Tags: link

People spent a lot of time and energy in 2024 talking about (and on) other people’s websites. Twitter. Bluesky. Mastodon. Even LinkedIn.

I observed it all with the dispassionate perspective of Dr. Manhattan on Mars. While I’m happy to see more people abondoning the cesspool that is Twitter, I’m not all that invested in either Mastodon or Bluesky. Or any other website, for that matter. I’m glad they’re there, but if they disappeared tomorrow, I’d carry on posting here on my own site.

I posted to my website over 850 times in 2024.

I shared over 350 links.

I posted over 400 notes.

I published just one article.

And I wrote almost 100 blog posts here in my journal this year.

Here are some cherry-picked highlights:

• January: Continuous partial ick — Voigt-Kampff.
• March: What the world needs — Write for yourself.
• April: My approach to HTML web components — Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
• June: Filters — A web by humans, for humans.
• August: Frostapalooza — A truly special event.
• November: The meaning of “AI” — Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.

Daring Fireball: Kottke on the Art and Power of Hypertextual Writing

Hypertext links are an information-density multiplier.

The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.

Long live hypertext! – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

This is how I write:

As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.

Raw dog the open web!

In our current digital landscape, where a corporate algorithm tells us what to read, watch, drink, eat, wear, smell like, and sound like, human curation of the web is an act of revolution. A simple list of hyperlinks published under a personal domain name is subversive.

Notes – David Bushell

David is on board. Who else?

I was having a discussion with some of my peers a little while back. We were collectively commenting on the state of education and documentation for front-end development.

A lot of the old stalwarts have fallen by the wayside of late. CSS Tricks hasn’t been the same since it got bought out by Digital Ocean. A List Apart goes through fallow periods. Even the Mozilla Developer Network is looking to squander its trust by adding inaccurate “content” generated by a large language model.

The most obvious solution is to start up a brand new resource for front-end developers. But there are two probems with that:

1. It’s really, really, really hard work, and
2. It feels a bit 927.

I actually think there are plenty of good articles and resources on front-end development being published. But they’re not being published in any one specific place. People are publishing them on their own websites.

Ahmed, Josh, Stephanie, Andy, Lea, Rachel, Robin, Michelle …I could go on, but you get the picture.

All this wonderful stuff is distributed across the web. If you have a well-stocked RSS reader, you’re all set. But if you’re new to front-end development, how do you know where to find this stuff? I don’t think you can rely on search, unless you have a taste for slop.

I think the solution lies not with some hand-wavey “AI” algorithm that burns a forest for every query. I think the solution lies with human curation.

I take inspiration from Phil’s fantastic project, ooh.directory. Imagine taking that idea of categorisation and applying it to front-end dev resources.

Whether it’s a post on web.dev, Smashing Magazine, or someone’s personal site, it could be included and categorised appropriately.

Now, there would still be a lot of work involved, especially in listing and categorising the articles that are already out there, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much work as trying to create those articles from scratch.

I don’t know what the categories should be. Does it make sense to have top-level categories for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with sub-directories within them? Or does it make more sense to categorise by topics like accessibility, animation, and so on?

And this being the web, there’s no reason why one article couldn’t be tagged to simultaneously live in multiple categories.

There’s plenty of meaty information architecture work to be done. And there’d be no shortage of ongoing work to handle new submissions.

A stretch goal could be the creation of “playlists” of hand-picked articles. “Want to get started with CSS grid layout? Read that article over there, watch this YouTube video, and study this page on MDN.”

What do you think? Does this one-stop shop of hyperlinks sound like it would be useful? Does it sound feasible?

I’m just throwing this out there. I’d love it if someone were to run with it.

There’s a new addition to the latest version of Chrome called speculation rules. This already existed before with a different syntax, but the new version makes more sense to me.

Notice that I called this an addition, not a standard. This is not a web standard, though it may become one in the future. Or it may not. It may wither on the vine and disappear (like most things that come from Google).

The gist of it is that you give the browser one or more URLs that the user is likely to navigate to. The browser can then pre-fetch or even pre-render those links, making that navigation really snappy. It’s a replacement for the abandoned link rel="prerender".

Because this is a unilateral feature, I’m not keen on shipping the code to all browsers. The old version of the API required a script element with a type value of “speculationrules”. That doesn’t do any harm to browsers that don’t support it—it’s a progressive enhancement. But unlike other progressive enhancements, this isn’t something that will just start working in those other browsers one day. I mean, it might. But until this API is an actual web standard, there’s no guarantee.

That’s why I was pleased to see that the new version of the API allows you to use an external JSON file with your list of rules.

I say “rules”, but they’re really more like guidelines. The browser will make its own evaluation based on bandwidth, battery life, and other factors. This feature is more like srcset than source: you give the browser some options, but ultimately you can’t force it to do anything.

