The inane ramblings of beeps.
For a long time now, the primary logo of my websites has been a kind of animal head with a gear inside of it. Originally, this was a nod to, well, being a furry obviously, but also to my online handle ‘querkmachine’. It’s like some sorta quirky machine furry, geddit? The ‘robat icon’. It became even more relevant when my fursona changed to become a robot bat (or ‘robat’, because I’m fun like…
The somewhat belated third (and probably final part) in my mini series about web form design. See part one, which focused on the kinds of questions you ask and part two, about visual design if you haven’t already. This post is going to cover technical implementation details from the frontend perspective. Inputs, labels, IDs Every single one of your <input> , <select> and <textarea> elements should…
Sometimes you’re working on a project with a lot of colours. Maybe those colours are new to you because a recent rebrand has changed the foundations of your design system, or maybe you’re just working on a redesign of a personal project. In an ideal world (and we all want an ideal world, right? ) the colour combinations you end up using should be accessible. You might even be legally required to…
It’s a bank holiday, so have a cheap and easy blog post whilst I spend the day doing other stuff. Yeah, I know this blog doesn’t update daily and that isn’t how any of this works, but this is my website and I’ll lie if I want to. This blog post contains links that aren’t affiliate links because no one would pay me for this garbage. The backpack I use the LTT Commuter Backpack . It’s a pretty good…
The second in my mini series about web form design. See part one, which focused on the kinds of questions you ask if you haven’t already. This post is going to cover some bits about how you lay out those questions . Make inputs look like inputs This sounds like an obvious one, but once you start looking you might be surprised how often you find websites where a text input doesn’t look like a text…
Forms have existed since 1677, when the outlaw Jonathan Formsby decided to extort money by leaving blank spaces on a piece of parchment and coercing the landed gentry into writing illicit personal details into the spaces at blunderbuss-point. In the 350 years hence, no one has created a better way of acquiring information from others, voluntarily or not. An awful lot of the world wide web involves…
What started optimistically as the Year of Health (in the eat healthy, exercise more sense) ended up turning into a bit of a Year of Health Hell with not one, but three new chronic conditions added to the list of ailments I’m probably going to be managing for the rest of my mortal days. Improving my personal wellbeing (and other ambitions) ended up falling to the wayside, focusing instead on…
Can we get straight to the point here? Generative AI is kind of bad. Bad as in it’s not good, for basically 99% of use cases that people keep using it for. Large language models work entirely on mathematical probabilities. They will never readily produce something that isn’t the washed-out average of what the majority of the human-provided training data could be summarised to. Generative AI art…
Back in January, I did a little bit of renovating in the open , during which I stripped things back and changed a bunch of things around over a period of a few weeks. This week, I’ve made some more changes. Consider it a continuation of that work, or don’t, but some people really hate change, so I feel inclined to defend changing anything. Lost in space For the first time in a very long time, this…
I wasn’t great at languages (or ‘modern foreign languages’ as it was officially called) in school. Part of this was circumstantial. I moved cities partway through secondary education, from a school where French was the foreign language of choice to a school where German was, forced into doing a German GCSE with three fewer years of German knowledge than my fellow pupils. I ended up scraping a D,…