Nick's personal website and weblog
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…
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…
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…
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…
Likes 95 reasons for having your own website by Elliott Cost (Bell Kiosk). See also 100 things you can do on your personal website by James.
Bookmarked On CSS baseline and vertical rythms by doriane (ungual.digital). A crafty and hacky implementation of CSS baseline, transforming lineheight behavior, and feeling of rythms.
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…
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…
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…
Bookmarked Time-based background colour transitions with Temporal and CSS color-mix by Sophie Koonin . This is so freakin cool! Creative programming with the Temporal API and color-mix CSS function.
Bookmarked How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Dan Carr (Reverb Machine). A neat deconstruction of Brian Eno s work and process. Via The Tonearm .
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…
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 .
Introducing this month’s IndieWeb Carnival , Joe connects the dots between cosplay and personal style, in a way I hadn’t given enough consideration before. The more I cosplay the more I think all clothing is costume. Doing makeup to be a character is not much different from a haircut and a shave. Dressing for Halloween and dressing for a wedding are related. Comic Con, funeral, job interview,…
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…
Earlier this week I read Kyle Chayka s latest for The New Yorker , called The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet . It s about Anthropic s Claude Design and some of the visual giveaways the tool spits out by default. Notably, Naz Hamid changed the design of his personal site and wrote about avoiding the warm terracotta colors and serif type pitfalls, lest there be any question…
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 .
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.
Zelda, 2015 – 2026. My beloved dog Zelda died on June 13, after being very sick with liver cancer. Our home feels a lot emptier without her presence. I hadn t been through the grieving process with an animal before, but certainly with other family members. The brain always reminds you you have less time with a pet, but their loss hits profoundly in the same part of the heart. Zelda was my…
Eric Bailey, on the case for an accessibility designer vibe coding when all his coworkers are also vibe coding : I am a person existing inside of layered, interconnected, and dysfunctional systems. And these systems all thwart attempts to navigate or repair them if they are counter to their end goals.
Here s a sticker I slapped on a container we would keep dog food in. I found the sticker at a local shop in Providence, RI, while we were there for an art show Eleanor was featured in. Years later, I met an artist in Santa Fe with this same sticker on her water bottle. She attended RISD, lived in Providence and was friends with Mickey Z , the artist behind this particular sticker .
As the owner of a ragged Knicks jersey from 1999 (which no longer fits me), I should be in a celebratory mood today. But yesterday we had to say our final goodbye to Zelda, a dog we had for eleven wonderful years. I am writing down some memories and reflections, and will be publishing a memorial post about Zelda someday soon. The celebrating today belongs to the City of New York, and Mike Brown s…
Likes It doesn’t matter if it works by Henry (from online) . There are about a thousand and one debates about the ecology of AI, the ethics of AI, the governance of AI. As the technology advances, the debate with the slipperiest footing is on the actual efficacy of AI: does this work for this application? Or for this one? Ultimately, whether LLMs “work” as a technology or not doesn’t matter. The…
Likes Lone Piñon’s Fight to Save New Mexico’s Local Sounds From Extinction by Brad Sanders (Bandcamp Daily). An insightful interview and review of Hot Carne Seca , the latest album by Albuquerque s Lone Piñon.
Bookmarked Hey Arnold! Backgrounds by Steve Lowtwait . I didn t watch a whole lot of this series when it aired in the 1990s, but clearly the artists had a lot of fun designing the backgrounds (city streets, apartment interiors) and filling them with fun details. Looking at these drawings, I can t help but think of A Cartoonist s Review of AI Art , a recent webcomic I saw which lamented the decline…
Likes To my students. by Brent A. Yorgey . I originally got into computing because of the beauty of ideas, the joy of creating, and the possibility of building tools to help people and foster human relationships. I still believe in those things, even though it seems like most of the industry does not. I m writing this in the hope and knowledge that you believe in those things, too. There are…
Bookmarked Trying to Fail . Trying to Fail is a year-long experiment in rebuilding creative courage. After a decade of documenting the work of other artists, I realized I had forgotten how to make things for myself. I became too careful, too rigid, and too afraid of getting it wrong. Making things badly on purpose and learning from the process. I absolutely love this, and this channel deserves…
Bookmarked The Website Redesign Handbook by Marc Jenkins (16by9) . I had previously bookmarked Fictive Kin s book on web systems , and this is in a similar vein, but a little different. The 16by9 studio s focus on charities and nonprofit orgs may have something to do with it. Check out the Principles of Great Websites .
I m listening to the latest release by Marisa Anderson, The Anthology Of UnAmerican Folk Music . The Anthology Of UnAmerican Folk Music is a collection of nearly one thousand songs culled from the private record collection of the late Harry Smith. Assembled by Anderson after a chance encounter led to an opportunity to study and explore this treasure trove of music, the Anthology focuses on music…
The Savannah Bananas and the Banana Ball League have resurrected the Indianapolis Clowns . The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City is licensing the name and intellectual property in order to fund an expansion of the museum. For The Atlantic , Josh Levin has written an excellent article ( archived ) interrogating the tricky history and complicated legacy of the Clowns. Jesse Cole and Bob…
I truly appreciate Tracy Durnell s Letting things build , a reflection on a year and a half of more focused reading leading to her digital aura series posted to her website. I also wonder if some of the friction people are noticing in long-form reading comes from choosing the “wrong” books to start rebuilding their focus. Optimization culture makes us want to read “the best” book on any subject…
Likes Making a mark. by Michelle Barker .