I’ve implemented this over on The Session. There’s a JSON file called speculationrules.js with the simplest of suggestions:

{
  "prerender": [{
    "where": {
        "href_matches": "/*"
    },
    "eagerness": "moderate"
  }]
}

The eagerness value of “moderate” says that any link can be pre-rendered if the user hovers over it for 200 milliseconds (the nuclear option would be to use a value of “immediate”).

I still need to point to that JSON file from my HTML. Usually this would be done with something like a link element, but for this particular API, I can send a response header instead:

Speculation-Rules: “/speculationrules.json"

I like that. The response header is being sent to every browser, regardless of whether they support speculation rules or not, but at least it’s just a few bytes. Those other browsers will ignore the header—they won’t download the JSON file.

Here’s the PHP I added to send that header:

header('Speculation-Rules: "/speculationrules.json"');

There’s one extra thing I had to do. The JSON file needs to be served with mime-type of “application/speculationrules+json”. Here’s how I set that up in the .conf file for The Session on Apache:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
  <FilesMatch "speculationrules.json">
    Header set Content-type application/speculationrules+json
   </FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

A bit of a faff, that.

You can see it in action on The Session. Open up Chrome or Edge (same same but different), fire up the dev tools and keep the network tab open while you navigate around the site. Notice how hovering over a link will trigger a new network request. Clicking on that link will get you that page lickety-split.

Mind you, in the case of The Session, the navigations were already really fast—performance is a feature—so it’s hard to guage how much of a practical difference it makes in this case, but it still seems like a no-brainer to me: taking a few minutes to add this to your site is worth doing.

Oh, there’s one more thing to be aware of when you’re implementing speculation rules. You have the option of excluding URLs from being pre-fetched or pre-rendered. You might need to do this if you’ve got links for adding items to shopping carts, or logging the user out. But my advice would instead be: stop using GET requests for those actions!

Most of the examples given for unsafe speculative loading conditions are textbook cases of when not to use links. Links are for navigating. They’re indempotent. For everthing else, we’ve got forms.

Qubyte Codes - IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024

Mark’s write-up of the excellent Indie Web Camp Brighton that he co-organised with Paul.

The past weekend’s Indie Web Camp Brighton was wonderful! Many thanks to Mark and Paul for all their work putting it together.

There was a great turn-out. It felt like the perfect time for an Indie Web Camp. There’s a real appetite for getting away from ever more extractive silos and staking claim to our own corners of the web. Most of the attendees were at their first ever Indie Web Camp.

Paul asked me to oversee the schedule planning on day one, which I was happy to do. We made sure that first-timers got first dibs on proposing sessions. In the end, every single session was proposed by new attendees.

Day two was all about putting ideas into practice: coding, designing, and writing on our own website. I’m always blown away by how much gets done in just one short day. Best of all is when there’s someone who starts the weekend without their own website but finishes with a live site. That happened again this time.

I spent the second day tinkering with something I started at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg in October. Back then, I got related posts working here on my journal; a list of suggested follow-up posts to read based on the tags of the current post.

I wanted to do the same for my links; show links related to the one I’m currently linking to. It didn’t take too long to get that up and running.

But then I thought about it some more and realised it would be good to also show blog posts related to the link. So I did that. Then I realised it would be really good to show related links under blog posts too.

So now, if everything’s working correctly, then at the end of this post you will not only see related blog posts I’ve previously written, but also links related to the content of this post.

It was a very inspiring weekend. There’s something about being in a room with other people working on their websites that makes me super productive.

While we were hacking away on day two, somebody mentioned that they still find hard to explain the indie web to people.

“It’s having your own website”, I said.

But surely there’s more to it than that, they wondered.

Nope. If someone has their own website, then they’re part of the indie web. It doesn’t matter if that website is made with a complicated home-rolled tech stack or if it’s a Squarespace site.

What you do with your own website is entirely up to you. The technologies are just plumbing wether it’s webmentions, RSS, or anything else. None of it is a requirement. Heck, even HTML is optional. If you want to put plain text files on your website, go for it. It’s your website.

The Subversive Hyperlink - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Subvert the status quo. Own a website. Make and share links.

The web is mostly links and forms | Go Make Things

In the same vein as that last link, Chris says what we’re all thinking:

Most of what we build is links from one page to another, and form submissions that send data from the browser to the server.

Beyond the Frame | Untangling Non-Linearity

A fascinating look at the connections between hypertext and film editing. I’m a sucker for any article that cites both Ted Nelson and Walter Murch.

One of the first ever personal websites—long before the word “blog” was a mischievous gleam in Peter’s eye—was Justin Hall’s links.net. Linking was right there in the domain name.

