Sophie builds fun things out of HTML, CSS & JavaScript, and writes blog posts about tech and mental health.
When was the last time I did one of these? Last year? Here's a collection of things I've enjoyed from the last 8 months, I suppose. Video games Satisfactory I knew I shouldn’t buy this game after playing the demo, but I bought it anyway, and I’ve racked up over 100 hours on it so far. Please send help. I bounced off Factorio as I found it quite overwhelming, but Satisfactory has a bit more…
I've given my website a bit of a refresh! There's a slightly updated layout if you're on desktop, plus I ditched the etc page and I've revamped my links page to be powered by raindrop.io . The minimalist theme is still minimalist, but a bit more fancy. The vaporwave theme has a newly jazzed-up nav bar with some adorable little icons. But the biggest change is to the city theme , which was…
There are many things that make me extremely uncool, but one of my particularly nerdy interests is the London Underground. The evolution of its iconic map, showing long-forgotten stations; old wooden-floor train stock I remember from my childhood; the Hidden London tours of old stations, closed-off platforms and soot-covered stairwells with beautiful original tiling. "Station closed" poster at…
Throughout my career, I feel like I’ve done a pretty decent job of staying top of new developments in the industry: attending conferences, following (and later befriending!) some of the very smart people writing the specs, being the one sharing news on Slack about exciting new features of CSS or JS with my colleagues. The joys of working on an internal tool where you only need to worry about…
Skip to bits you care about: The year in... ...furry friends ...retreating into my cave ...conferences ...gardening ...books ...music ...video games ...blog posts The year in... ...furry friends We got a dog ! She's both the most wonderful and most annoying thing I've ever encountered. It's hard work and she needs a lot of training, but she's come a long way in the time we've had her. 2026 will…
Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the AI result explained how to reproduce it at home. How does it know? Because it’s trained on all the ramen recipes that multiple recipe authors spent hours, weeks, years perfecting. Generative AI is a blender chewing up other people’s hard work,…
I meant to post this in May, but then I went back to work after my final (sob) sabbatical, and I also lost a lot of time to Blue Prince at some point, so here we are in July. I thought I'd update with some medium-sized news in the form of a medium-sized dog: Her name is Penny. She's a staffy mix (and a rescue, so the rest is a mystery) and she's the cuddliest dog you've ever met. We've been…
This is an updated & abridged version of the talk I gave at several conferences throughout 2022/23, including Beyond Tellerrand , CSS Day and FFConf . If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website . A little home on the independent web. A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a…
This takes me back to my teenage years, doing Friday Five on my blog and later on the sets of questions on LiveJournal that were known as memes . Thanks Sally for the tag! <3 Why did you start blogging in the first place? As a teenager I blogged obsessively, posting about every minute detail of my life, every boy or girl I liked, every exam I was dreading. In researching my talk about personal…
You Are Not Meant To Scale - Keith Kurson - “Take a deep breath, and say out loud: I am not a machine, I am not meant to scale. You have a finite amount of energy, and a community of people around you who can use that energy. You can use that energy, to make it through the day, which is the most important thing. Waking up tomorrow is the name of the game.” Tech continues to be political - Miriam…
Everyone knows your location - It’s quite jarring to see the kind of information that gets sent to the highest bidder from seemingly innocuous apps.
After 4 (cumulative) years of service at my job in late 2023, I became eligible for a 3-month paid sabbatical (honestly what a perk). My only prior experience of a work sabbatical had been the offer of a 6-month paid sabbatical after 25 years of service at a past employer, so needless to say, this was very exciting indeed. Cautious of being alone with my thoughts for 3 months – my husband couldn’t…
For Christmas 2022, I bought my husband a Steam Deck. It's a handheld games console that runs a version of Linux (so you can also use it as a computer and plug it into a monitor, if you want), and works seamlessly with nearly every game in your Steam Library. It's GREAT. I 100% use it more than he does, to play all manner of weird and wonderful things. It plays older games perfectly, and I even…
It’s Boxing Day and I’m a small pile on the sofa. We successfully Did Christmas at ours this year, and I never want to see another mince pie (until next year). So, what better time than now to look back on the year? Skip to bits you care about: The year in... ...big life things ...conferences ...gardening ...travel ...books ...podcasts ...music ...video games ...blog posts ...Christmas dinner The…
modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics - every word of this post resonates, and you should read it.
