Articles and notes by Matthias Ott, User Experience Designer from Stuttgart, Germany.
At Google I/O this week, the company announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years . The ten blue links? Gone. Instead, you get — first at times? soon always? — “generative UI”, an “intelligent search box” with custom interactive widgets, built on the fly by Gemini. You get “information agents” that monitor the web for you around the clock. You get mini-apps you can build right inside the…
Chrome 148 shipped this week, and in the release notes you’ll find one of the best things to happen to web performance in a long time: loading="lazy" for <video> and <audio> elements. Scott Jehl , an engineer at Squarespace focusing on performance and accessibility, has been the driving force behind this. Scott and a small team of engineers proposed the spec change, wrote the implementation, and…
You might know that I – with the generous help from Brandon Kelly on the Craft 5 version – wrote and maintain a Webmention plugin for Craft CMS . Today, I shipped version 1.3.0 . It’s a security and abuse hardening release, and if you’re running the plugin, you should upgrade. The backstory of this one is, at least to me, kind of interesting. Back in March, I added a new feature to the plugin: a…
Yesterday, I opened Discord to a message from my friend Bastian Allgeier that I had never quite seen in all the years I’ve been building sites with his Kirby CMS . “Today we are releasing our biggest security release in the last 14+ years,” Bastian wrote. “The last few weeks have been intense, to say the least. We received 8 reports within just a couple of days.” Six of those eight security…
In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and a conviction. Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and he believed he had found the answer: the problem was that the people who did the work were also the people who decided how to do it. Workers brought…
On December 24, 1968, Christmas Eve, astronaut William Anders took what would become one of the most consequential photographs in human history. He was aboard Apollo 8, orbiting the Moon for the fourth time, when the spacecraft rotated and the Earth appeared in his window. A small, luminous sphere, blue and white, suspended in the blackness above the barren lunar horizon. Anders grabbed his…
The new WebAIM Million report is out, the eighth annual accessibility analysis of the top one million home pages on the Web. And after eight years of data, the picture is as sobering as ever. In 2019, 97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG conformance failures. In 2026, that number is 95.9%. That’s less than two percentage points of improvement in seven years – and this year actually reversed the…
Dave Rupert just wrote a piece called People are not friction and I just had to write a short reaction blog post, because Dave names something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. His main argument: the AI marketing dream of a “frictionless” workflow – where you automate away every task you don’t enjoy, every job you don’t know how to do, and every person who slows you down – is not…
In November 1928, Georg Neumann and Erich Rickmann founded Georg Neumann & Co. in a Berlin workshop and by the end of that year, Neumann had debuted the CMV 3 , the first mass-produced condenser microphone . The CMV designation stood for Condensator Mikrofon Verstärker , condenser microphone amplifier, and the number three hints at the least two prototypes that didn’t quite make it. The…
You might have seen the diagram before. The one Vincent Driessen put up on his website a few years ago to explain the concept of a Git branching model. Source: Vincent Driessen’s original Git branching model diagram A few days ago, Microsoft published a page on their Learn portal that contained a diagram that looked … familiar. But only until you looked at it more closely. That’s when you noticed…
A couple of weeks back, I’m sitting at my desk when a direct message from my frontend friend Kevin Powell pops up. Kevin’s a genuinely kind guy. He makes CSS videos on YouTube and he’s got this way of explaining things that never makes you feel stupid for not knowing them already. He’s one of those folks who still has faith in the Web. “ Hey, hope you’re doing well! I was going to link to…
If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my roughly 30 years of working with design tools, it is that they come and go and that you should always stay curious and be open and ready to learn something new. As a teenager, I made my first clip-arty design attempts in CorelDRAW . Right after finishing high school, I dabbled in QuarkXPress during an internship at BBDO. As a student, I fell in love…
Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture our imagination and speak to our fears and our dreams. Maybe that’s why you will find a lot of stories in the writing on this site. My reply to…
I have to confess that I am not reading that many books these days. Most of the time, I resort to listening to them in audio form. But every once in a while, a book comes along that is just too interesting not to at least give it a try. Reading Kai Brach’s excellent newsletter Dense Discovery , I came across such a (new) book by Joanna Walsh: Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it…
In 1977, NASA launched two spaceships carrying two golden records into the void of interstellar space. The Voyager Golden Records contained instructions for playing its contents, finding Earth in the cosmos (oh my …), as well as images, a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings in 55 languages. We didn’t know if anyone would ever hear…
My gut feeling tells me that not that many people have yet heard of or used the linear() easing function , one of the most exciting newer additions to CSS. Looking at the stats in the State of CSS survey , this is somewhat confirmed: only about 30 percent of respondents have used it and another 30 percent have never even heard of it. But what’s also interesting is the ratio of people who report to…