I really enjoy sharing links on my website. It feels good to point to something and say, “Hey, check this out!”

Other people are doing it too.

• I really enjoy Neil’s links (RSS), always wrapped up with a quote of the day.
• Scott Boms’s Through Lines (RSS) are always packed with good stuff, along with new typeface releases.
• Jim Nielsen’s notes (RSS) are as valuable as his blog, which is to say, very.
• Then there’s Clive Thompson’s Linkfest (RSS)—it’s right there in the name.

Then there are some relatively new additions to the linking gang:

• Hidde’s links (RSS),
• Andy’s links (RSS), and
• Sophie’s links (RSS) batched into a weekly release.

There are more out there for you to discover and add to your feed reader of choice. Good link hunting!

RSS Anything

Next time you’re frustrated by a website that doesn’t provide an RSS feed, try using this tool:

Transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS Feed

I was impressed with how Safari now allows you to add websites to the dock:

It feels great to have websites that act just like other apps. I like that some of the icons in my dock are native, some are web apps, and I mostly don’t notice the difference.

Trys liked it too:

For all intents and purposes, this is a desktop application created without a single line of Swift or Objective-C, or any heavy Electron wrappers.

Oh, and the application can work offline! Service workers, and browser storage are more than stable enough to handle a variety of offline loading patterns. These are truly exciting times to be building for the web!

There was one aspect that I was particularly pleased with. External links:

Links within a Safari-installed web app respect your default browser choice.

Excellent! Except it’s no longer true. At least not in some cases. The behaviour is inconsisent but I’m running the latest version of Safari on the latest version of Sonoma, and now external links in a Safari-installed web app are broken. They just stay in the same application.

I thought maybe it was related to whether the website’s manifest file has the display value set to “standalone” rather than, say, “minimal ui”. Maybe the “standalone” instruction is being taken literally? But even when I change the value I’m still getting the broken behaviour.

This may sound like a small thing, but it completely changes the feel of using the web app. Instead of feeling like “I’m using an app that just happens to be on the web”, it now feels like “I’m using a web browser but with fewer features.”

I’ve been loving having Mastodon as a standalone app in my dock. It used to be that if I clicked on a link in a Mastodon post, it would open in my browser of choice (Firefox) where I could then bookmark it, or do any other tasks that my browser offers me. Now if I click on a link in Mastodon, I’m stuck in the same “app”. It feels horribly stifling.

I can right-click on a link and get options that still keep me in the same app, like “Open link” or “Open Link in New Window.” To actually open the link in my web browser, I have to select “Copy Link”, then go to my web browser, open a new tab, and paste the link in there.

This is broken. I hope it isn’t intentional. Maybe I’m just at the receiving end of some weird glitch. If this stays this way, I’ll probably just remove the Safari-installed web apps from my dock. They feel pointless if they’re just roach motels.

I’d love to file a bug for this, but this isn’t a Webkit bug, it’s a Safari bug (and the Webkit bug tracker is at pains to point out that Webkit and Safari are not the same thing). But have you ever tried to file a bug with Apple? Good luck!

Anyway, I sincerely hope that this change will be walked back. Otherwise websites in the dock are dead in the water.

unrot•link

Remy has turned his linkrot-battling technique into a service that you can use. He has more details on his blog.

Revealing ‘back to top’ button

Such a clever minimalist use of CSS!

John Willshire has been pondering web marginilia AKA stuff you put in your sidebar.

He has a particular fondness for the good ol’ blogroll. I’ve still got my analogue equivalent on my homepage—the bedroll. It’s a list of links to people who’ve stayed over. Maybe I should also have a regular blogroll, but I suspect it would just be a reproduction of feeds I’m subscribed to.

Then there’s marginalia at the level of a blog post, rather than a whole blog. Kevin Marks points out that this is something that Vannevar Bush described his theoretical memex doing—a device I was just talking about. Kevin created a proof of concept showing outbound and inbound links.

Outbound links are annoted versions of the A elements in a blog post. Inbound links are webmentions (which should now include this post of mine).

Kevin has those links in the margins on either side of the blog post. I’ve also got links that go with my blog posts, but they’re displayed linearly:

1. the post itself,
2. any responses (webmentions),
3. related posts, something I only recently added, and
4. posts from the same day further back in time.

Do they still count as marginalia when they’re presented vertically rather than alongside? For mobile devices, I’m not sure there’s any alternative.

After two days at border:none in Nuremberg, it was time for two days at Indie Web Camp, also in Nuremberg.

I hadn’t been to an Indie Web Camp since before The Situation. It felt very good to be back. I had almost forgotten how inspiring and productive they can be.

This one had a good turnout of around twenty people. We had ourselves an excellent first day of thought-provoking sessions. Then on day two it was time to put some of those ideas into action.

