OnlyRSS started out as an RSS feed—with no associated website (hence the domain name.) The articles only existed in the feed, and they could only be accessed via RSS readers such as Feedly and Inoreader. As I became increasingly interested in typography, I decided to be a little more traditional and actually make my articles visible on a website. At that point, OnlyRSS.org became my “learning tool” i.e. it was my reason to learn the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
What can you do with an AI browser? I've been using an AI browser for a few days, so thought I'd share some examples of what you can do with it. I've tried to think of tasks that I often find myself doing when online, that I find tedious. Background It's easy to suffer from AI fatigue at the moment. We're bombarded with new product launches, endless webinars and presentations (some of which I'm…
Photo editing using Gemini Ten examples of photos edited using the new Nano Banana model from Google Gemini. The key takeaway? Each example just required uploading an image to the Gemini app and typing a single prompt—no tech skills needed. You're reading this in your RSS reader, which is great! But, in the version on the source site the images are clickable, which toggles between original and AI…
The enshittification of UK supermarkets UK supermarkets have transformed simple shopping into a data-harvesting nightmare. What was once as easy as picking up an item and paying has become a multi-tiered pricing system requiring apps, weekly unlocks, and surrendering personal data just to access “normal” prices. A rant about the enshittification of UK supermarkets. I remember the first time I…
AI-assisted coding is the electric-assisted cycling of software development My premise here is that electric bikes don't just make cycling easier for existing cyclists—for many people they make cycling possible. I see many parallels with AI-assisted software development i.e., for existing software developers AI-assisted coding makes their job easier, for people who can't code, it makes software…
Same news, different views: The BBC's design at home and abroad Around a year ago I noticed that the BBC news site had updated their article format—and I really liked the new look. But, I then realised that I had my VPN on and was actually seeing the site as viewed from the US! Have our American cousins evolved so much during our split 400 years ago that they now have a better appreciation of…
Why Product Managers need to embrace the tech After 16 years as a Product Manager, I share my thoughts on why technical knowledge is highly beneficial for product managers. Background I’ve been a Product Manager for 16 years. I don’t mean I’ve worked in product management for 16 years, I mean I’ve literally had the individual contributor (IC) role of Product Manager (PM) for 16 years. Does this…
Learning log: 2024 My 2024 learning goals and resources. In this post I outline my learning goals for 2024 and list the resources I used. 2024 goals During January 2024 I finally completed the Mimo JavaScript course. This course took many months, and was my primary source of training for JavaScript. It also represented the end of chapter 1 of my learning journey (i.e. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript ).…
Visualising my daily constitutionals (walks) The result of my attempt to build a calendar heatmap from scratch with HTML, CSS, and JS. The heatmap visualises my daily walks in 2024. Calendar heatmaps It's hard to think of another chart type that can show daily data over a 12-month period in such a small space as well as a calendar heatmap. Calendar heatmaps allow you to glean: relative values…
Bring back the daily constitutional After discovering the concept of the daily constitutional recently while reading Sherlock Holmes, I think it's a phrase (and practice) that deserves a comeback. Introduction I've been working my way through Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short stories. It's a great way to boost my end-of-year Goodreads stats (I'm counting each short story as a “book”—this…
Learning log: 2023 My focus this year was meant to be SQL & Python, but it ended up being mostly JavaScript, and then of course, like everyone else, I got a bit distracted by Generative AI. On this page you'll find links to all the resources I used. 2023 goals I'm disappointed with my progress this year. It was meant to be the year I finally learnt SQL, but about halfway through the year I changed…
Introduction To celebrate our 20 th wedding anniversary the wife and I spent two weeks in Canada during late September 2023. We flew into Vancouver and then drove to Whistler, Clearwater, Jasper, Banff, and finished in Calgary. The scenery was breathtaking, and the weather was perfect. The following image gallery is a selection of my favourite photographs from the trip. Gallery For anyone viewing…