A roundup of fun things and projects. TV I mentioned to my husband that I'd never watched Life on Mars, so we're watching it all the way through, and it's brilliant, obviously. I'm horribly annoying when watching things that have been filmed in places I know because I will a) announce where it is and b) complain if a character goes from one place to another in a way that isn't geographically…
I was very fortunate to speak at another excellent Beyond Tellerrand last week, alongside some brilliant and wonderful people. Once again I was inspired by the variety of topics and messages people shared on the stage. Alongside the usual artists’ inspiring career stories and techies’ (equally inspiring) web design magic, there was a strong undercurrent of anticapitalist messaging in a way that is…
Nic Chan - Nic has just finished rebuilding her website and it’s INCREDIBLE! Seriously just look at it CSS { In Real Life } | Limitation Breeds Creativity: A Study in Composition with Custom Properties - Michelle has done some (characteristically) amazing things with a handful of divs. Introducing @bramus/caniuse-cli, a CLI tool for “Can I Use …” - This is going to be very useful! Selling a small…
Those of you who know me (or who have been reading my posts for a while) will know that I'm often at conferences. I tend to speak at around four a year, plus attending one or two on top of that. I also know a great many people who never go to conferences, and I think they're missing out. Conferences are a fantastic way to not only broaden your horizons when it comes to your job and your skills,…
I've built a new theme for this site, inspired by my love of gardening as well as one of my favourite video games. With no pixel artistry skills to speak of, I'm grateful to the various artists over on itch.io , who I've credited on the about page, for all their lovely creations!
How to Monetize a Blog - Just read it, ok? I promise it’s extremely worth it.
The area element - I’m really enjoying Heydon’s HTML element safari, from the better-known to the lesser-known. This will certainly fall into the latter camp for a lot of folks!
After an initial burst of blogging energy January followed by a series of automated posts featuring good things I’d read recently, it fell off a cliff towards the end of March. I didn't get bored, I promise! Life got extremely busy and reading through an ever-growing mountain of RSS feeds became too much of a chore. Eventually I declared bankruptcy and marked all as read, so if I’ve missed…
A few years back I got so bored of taking attendance for my choir that I wrote a Slack integration to do it for me (I got us on Slack in 2014). That evolved from a dodgy Python app triggered by slash commands into into a neat little Typescript suite called Choirbot that triggers via cron job. It does everything from posting reminders about upcoming rehearsals to reporting on attendance stats, and…
Heat Death of the Internet - takahē - “The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.” Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated…
Say hello to the Mykeyclub MKC75 ! It's so pretty! This is going to be my new office keyboard. Weighted aluminium case, so nice and heavy without too much rattle. It's got a rotary encoder (that's a knob to you and me) which controls the system volume (I look forward to forgetting it's there). I put in Dangkeebs HaluHalo linear switches which I got from SerpentKeys . They're a tiny bit louder than…
Mastodon has often been touted as some kind of grassroots utopia compared to the bro-niverse that is Twitter. But in my experience it's exactly the same: full of sanctimonious reply guys. Before the great Twitter exodus I'd amassed quite a following through a carelessly curated campaign of shitposting, and occasionally a post would go viral. Some really quite nasty things happened sometimes.…
First conference of the year is done, and what a conference it was! I begged Josh to let me speak at All Day Hey in 2022, and he promised me a slot in 2024 which at the time seemed forever away. As seems to happen a lot now, I blinked and it was just around the corner. It was the first outing for my new talk on technical migrations, and I'm really pleased with how it went. If you missed All Day…
On having no visual memory - Rachel Andrew shares her experiences of what it’s like to have aphantasia. Why Good Captioned Videos Are Important – Meryl.net home - A really insightful guide to what makes good, accessible video captions. Plain is always better, folks!
You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist - I am BARRY HESS - “You don’t need to labor over your posts. You don’t need to have perfect grammar or spelling. You don’t need to leave a post in draft for seven months, pouring over research. (Though you can if you want!) You don’t really need to have an idea. Just write. Then share.” Testing HTML With Modern CSS: HeydonWorks - Heydon’s useful CSS bag of tricks…
It's rhubarb season! I came home from my parents' last weekend with a large armful of the stuff. Rhubarb is extremely tart and not very nice on its own unless you drown it in sugar. It's particularly good when paired with very sweet things to balance out the sharp edge of the fruit, hence its classic pairing with custard. I love the pleasingly pink hue of it when it's cooked. On Sunday night I…
Two years after All Day Hey made me realise I missed the web , I'm really excited to be speaking there myself! I'll be talking about technical migrations – how we recently pulled off a Typescript migration at Monzo, and things you should consider when doing a migration yourself. And what a line up - my good pals Hidde and Ana , plus UX whiz Imran Afzal , and two of my lovely Monzo colleagues…
"a proper cup of tea" by Terry - An absolutely joyously chaotic tea-making game. I recommend trying all the different combinations for maximum mirth.
Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again - Jared White reflects on his early experiences of the web, and suggests maybe we’re ready to do the 90s web again…
This isn't going to be a tech post, mainly because I haven't really been enjoying tech things recently. I spend all day thinking about technical integrations and system architectures and requirements, so I don't really want to do anything dev-related when I get home. Every time I see people talking about Astro or web components or new CSS features I feel bad because I know I should try it out and…
Some little ways I’m using CSS :has() in the real world - Piccalilli - Some great tips for one of my favourite recent CSS features. Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2023 refresh - Lynn’s annual redesigns are a real joy, and this is a fascinating look into the inspiration and technique that went into the 2023 edition. Neatnik Notes · Motive as a filter - When you use a free email service like Gmail,…
Tailwind vs Semantic CSS - Found via Andy Bell's site - as he puts it, this post is pretty clearly biased towards semantic CSS but I think it's pretty evident fromt his that bare-bones HTML with "plain old CSS" is a lot more performant than stuffing a page full of unnecessary divs and stacking utility classes. Where I’m at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing - It was March 2022 when I sold CSS-Tricks to…
It's OK to abandon your side-project - Robb Owen - "We hear about all the side-project success stories, but what if we talked more openly about the ones that tanked?" Robin Rendle — Mini Manifesto - Robin has redone his homepage and it’s utterly glorious.
The Midnight Pub - A tiny forum in the form of a virtual pub. It even has a speakeasy. This website is personal - Frills - I really identify with this post, and the feeling that my posts aren’t worth anything if they’re not useful in some way. In reality there are no rules at all about what you should post on a personal site! Don’t Disable Form Controls - Stop disabling submit buttons. the top of…
Please, don’t force me to log in - It feels like every website or connected device wants you to sign up before you can use it these days… It feels like React is getting a bit of a kicking recently - Piccalilli - There's a lot of React criticism floating around at the mo, much of it justified. I think people are quick to use it when they don't need to. But as someone working on a very big, very…
At university I worked at Manchester Academy, and would often end up behind the bar at all sorts of gigs from pop, to metal, to folk. Metal gigs were always my favourite because the crowd were very nice to bar staff, whereas sometimes you'd have "POUR OUT CANS" written on the sign in sheet and you knew it was going to be rowdy. Anyway, one of the gigs I ended up working at was Caitlin Rose, a…
Old'aVista - Altavista was my first search engine (or should I say altavista+was+my+first+search+engine) and this is a delightful trip down memory lane. Inside .git - Legendary explainer of things Julia Evans has written a fascinating and understandable guide to what lives inside the .git folder. CARI | Aesthetics - I shared this on Mastodon a while back but this is just so compelling, and some of…
This is a dangerous path you're about to walk down. Is your wallet ready? Whether you prefer the smooth glide of linear switches, the gentle bump of a tactile switch or the full-on audio assault of a clicky switch, there’s something extremely gratifying about typing on a mechanical keyboard (even if it’s just a reply to someone who is wrong on the internet). And it’s even better if it looks as…
Edit 04/02/24 to change the comparator date from midnight on previous Saturday to midnight on previous Sunday to prevent duplicate links being published. A post that’s been getting a lot of traction recently is I miss human curation by Cassidy Williams, in which she laments that we’re so reliant on algorithms to show us new stuff now, instead of having it recommended to us by other humans.…
The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit - Aftermath - How AI-generated content is ruining search engines for everyone. Exposed RSS - I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I get it. Maybe they picked an off-the-shelf t… You should blog | keith.is - Keith calls out for folks to make this the year of blogging about whatever…
Skip to the bit you care about: About Neocities Hosting a static site on Neocities Continuous deployment to Neocities with Github Actions Scheduling builds I’ve hosted this website in a few different places since I started it in 2019. It started out on Netlify, but after my post about everything I googled went viral, I exceeded the bandwidth of the free plan. Then I moved it to Vercel, which (at…
It occurred to me this week that even though I’ve been using webmentions as comments for a really long time, I hadn’t actually been sending them myself. The shame! Here's how I set it up. Edit 22/01/23: I've added in some checks to make sure I don't send webmentions for a post if I've already done it before. Certified good egg Remy Sharp has a tool called webmention.app which will send webmentions…
I came across Sara Joy's (very cool) demo of CSS theming without classes today, and looking through the code spotted a couple of elements I hadn't come across before: <progress> and <meter> . Granted, I've probably seen the <progress> element plenty of times, but I struggled to see what the <meter> was for. While <progress> is fairly self-explanatory – it shows how far along something is, such as…
localghost.dev has a new theme! In search of a little project over the merrineum that didn’t require me to learn anything and therefore use my brain, I remembered there was a stylesheet hidden in the themes directory of my website that I hadn’t finished. The theme: teenage personal websites in the early 00s. It was a lot of fun to build, and really nostalgic to recreate the websites of my youth.…
Everything you've ever wanted to know about sound, and things you didn't know you wanted to know but are glad you learned, such as: why all film trailers sound the same with that deep "booj" noise how NASA ran live audio from the Moon how the language in The Sims came about, and the people who voice it the history of Windows startup sounds the Loudness Wars , aka the reason so much popular music…