A little trick I like to do on the practical day is to have two tasks to attempt: one of them quite simple, and the other more ambitious. That way, as long as I get the simpler task done, I’ll always have at least something to demo at the end of the day.

This time I attempted three bits of home improvement on my website.

Autolinking Mastodon usernames

The first problem I set myself was ostensibly the simple one. But it involved regular expressions, so then I had two problems.

I wanted to automatically link up Mastodon usernames if I mentioned one in my notes. For example, during border:none I mentioned Brian’s mastodon username in a note: @briansuda@loðfíll.is.

That turned out to be an excellent test case. Those Icelandic characters made sure I wasn’t making unwarranted assumptions about character sets.

Here’s the regular expression I came up with. It’s not foolproof by any means. Basically it looks for @something@something.something.

Good enough. Ship it.

Related posts

My next task was a bit more ambitious. It involved SQL queries, something I’m slightly better at than regular expressions but that’s a very low bar.

I wanted to show related posts when you get to the end of one of my blog posts.

I’ve been tagging all my blog posts for years so that’s the mechanism I used for finding similar posts. There’s probably a clever SQL statement that could do this, but I ended up brute-forcing it a bit.

I don’t feel too bad about the hacky clunky nature of my solution, because I cache blog post pages. That means only the first person to view the blog post (usually me) will suffer any performance impacts from my clunky database queries. After that everything’s available straight from a cached file.

Let’s say you’re reading a blog post of mine that I’ve tagged with ten different keywords. I make a separate SQL query for each keyword to get all the other posts that use that tag. Then it’s a matter of sorting through all the results.

I loop through the results of each tag and apply a score to the tagged post. If the post shares one tag with the post you’re looking at, it has a score of one. If it shares two tags, it has a score of two, and so on.

I decided that for a post to be considered related, it had to share at least three tags. I also decided to limit the list of related posts to a maximum of five.

It worked out pretty well. If you scroll down on my recent post about JavaScript, you’ll see links to related posts about JavaScript. If you read through a post on accessibility testing, you’ll find other posts about accessibility testing. If you make it to the end of this post about Mars colonisation you’ll see links to more posts about exploring our solar system.

Right now I’m just doing this for my blog but I’d like to do it for my links too. A job for a future Indie Web Camp.

Link rot

I was very inspired by Remy’s recent post on how he’s tackling link rot on his site. I wanted to do the same for mine.

On the first day at Indie Web Camp I led a session on link rot to gather ideas and alternative approaches. We had a really good discussion, though it’s always worth bearing in mind that there’ll never be a perfect solution. There’ll always be some false positives and some false negatives.

The other Jeremy at Indie Camp Nuremberg blogged about the session. Sebastian Greger was attending remotely and the session inspired him to spend the second day also tackling linkrot.

In the end I decided to stick with Remy’s two-pronged approach:

1. a client-side script that—as a progressive enhancement—intercepts outbound links and re-routes them to
2. a server-side script that redirects to the Internet Archive if the link is broken.

Here’s the JavaScript I wrote for the first part.

It’s very similar to Remy’s but with one little addition. I check to see if the clicked link is inside an h-entry and if it is, I pass on the date from the post’s dt-published value.

Here’s the PHP I wrote for the server-side redirector. The comments tell the story of what the code is doing:

• Check that the request is coming from my site.
• There also has to be a URL provided in the query string.
• Make a very quick curl request to get the response headers from the URL. The time limit is set to 1 second.
• If there was any error (like a time out), give up and go to the URL.
• Pick the response headers apart to get the HTTP status code.
• If the response is OK, go to the URL.
• If the response is a redirect, go around again but this time use the redirect URL.
• Construct the archive.org search endpoint.
• If we have a date, provide it. Otherwise ask for the latest snapshot.
• Ping that archive.org URL. This time there’s no time limit; this might take a while.
• If there’s an archived copy, redirect to that.
• There’s no archived copy. Give up and go the URL anyway.

Not perfect by any means, but it works for the most common cases of link rot.

For the demo at the end of the day I went back into my archive of over 10,000 links and plucked out some old posts, like this one from December 2005. It takes a little while to do the rerouting but eventually you get to see the archived version from the same time period as when I linked to it.

Here’s another link from 2005. Here’s another. Those links are broken now, but with a little patience, you’ll still get to read them on the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive’s wayback machine really is a gift. I can’t imagine how would it be even remotely possible to try to address link rot on my site without archive.org.

I will continue to donate money to the Internet Archive and I encourage you to do the same.

Link colors and the rule of tincture

When you think of heraldry what comes to mind is probably knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, that sort of thing. Medieval stuff. But I prefer to think of it as one of the earliest design systems.

This totally checks out.