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Notes

A microblog. Frequent, shorter updates. My Bookmarks and Likes live here. Often with hyperlinks, quotes, or commentary.

  1. Last week I was able to attend an informative online session on creating a digital accessibility program, presented by Jesse Loesberg.

    Creating a sustainable digital accessibility program in higher education requires more than responding to legal requirements or fixing isolated website issues. It involves understanding an institution’s digital environment, identifying priorities, developing internal expertise, educating content creators, and integrating accessibility into everyday operations.

    In this session, Jesse Loesberg shares how the UC Berkeley Library formalized its digital accessibility work within a large, decentralized university system. The discussion begins with UC Berkeley’s complicated disability rights history and the legal action that ultimately led to stronger accessibility requirements across the institution.

    The event was hosted by the WordPress Accessibility Meetup (Equalize Digital), but the content and takeaways were applicable to any set of technologies. Jesse is a great speaker, and I would attend one of his accessibility talks again in the future. The video recording and transcript of Jesse’s talk are available now on the Equalize Digital website.

    Aug 12, 2026 02:01 PM

  2. Took my first trip to Taos with the family this past weekend. We stayed at El Pueblo Lodge, a sprawling property which has a nostalgic roadside Americana feel. Highlights of this hotel were the hot breakfast and the cool pool. We visited Taos Pueblo, the Taos Musem of Art at the Nicolai Fechin House, and the Harwood Museum of Art. Our child played at Twirl, a unique toy shop and play area in the downtown corridor. We hiked a bit of the Italianos Canyon Trail on the way to Taos Ski Valley. My favorite meal was at Aji restaurant, celebrating our wedding anniversary. On the way home we stopped at the St. Francis church at Ranchos de Taos, made famous by Georgia O’Keefe.

    Aug 3, 2026 08:38 PM

  3. Bookmarked Vladimir Nabokov’s pale fire: the lost ‘father of all hypertext demos’? by Simon Rowberry.

    In the mid-sixties, Ted Nelson worked at Brown University on an early hypertext system. In 1969, IBM wanted to show the system at a conference, and Nelson gained permission to use Vladimir Nabokov’s highly unconventional and hypertextual novel, Pale Fire (1962) as a technical demonstration of hypertext’s potential. Unfortunately, the idea was dismissed in favor of a more technical-looking presentation, and thus was never demonstrated publicly. This paper re-considers Pale Fire’s position in hypertext history, and posits that if it was used in this early hypertext demonstration, it would have been the ‘father of all hypertext demonstrations’ to complement Douglas Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos’ in 1968. In order to demonstrate the significance of Pale Fire’s hypertextuality and Nelson’s ambitions to use it, this paper will explore its hypertextual structure, the implication thereof for the novel and evaluate its success as a hypertext compared to electronic systems.

    Jul 25, 2026 07:05 PM

  4. Raphael Magarik, on the Jewish Museum’s Paul Klee exhibit:

    [Walter] Benjamin would have understood all too well his text’s appropriation as a nationalist trophy. He writes terrifyingly of present victors’ power over the past: “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” Here again, Benjamin rejects the illusion of a fixed, monumental past; historical legacies are battlegrounds, to be won or lost in today’s struggles. One sees an intimation of this idea in the Jewish Museum’s laudable choice to devote a full exhibit to Klee. For Paul Klee was notably not a Jew, though he was accused of being one by the Nazis, who attacked his art as “degenerate.” He responded by gamely incorporating Stars of David and legendary “Red Jews” into his sketches and paintings. In honoring Klee (including his earlier, pre-Nazi work), the Jewish Museum acknowledges an anti-essentialist account of its own organizing identity category: art, and even artists, can be made Jewish, even retrospectively, by the assault of history. Because the fight against fascism furnishes the rationale for the exhibition, the museum might have easily gone further, connecting the ultra-nationalism and genocide of Klee’s moment to our own.

    Jul 22, 2026 06:21 PM
  7. screenshot of the nicksimson.com homepage in dark mode and light mode

    Fun things can happen when you name your stylesheet interim.css. It didn’t take me long to tire of pure black and white, and I’ve always wanted to use eggplant as a dark mode background color. I used the Meyerweb Color Blender tool to mix a little lavender into a “French porcelain” white color and then create some color steps between the lightest and darkest background/text colors. I’m using some brighter candy shades for hover effects.

    The screenshot above is from Equinox, a handy tool that lets you view light mode and dark mode at the same time.

    Jul 8, 2026 02:27 PM

  8. I enjoyed Rob Weychert’s writeup on building his listening diary, from Last.fm data going back to 2005.

    I’m glad to have it. Some entries are documents of how I self-soothed during a challenging time. Many make space for artists I kept coming back to who didn’t previously have a presence on the site, often because I streamed their music without writing about them or buying any of their records or seeing them live. Hopefully going back through the listening diary will help me start to rectify that.

    Jul 6, 2026 01:13 PM

  9. Bookmarked Modern CSS theming with light-dark(), contrast-color(), and style queries by Una Kravets.

    I’ve been playing with a combination of new CSS features that, together, form a really nice dynamic theming system. This technique creates themed components with shadows in light mode that swap out to glowing borders in dark mode, and text that’s always readable against its dynamic background color. All in CSS. Available in all modern browsers as of May 2026 🥳.

    Jul 5, 2026 08:46 PM

  12. Likes Navigating the maze by Chris Ferdinandi.

    Before blogs and UX-as-a-discipline and every-ecommerce-site-looks-like-a-Shopify-template, websites encouraged you to explore. They’d have subpages you could only find by navigating deeper into a primary one.

    They were filled with easter eggs and whimsy and hidden paths to explore.

    This is one of the biggest appeals of digital gardening to me. It encourages you to explore a bit and find hidden paths.

    Jul 4, 2026 10:25 PM

  13. Likes An American Playlist by The New Yorker Critics at Large Podcast.

    I don’t normally listen to this podcast, but the topic intrigued me, and this is a great playlist for all the messy complexity that is the idea of “America”.

    Jul 3, 2026 03:50 PM

  14. Dave Smyth, on the hidden costs of LLM problem-solving:

    This isn’t a new scenario for professionals to navigate: it’s normal for people to make suggestions and there to be some back-and-forth over what the right approach is. What’s different is the frequency of suggestions, especially when they seem plausible but ultimately don’t work.

    I think this is where the biggest hidden costs lie. An LLM can generate an infinite number of suggestions for free, but working out what’s useful from that can take a significant amount of time. It’s inefficient and counterproductive.

    Jun 30, 2026 01:24 AM

  15. Bookmarked Warbler by David Jonathan Ross.

    A revival of a late eighteenth century “soft” Transitional serif type designed by William Martin and cut for William Bulmer. A gorgeous specimen website by Matthew Smith.

    Jun 24, 2026 04:39 PM

  16. Likes Do I belong in tech anymore? by Ky Decker.

    The explosion of AI has played a significant role in my own burnout. Worse, it feels inescapable. Few tech organizations are taking a principled stance against AI use. But AI use is only one part of broader social trends within tech that leave me questioning whether I should remain here.

    Jun 24, 2026 04:33 PM