Jim Nielsen

OP: Perhaps it is, but this article honestly took me 12 months to research & write. I really struggled to find trustworthy sources. Do you know of any others I should look at? Also, I rather like the idea that blogging can simply be stating the obvious: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/blogging-stating-the-obvious/. Hopefully my argument is helpful to someone!

this is the best description of software (as notion and as profession) for non-insiders. Here another jewel from Paul Ford: "The only technology that you need is deadlines" And an article about it: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/deadlines-as-technology/

Something for the sanding list: Navigating between https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/about/ and https://blog.jim-nielsen.com makes the layout shift a bit in Safari on macOS. The reason is that Safari only shows the scrollbar when it's needed but without "reserving" the space. I once spent hours debugging this before I realized what was happening, my confusion coming from the fact that with the inspector open that wasn't the case (As there the scrollbar was always visible...).

There are a whole lot of front-end UIs for Hackernews but I never wanted to litter my primary browser with extras unless in dire need. I usually browse Hackernews in my Primary Browser on a rather large monitor. So, the first problem is that Hackernews is too spread out for comfort and I have a custom styles that forces the max-width within 960px (I know, OldSkool habit). If this is something you are comfortable with, I just set the text to be a little darker than the default light gray. FYI, `table#hnmain` where everything happens in HN. And one of the best articles to help you with this is at https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/custom-style-sheet-in-safari/ To set the text to a darker color; :root { /* besides the other variables */ --color-700: #374151; } table.fatitem .toptext { color: var(--color-700) !important; }

https://jloh.co/ Runs on Hugo hosted by Netlify. I want to make it more minimalist, I really like how clean and simple Jim Neilson's is for example https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/

Hey, I do this too, and I absolutely love receiving thoughtful e-letters, the few times a year they happen! Here are my reasons, copied from my site's "Standing Invitation" [0]. > Email me just because (not just for work). Whatever feeds your curiosity; silly, fun, nerdy, serious. > Why? > 1. Do unto me what I have done unto others. I habitually cold-email anyone who moves me in some way (joy, insight, utility, mind shift…). I also love to receive such email! > 2. There is too little unsolicited positive feedback in much of most of our lives. At some point in the fuzzy past, I decided enough was enough. At least someone somewhere ought to feel good sometime for no reason whatsoever. Since that realisation, I have cold-emailed people willy-nilly. See also: Saying Thank You [1], and Days Are Easily Made [2]. > 3. It's always been a delight; no regrets. You should try it too! > So, let serendipity reign; write away! [0] https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation [1] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/saying-thank-you/ [2] https://www.autodidacts.io/how-to-make-someones-day/

Thanks very much for a thoughtful reply and link to your article. I look forward to reading it. As it turns out, I shared that very same article in the Datastar discord the other day! Here's some other good ones that I found while digging into the topic, for anyone who cares. * https://warpspire.com/posts/url-design/ * https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/examples-of-great-urls/ * https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI * https://www.hanselman.com/blog/urls-are-ui I strongly agree that good urls are very important. But I don't see how D* prevents correct urls/history at all... You can click anchor links just fine for pages that are genuinely separate pages. If its just a sub page, filter etc, then i think in many cases it should only swap into the dom without updating the history. Moreover, am I wrong to think that if you use hx-boost to swap in fragments, then the URL that gets updated/saved in history wouldn't actually load the same page if you loaded it from a bookmark? That wouldn't happen with non-boosted anchor links. Anyway, I'm not the best person to take up this argument. If you are interested at all in some respectful debate on the topic, it would be great if you came by the datastar discord where there's definitely people who would be better able to engage with it. I'd be eager to observe from the sidelines

It may have actually started with Web Components Community Group report itself: https://w3c.github.io/webcomponents-cg/2022.html --- start quote --- It's worth noting that many of these pain points are directly related to Shadow DOM's encapsulation. While there are many benefits to some types of widely shared components to strong encapsulation, the friction of strong encapsulation has prevented most developers from adopting Shadow DOM, to the point of there being alternate proposals for style scoping that don't use Shadow DOM. We urge browser vendors to recognize these barriers and work to make Shadow DOM more usable by more developers. --- end quote --- And probably continued in HTML Web Components https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components/ A more technical and measured take on Shadow DOM is here: https://nolanlawson.com/2023/12/30/shadow-dom-and-the-problem-of-encap…