Background I hadn't written an article for quite some time, so decided to write about the View Transitions feature that has been added (behind a feature flag) to Google Chrome. I implemented View Transitions on this site about 6 months ago, and I couldn't remember why I hadn't already written about it. Then, during my research, I remembered Dave Rupert's blog post " Getting started with View…
Background If you're reading this then you are probably already aware of the upcoming new CSS feature: text-wrap: balance; If not, then please visit the Chrome dev blog for the full details. Basically, it's a way to "balance" titles, headings, and short paragraphs such that there are a similar number of words per line (and hence avoid widowed words). For simplicity, I'm going to refer to it as CSS…
The benefits RSS can be a valuable tool for Product Managers. It allows them to stay up to date on industry news and trends, track competitors, and better understand their customers. If you're new to RSS, then see my previous article: What is RSS and what are aggregators? In the list below I summarise 10 benefits (if humans had 8 digits, I'd have only listed 8) for Product Managers. 1. Stay up to…
Background I recently created my first HTML tables for my Learning Log 2022 article . Each row in the table was a course or book I had used during the previous year, and I wanted to add a progress indicator within the rows to show my progress. It took some effort to get the tables looking and functioning the way I wanted (mostly due to declaring the progress variable in the HTML and not the CSS)…
Putting the numbers into context A lot of articles have been written recently that discuss Air India's record-breaking order of new Airbus and Boeing aircraft. Many articles have not however mentioned the size and breakdown of Air India's current fleet. I thought I'd try and reuse the same data visualisation (the isotype chart) from my previous blog post and create a new isotype chart for Air…
Background Inspiration for this chart came from the recent infographic on VisualCapitalist.com which visualises the world’s top 25 fleets of combat tanks (they specifically state “combat” tanks, which intrigues me, are there tanks designed for the daily commute?). Their chart was a jpg, and I wanted to see if I could build something similar using HTML & CSS (without JavaScript or a charting…
Background Inspiration for the first chart came from the recent infographic on VisualCapitalist.com which displays the share of men versus the share of women among smokers (across the world's 50 most populous countries). Their chart was an embedded image. I wanted to see if I could build a similar chart using HTML & CSS. I'm sure there are charting libraries that would let me build something…
2022 goals My primary learning goal for 2022 was to gain a deeper understanding of the online presentation of unstructured content. In addition to understanding the basics, I also wanted to be able to put what I had learnt into practice. This required the continuation of my deep dive into HTML & CSS, and a total redesign and rebuild of this website—with a focus on typography and speed. In addition…
Background If you are reading this in an RSS reader, although the full article is included below, the source article has a better comparison of the original and restored photos which cannot be replicated here (as it uses JavaScript) "Zoom and enhance!" is a movie trope that has long infuriated anyone who has even the most basic understanding of what is (and isn't) possible when manipulating…
Background I started to build this website in January 2021 with the aim of teaching myself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's now June 2022, and over the last few months I've been asking myself when I'm going to get around to JavaScript. Three days ago, while I was halfway through a circuit training session in my home-gym, I realised that since starting circuit training (about a month ago) I'd been…
Background During February 2022 OnlyRSS.org became a Progressive Web App (PWA). The plan wasn't really for anyone to install OnlyRSS on their mobile or desktop, it was for me to understand what was required to turn a website into a PWA—and the best way for me to understand that was to do it. The Google Play and Apple App store are great places to discover new apps, and once you find an app that…
Background For the first 13 years of my career I worked as a research scientist for the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency ( DERA , an agency of the UK's MoD). I worked on 3–5 year projects covering a wide range of subjects. Even though the projects varied, they did all have one thing in common, i.e. one of the deliverables was always a report, and much like the infamous TPS reports from…
I recently created a subscribe page (which can be reached from the RSS link on the homepage). The aim was to create an easy way for users to copy the RSS feed URL (previously the link simply opened the RSS feed, which many users might have found confusing), and also gives some basic instructions on how to subscribe to OnlyRSS via two popular RSS aggregators i.e. Feedly and Inoreader. The Feedly…