Q: Who are the people? A: We are the people! Call-and-response slogan of the New York Giants, circa 1885 When I started reading Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People s Team by A. M. Gittlitz, the New York Mets were in the middle of a losing streak that would reach 12 games. Not the most dismal rcord in the team s history, but notable for one of professional sports most…
One of the best descriptions of Mets fandom I ve seen this year, from FanGraphs 2026 ZiPS Projections posted by Dan Szymborski in January: The Mets are a bit like an intellectual character in a 19th Century Russian novel. They’re well-read enough to understand why life just isn’t working, and while they make changes every winter, it always seems to come with the precognition that something will go…
Bookmarked North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns by Rick Aschmann . This is a detailed map of North American English dialects, showing how pronunciation and word choice shift across regions. I don t know much about the accuracy of this map or its creator but it is interesting to me as a bit of folk cartography. Ben T. Smith blogged about this back in 2011 , but I only…
Bookmarked Spring 2026 Bootcamp by Bad Website Club . Carmen, Eda and Jess have taught over 75,000 learners via our free programming bootcamps and are really excited to be launching a new social learning project where we’ll learn just enough web skills to be dangerous alongside all of you. Here s a completely free, live and async opportunity to learn HTML and CSS with others, following the…
Bookmarked Under the hood of MDN s new frontend by Leo McArdle . This is a technical blog post about the MDN team ditching their React app for native web components and baseline web platform features. Building this new frontend was a complete pleasure: it s been a privilege to be able to use new web technologies to build the website that documents them.
Likes That’s Home. That’s us. by Brennan Kenneth Brown . The photograph s official name, according to NASA, is Hello, World . A programmer s joke, a first proof that the system is working. But also a greeting. A wave across an incomprehensible distance. We are still here. It is the first image of the complete Earth taken by human hands since December 7, 1972 , 54 years ago. For my entire lifetime,…
I couldn t remember the last rock show I attended. It was well before I became a parent in 2022, and some time before the Covid-19 pandemic. I was lucky to get out on a Monday evening (March 30) to see Ratboys and villagerrr at Launchpad here in Albuquerque. The current tour is called When the Sun Explodes and the two groups are on the West Coast this week. Ratboys is touring in support of their…
Engels in the Outfield → For The New Yorker , Adam Gopnik reviewed Metropolitans by A.M. Gittlitz, a history of the New York Mets as the people s team , and referenced Alva Noë s Infinite Baseball as well: Baseball appeals because it is historical in the first instance: one thing happens, then another, and each thing is reflected in the next, as in the history of art. In this respect,…
Check out Ron s Musical Retrospective detailing 21 years of listening data from Last.fm. His page is based on a toolkit from Joel s Listening Autobiography (also 21 years). I love the storytelling aspect to these pages, combining a written narrative with compeliing interactive data visualizations, as well as audio previews. From the credits it looks like these pages are made with the Last.fm API…
Bookmarked Progressive Web Components by Ariel Salminen . Elena is a simple, tiny library (2.6kB) for helping you to build Progressive Web Components . Unlike most web component libraries, Elena doesn’t force JavaScript for everything. You can load HTML and CSS first, then use JavaScript to progressively add interactivity.
Baseball allegiances, no explanation: Mets a two- or three-inning nap on a Sunday afternoon Albuquerque Isotopes Hiroshima Carp Watching historic plays and calls on YouTube People still rocking Expos gear Ice cream sundae served in a little plastic helmet Inspired by a popular post on Bluesky yesterday by a user named Meh .
Bookmarked Principles for Knowing When to Stop Designing by Ben Brignell . This is a good reminder about exercising restraint at a moment when design tooling and workflows are becoming obsessed with how quickly things can be built.
Yesterday longtime Mets radio broadcaster Howie Rose announced his retirement at the end of the 2026 season. Howie s encyclopedic knowledge of Mets history makes listening to the radio broadcasts so fun. He grew up in Queens alongside the team, after all. After almost 40 years with the Mets, and behind the mic in the radio booth since 1995, its going to be hard imagining the home broadcasts or…
I love the metaphor Wilfred Stephen Anfield chooses for blogging in this introductory post, Why the porch : I designed this digital porch lined with Mason Jar Notes to work in a different way. Slower. Calmer. Spacious. Mine. Somewhere I could sit with an idea long enough to find out what I actually believe about it—or think I believe about it—not just what might potentially go viral. Mason Jar…
Likes Take your own pulse by Joe Crawford .
Likes Everybody Needs a Rock by Naz Hamid . The title is a reference to a wonderful book written by Byrd Baylor and illustrated by Peter Parnall. This book is displayed on my child’s bookshelf, along with a few others by the same author and illustrator. This post also references Ethan Marcotte’s worry stone post, another perennial favorite.
This is my entry for the March 2026 IndieWeb Carnival, on museum meories , hosted by James . Somewhere in this house, probably stashed away in a shoebox of other trinkets and doodads, is my first admission button to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met stopped using these iconic buttons in 2013 and they’ve since gone the way of the subway token. My button is dark green, bearing the old ‘M’ logo…
Likes Icky by Gary Peters .