Developer here. I super appreciate the support. Some context: - I'm a big fan of RSS and there is a thriving community behind. Just check out this list: https://github.com/AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS - I'm also a firm believer of web as a platform, a distributed document database, and an open library of knowledge, as opposed to a "compile target" for cryptic JavaScript apps that take control and freedom away from users. Jim Nielsen has a timely critique: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/web-languages-as-compile-targets/ - The bigger picture behind the osmos project is to create an IDE for personal knowledge management. On the surface: 1. I read my rss with osmos::feed. 2. I capture reference links from the feed with osmos::memo. 3. I digest the knowledge and connect them into notes with osmos::note. - All of them are done with plaintext (some sprinkle of markdown), remote hosted on GitHub, so they are easy to run NLP and ML against. Potentially with GitHub actions, or locally with some bot, with a cloned repo. - In the long term, I was hoping to create a "positive feedback loop". Use ML to extract patterns from my notes, make connections for me, and recommend interesting reading in the osmos::feed. On the other end, osmos::feed can use NLP to detect how each article in the feed might connect to ideas from osmos::note and make note-taking even easier. - The parent project (https://osmoscraft.org) is still in super early stage. Would love to let the community give it a…

or this one https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/

Apple is no stranger to using a web browser for basic OS functionality. Several pages in the settings app are actually WebKit, source: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/

Well, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that they started using webviews for stuff like system UI: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components/ - Jim Nielsen has a series of posts on how to use made up HTML tags in a way that doesn't just fail to nothing when the javascript defining the custom-element doesn't get successfully executed.

Maybe this https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424? On mobile the webview app experience is crap and it's immediately obvious that an app is not native. Simply nobody asks customers how they like it. The management assumes that as long as nobody complains and the users don't leave in droves, the experience must be impeccable.

No, this is one of those bizarre “wait, really, they put that in the default stylesheet” problems. There is a lot of weirdness lurking in the default user agent stylesheet…especially in Safari: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/things-i-learned-reading-webkits-ua-… Browser vendors put a lot of surprising, and very poorly documented, defaults into user agent stylesheets, and they can trip you up at the most basic level, and the styling is poorly exposed in most web inspector tooling. I ran into a nasty one with Safari’s date picker—had to go down a lot of rabbit holes to figure out I needed to finesse the `::-webkit-date-and-time-value` CSS to get an input field styled correctly.

Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? At least some of them are actually web pages: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/

What’s the problem you’re trying to solve w/ Pomodoro? As I understand, Pomodoro’s purpose is to incrementally train you to stay on task for longer and longer durations. Is that not working for you or do you have a different goal? “The only technology that you need is deadlines“ - Paul Ford https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/deadlines-as-technology/

Sounds like you might like the idea coined as "HTML Web Components": https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components/ You basically write all the normal HTML and CSS so it's loaded in right away. But then you also make use of the advantages that defining a custom element gives you.

Sounds like a similar argument outlined here in a framework-agnostic way: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components/ I don't really understand why people would bother arguing whether htmx is a library or a framework. It's a way of making a web site where you write less JS.

There are many things in life that can disable a person for a time. With proper care, healing and rehab, abilities can be regained. In the mean time, many experiences that were formerly unexamined bring valuable insights. As Cindy Li observed, "We’re All Just Temporarily Abled" <https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/temporarily-abled/>

Kinda tangential but plugging this because I was so happy to find it a couple months ago (collates articles in kindle/ereader format) https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/reintroducing-readlists/

Seems nice too bad it's mac only. However this article claims it's free to use the API. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2019/down-the-rabbit-hole-of-image-optimi…

I want to note that Vue provides official instructions on how to use it without build tools [1], and lots of folks who have written posts on how to use React without tooling as well [2]. I agree that they're ultimately designed to be used with tooling, but it's not a blanket requirement. - [1] https://vuejs.org/guide/quick-start.html#without-build-tools - [2] https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2020/react-without-build-tools/

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/about/internal-links https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/visualizing-my-blogs-links/

Even OSX uses webviews for "native" ui: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/

Chromebooks suck because they run ChromeOS [1]. > From what I could gather, the version of Chrome was tied to ChromeOS which couldn’t be updated because of the hardware. No new ChromeOS meant no new Chrome which meant stuck at version 76. [1]: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/a-web-for-all/ / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29894300