Stacked bar charts For the purpose of this article I'm going to be using a real world example, specifically a stacked bar chart designed to show the number of aircraft of each type e.g 737-800, A320-200 etc. in an Airline's fleet, categorised by the aircraft status i.e. In Service, On Order, and Storage. This 'fleet breakdown by type and status' is essential when trying to understand the…
If you are reading this in an RSS reader, you might want to visit the actual blog, as the article refers to style elements that won't appear in your RSS reader. All the best blogs tend to be written by experts, and also tend to keep to a specific field or topic. My blog does neither of those things. For example, this post is about separating paragraphs using CSS, I'm only just starting to learn…
If you are reading this in your RSS Reader, then well done, RSS is cool, and therefore, by extension, so are you!. But, much of this article won't make sense unless you visit the actual blog post, as much of the article is inside a mock-Kindle that I created with CSS. I created this article for two reasons: I wanted to highlight some Kindle benefits that are often overlooked (probably because they…
There's no web article associated with this RSS entry. This post exists in the RSS feed only. If you're reading this, you are a member of a very, very, small club. Every year a group of friends and I exchange our 'Top's of the year'. Here's my list for 2021. Movies (first watched during 2021) Promising Young Woman Captain Fantastic Nobody Predestination The Invisible Man The Dig Whiplash Molly's…
I've used very specific wording in the title of this post. The key word in the title is build , I specifically don't state that every product manager should have a website, or write a blog, I don't even think it's that important if Product Managers actually publish the website's they build, but I do believe that all Product Managers (ok, not all, only those who are responsible for online products)…
Background I bought my Concept 2 Model C rower in 2001, my plan (like most people who buy exercise equipment) was to use it every week. And, like most people, I failed. I used the rower sporadically for a while, and then I moved house, and it just sat there in my new home, gathering dust. I'd get the urge to start using it again (yes...January) and as usual, it didn't last. I've always done some…
Background Whether you work in data science, data analytics, finance, strategy, user experience, sales, marketing, or product, at some point you will be creating data visualisations, either for use externally (in your products and on social media), or internally (in your presentations and reports). As an employee of an information and analytics company, it’s important that the visualisations I…
What is RSS? RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardised, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow you to keep track of many (potentially, hundreds) different websites in a single news aggregator. Below you can see an example of the contents of an RSS feed. It's simply a channel (e.g. your…
Excaliwhatnow? Excalidraw is described by its creators as a "Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams". I'd describe it slightly differently, I think I'd go with "a drawing tool that's so easy to use that you spend your time making sure the drawing is effective, rather than 'pixel-fiddling'". Excalidraw is great for quickly creating diagrams (you can see lots of great examples on…
I recently wrote about my weekday lockdown routine . In this article I'll be describing the hardware I use to do my job while working from home. As a Product Manager for a suite of News and Data Analytics products, I use the tools that most office workers are familiar with, i.e. Office 365 apps, but I'm also often sketching UIs, writing requirements in Confluence, or using tools such as PowerBI…
Prior to lockdown Prior to lockdown, I used to work from 4 different locations: Bishopsgate (round trip commute ≈ 3hrs, car, train, tube, walk) Heathrow (round trip commute ≈ 2hrs, car) Sutton (round trip commute ≈ 2.5-3.5hrs, car) Home (0hrs) My start time each day was dependent upon which office I was working from, the earliest being when I was working from Sutton. To avoid the M25 traffic, I'd…
A typical day On any typical workday I might have the following applications open on my PC: Tasks (Outlook for Web), Agenda (Outlook for Web), Email (Outlook for Web), MS Teams (chats and meetings), Journal (Excel, where I document my activities), WhatsApp (non-work chat), Signal (non-work chat), Feedly (news aggregator), BBC.co.uk (news), Confluence (User Stories), JIRA (backlog), Word, Excel,…
I've been using RSS feeds to aggregate web content for almost 20 years. I believe that having relevant content available in a single location makes the web a much better experience and makes me a far more productive and more knowledgeable person\employee. Unfortunately, many “modern” websites don’t support RSS, so I’m fighting back. To help readdress the balance, I’m publishing my blog articles as…