Now that cross-document view transitions are gradually making their way into modern browsers , now seems like the perfect time to explore them, if you haven’t already. They are, in fact, surprisingly straightforward to implement. And just like we’ve seen with modern images , view transitions can be slapped onto existing projects as a progressive enhancement. That my website is now called a…
Five years ago, I wrote about AVIF: A New Image Format (back then). Since then, I’ve implemented WebP and AVIF support on numerous client sites for considerable performance improvements – but my own site was still serving JPEG, PNG, and GIF images only. So it was time to fix that. Here’s how I added modern image format support to my Craft CMS site. Modern Image Formats Rock 🚀 But first, a little…
It’s the early nineties. Legendary comic book artist Frank Miller had just broken away from the major publishers, after creating titles like Daredevil: Born Again, Ronin, and The Dark Knight Returns. He was now working with the then-young Dark Horse Comics, when he decided to take his baby there – a comic he had planned to do for years: a crime story in black and white. Sin City . So, Frank got to…
Whether you are running online workshops, recording audio or video, or making music, it’s worth spending some time on acoustic treatment for your room. Shit in, shit out , as they say… In my case, I wanted to improve the sound of voice recordings and live audio in my little office in the attic, which has a quite small footprint. So, a while ago, I made a real job of it and did my (amateurish) best…
In the late 1960s, a young musician was recording the sounds he played on his synthesizer onto his Revox tape recorders, when he suddenly discovered: if you connect the two tape recorders together, so that the playback head is separated by several feet from the record head, you get a very long delay echo . A few years later, the young man used this idea for the legendary title track of his fourth…
I still remember that moment. Do You? For me, that was a moment I never thought I’d see. The leaders of the world, finding common ground – agreeing to limit global warming to 2°C, and aiming for 1.5°C. Everyone, finally, coming together. Acknowledging that to avoid catastrophic damage to the planet and the ecosystems we depend on – and to protect our very livelihood – humanity must act. We all…
One of the most amazing things about working on the Web is that you can have years of experience under your belt and there are still things you don’t know. Often, people associate this with a more quickly-moving language like JavaScript, but it equally hold true for HTML. Although, on the first sight, HTML seems like a very “easy” markup language, it can still be incredibly hard to write solid,…
My son, who is the violinist in our family, recently told me an interesting little fact about Augustin Hadelich , one of the greatest violinists alive: it’s hard for him to enjoy other people’s performances. Not because he’s critical or dismissive – to the contrary – but because when he listens, he’s also always playing. He just can’t help it. When he hears someone play a phrase, he always wonders…
When it comes to web typography, I’m a sucker for fluid type . I love that it creates a harmonious rhythm for the typography of a project. I love how it speeds up the responsive design process in the browser. And that it feels like you are working with the grain of the web, not against it. Instead of trying to control every typographic detail, you are defining boundaries that make sure your design…
One Thursday in May, I was sitting in a slightly delayed train, heading home from Düsseldorf after three days of meeting good friends and making new ones at beyond tellerrand , my friend Marc Thiele’s wonderful conference. As usual, after visiting a conference, and beyond tellerrand in particular, my head was bursting with ideas and creative energy. I would feel the same way again a few months…
In 1986 – when I was four years old – three researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) were working on an idea that would change the world of technology forever: they figured out an efficient way for smart computer systems they called “connectionist models” to learn from their own mistakes. Not by manually correcting each error individually but by using a procedural algorithm…
Have you ever wondered why new CSS features and other web technologies very often seem to just work across browsers these days? The reason is probably: Interop. The Interop Project is a collaborative effort between major browser makers — Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla — to improve the Web by making it more consistent and reliable across all browsers. The idea is that instead…
Gregory Scott, founder of Kush Audio , shared an interesting insight about mixing music the other day: Sometimes, to bring something forward in the mix, instead of turning it up , it can be more effective to actually turn all the other things down . Let’s say you realise that the track you are working on needs more bass. So you pull up the fader for the bass by a few dB. But now you notice that…
For Blogtober , I dug up a draft about the two CSS pseudo-class functions :is() and :where() that I’d had lying around in my drafts folder for quite some time. Actually, when I originally started writing this post, :is() and :where() had just landed in CSS, and — just like with so many other new CSS features — I was expecting them to “change the way we write CSS.” Both are now widely available…
We’ve all been there: You write a bit of CSS, check whether everything looks right. You deploy. Then someone sends you a screenshot: the mobile navigation is broken. And why is the size of those headings just a bit off? And where has that button gone? Especially when you are working on a larger codebase together or you are refactoring your CSS or consolidating redundant styles, seemingly small…
Jane Goodall , the scientist, conservationist, and educator who died last Wednesday at 91, will always be remembered for her singular, field-defining work on wild chimpanzees. She lived with wild chimpanzees to study them, befriended them, and made a groundbreaking discovery: that they could make and use tools, a trait that, up until then, had been thought to be uniquely human. But more…
