

Strong agree with these sentiments regarding accessibility expressed by Max Böck and Andrey Okonetchnikov on Twitter.

From Andrey:

If you’re building UI, it’s your responsibility to make it work for everyone. Clients often tell me “we don’t care about accessibility” but in reality they do want keyboard support at the very least. So I just build my UI in a way it works without discussing it. It’s my job.

To which Max replies:

This. A11y is not “extra effort for people with disabilities”, it‘s just part of a well-crafted UI.

I’m currently interested in how to spend less time on social media platforms so as to be less exposed to ads, algorithms and general ill-effects. One approach I’m trialling is going back to the old school and using RSS to receive and aggregate updates from the people I follow, allowing me to read them in a central, noise-free place and not have to use social platform websites and apps.

I use the free, open source Mac and iOS app NetNewsWire on my MacBook. This is where I tend to add and organise my RSS feeds as it has a good UI, for example for arranging feeds into suitable folders.

If I want to read new items away from my Mac (on my phone, or on another computer), I use Feedbin – either the website or the iOS app. NewsNetWire and Feedbin sync pretty seemlessly so any organisation I’ve done in NetNewsWire is visible in Feedbin.

Feedbin is paid (I currently pay 5 USD per month). It has a slick UI and, since it’s a website accessible from anywhere, could be treated as your “central hub” for reading.

Feedbin also offers a few very interesting features.

• You can use it to subscribe to email newsletters, because it provides you with an email address for that purpose. This means you can have your newsletters arrive into the same central place as your RSS feeds;
• You can subscribe to Twitter accounts, and choose to filter tweets by only those with links or media attached (in theory the “more interesting” tweets);
• there’s a “Send to Feedbin” bookmarklet that essentially provides a one-click “Read later” function for use when browsing the web. This is a really handy feature because sometimes when I’m browsing I want to mark an article as “read later” rather than bookmarking it on my website, because until I’ve read it I won’t know if it’s bookmark-worthy. Having this feature destresses online life a little by stopping me leaving lots of browser tabs open at articles I “need to read”! I previously used Instapaper (and their bookmarklet) for this function, but again, it makes sense for me to bring everything into one place (Feedbin);
• You can “star” (i.e. save) items you’ve read but want to revisit, which is handy when browsing your “Unread” list on the move; and
• You can “share” items to well-known services (Twitter, Facebook etc) but interestingly also to a “custom service” by providing a URL. I could see me using this in future to bookmark an article on my own website.

I’m also currently trialling RSS.app for its ability to let me type in an Instagram user profile URL then give me back an RSS feed URL which I can add into Feedbin, and that’s working well so far, too.

Note: many thanks to Chris Coyier whose post NetNewsWire and Feedbin pointed me toward these excellent RSS clients.

Daniel Post shared a really cool performance-optimisation trick for Eleventy on Twitter the other day. When statically generating your site you can loop through your pages and, for each, use PurgeCSS to find the required CSS, then inline that into the <head>. This way, each page contains only the CSS it needs and no more!

Check out the code.

I’ve just installed this on my personal site. I was already inlining my CSS into the <head> but the promise of only including the minimum CSS that each specific page needs was too good to resist.

Turned out it was a breeze to get working, a nice introduction to Eleventy transforms, and so far it’s working great!

"Ok, as part of your interview test for junior developer, we want you to put some words, an image and some links onto a webpage. We use Node, Docker, Kubernetes, React, Redux, Puppeteer, Babel, Bootstrap, Webpack, <div> and <span>. Go!"

Bruce Lawson nicely illustrates how ridiculous many job adverts for web developers are. This (see video) never fails to crack me up. It’s funny ‘cos it’s true!

(via @brucel)