Articles

Webmention is a technology that allows websites to be notified when another website links to it. It can be used like a simple and privacy-friendly analytics tool to find out where visitors might come from (e.g. if there is a notable increase in visitors after another blog links to yours). It also enables you to showcase “other blogs that linked to this post”-like elements on your blog posts, to suggest related posts to your readers.

I learned about Webmention after reading a blog post by Xe Iaso.

For the past few years, I have been trying to get as independent as possible from big, “free” online services (mostly Google stuff) due to privacy reasons. Here I will write my setup, and the struggles I had with it.

If you regularly work with CSS, chances are that you are used to referencing images from CSS code. Usually, this is done with the url() function, which can be used with a URL for an image file or to directly embed a base64 encoded image.

But what can we do if these approaches are not exotic enough for our tastes? What if rendering images like this is just way too easy and does not have a big enough performance impact? Well, you’re in luck.

By now there are probably more articles about the flaws of NPM and the NPM registry than articles about how Java will die soon, but I felt like there haven’t been many of them which suggest solutions or workarounds to these problems, so these are the aspects I want to try to focus on here.

At some point in your life, you probably had to fill out a form that asked for your gender. Most forms
tend to have very limited options for specifying gender, ranging from a dropdown with ‘female’, ‘male’, and
sometimes ‘other’ to things like two radio buttons to pick either ‘female’ or ‘male’. This can be quite frustrating for people which do not fit into either of these boxes and even if an option for ‘other’ is available, this groups together many wildly different gender identities into one box.
Other issues can appear when someone aware of these problems tries to fix them by offering options for a wider range of commonly used genders: Dropdowns can end up having too many options and finding the best match gets hard, while still omitting the options some of your users might want to pick. This approach also often ends up including several genders which are usually treated as identical (why are you offering both the options ‘Woman’ as well as ‘Trans Woman’?).

Let’s look at how we can design forms to account for these issues and avoid them.