For a European with lots of friends and like-minded web folks in the US, it is both heartbreaking and bewildering to see how the political and societal climate in the country is changing right now. All of this is not only worrisome from a political perspective, but also poses very real risks in areas such as data protection, surveillance, legal frameworks, regulatory compliance, taxes, and…
When the people at EMI ordered a bunch of Altec 436B compressors in the late 1950s for Abbey Road Studios, they were hoping for that legendary American sound they had heard at their sister studio Capitol Records in Los Angeles. But when the units arrived in London and the engineers at Abbey Road gave the freshly installed units a thorough going over, they didn’t really like what they heard. So,…
Age quod agis. This Latin phrase, attributed to Ignatius of Loyola , the founder of the Jesuit Order, translates to “do what you are doing.” Do what you are doing. Like in: dedicate yourself wholeheartedly to whatever you engage in. Do what you are doing. Not the thing over there. Not that thing on your phone. Not the thing you will do tomorrow. That thing right in front of you. That thing you are…
It’s Blogtober again. And this time, I’ve (more or less spontaneously) decided to take part in it. For those of you who don’t know what it is: Blogtober is a writing challenge that takes part every Oktober (similar to Bloguary, Blobuary, Blarch, Blapril, Blay, Blune, Bluly, Blogust, Blogtember, … 🤓), in which bloggers commit to writing and publishing a new post every day throughout the entire…
I am convinced that it makes total sense to spend a certain amount of your (spare) time on this planet tinkering around and exploring stuff that seems totally useless or silly compared to what you normally do. And without having a real explanation for why it happened, I’ve been starting to get interested in software synthesizers lately. I can barely play proper melodies on my Arturia MiniLab –…
Now that the Webmention plugin is finally Craft 5 compatible after last week s update, I jumped at the chance and updated another plugin I had once written for my personal site. The Internet Archive plugin automates the archiving of your posts to the Wayback Machine . Each time you publish or update a post, the plugin submits the URL to the Internet Archive, so that a new snapshot is saved. It’s a…
Imagine my surprise, when, roughly two weeks ago, I received a direct message on Mastodon from Brandon Kelly , the founder and head of the team behind Craft CMS , opening with: 👋 I spent today working on a Craft 5 port of your Webmention plugin. My Webmention plugin ? The one I always meant to rewrite? The one that was still stuck on Craft 2? The very reason why my personal site was missing…
For the second time now, someone mentioned to me that it is kind of paradoxical that my newsletter, which is called “ Own Your Web ”, is not hosted on my own server or under my own domain but on Buttondown . And yes, they are right. I realize that this is kind of not walking the talk. Do I really own my Web in this case? I thought about this as well and my plan is – and actually always has been –…
I’ve been down in an audio plugin rabbit hole lately. More on that in a later blog post. But I just stumbled upon a set of free plugins that might be of interest to you, if you are doing voice recordings of any kind – be it a podcast, voice over, or, let’s say, video tutorials. There are, of course, many more free plugins for that use case. Again, I might cover more of them in separate blog posts,…
As Twitter is (far too) slowly falling apart and more and more people are looking for alternatives, Bluesky is enjoying a surge in popularity at the moment. One neat little feature is that you can use your own domain as your handle on Bluesky. In a way, this is the perfect handle for this new era of decentralized social media. Your personal domain is part of your digital identity on the…
In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or MacRumors, the official Mastodon app as well as the web version will now show a direct link to an author’s fediverse profile. What is primarily aimed at…
The Logitech Spotlight presentation remote is a sleek piece of hardware. It is comparatively small, fits nicely in the palm of your hand, and the buttons come with a very satisfying, albeit for my taste a tiny bit too loud, click. But most importantly, the brushed aluminium design feels sturdy, high-quality, and elegant. Exactly the piece of gear that you buy because you want a reliable,…
I just published the 11th issue of Own Your Web , my newsletter about designing, building, creating, and publishing on the Web. When I started the newsletter back in autumn of 2023, I didn’t yet know what form the newsletter would take on, if people would like it, and also whether I would like doing it or not. Eleven issues in, I can say with confidence that I enjoy researching and writing those…
Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down and all user data gets deleted after a few months. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine that a site you…
Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interest still is to create a good old bookmark. And there are many different ways to do this. First of all, you could save your…
In the last issue of Own Your Web , we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which probably everyone with a personal website should do: adding an RSS feed. What’s RSS? RSS, which stands for either “Really Simple Syndication” or…
For my birthday, I got a new pair of speakers for my home office / home studio. After looking around for quite some time, I settled on the ADAM Audio T5V in the end. The T5Vs are affordable, entry-level studio monitors with a 5“ woofer that are optimized for smaller rooms. And it doesn’t make sense to blast much more bass into my 3 by 3 meter office anyway. I’m still far from being experienced…
I’m turning 42 today and yes, I am as surprised about that number as you are. If 42 really is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, then maybe it makes sense to look back on what the old lad actually learned in all those years. So, here is a list of 42 life lessons, similar to the one Chris wrote when he was still 40 . Incomplete and mostly unstructured. For my younger self as much as…