Just setting up my microblog.
I’m a dad! Eleanor and I welcomed the arrival of our daughter this morning.
Me with Dad at my cousin’s wedding in 2019. Dad died early Tuesday morning at his home in Arizona. I wrote a little about who he was: nicksimson.com/posts/202…
IndieWeb Create Day
I’m currently participating in my first IndieWeb Create Day: Join us in the IndieWeb chat and in our Zoom room. Share ideas, create & improve our personal websites, and build upon each other’s creations. Whether you’re a creator, writer, blogger, coder, designer, or just someone who wants to improve their presence on the web, all skill and experience levels welcome. Breakout rooms available for those who want to collaborate on the same topic.
What it's like to be the target of a COVID conspiracy
This one really pissed me off. Three pretty ordinary people (a prop artist, a molecular biology professor and a physician) had their names, images and likenesses swiped in the service of COVID-19 conspiracy claims. Three ordinary people just using the internet to conduct and publish their research, to entertain, or to connect with others. After my wife and I had a miscarriage earlier this year, Dr. Rockwell’s story in particular makes me pretty furious.
You’re not so terrific and that’s OK
Not sure if it was all the 20th anniversary coverage of Sept. 11, but I felt like watching the 2004 documentary I Like Killing Flies this week. The film is about famed NYC cook Kenny Shopsin and his idiosyncratic family-run restaurant Shopsin's General Store. The film is not so much about the trauma of 9/11 in Lower Manhattan but the casualties of the real estate trends that change a neighborhood's character.
My first theme.json
It’s very strange to poke around at a piece of software that you have used daily for near 16 years and be lost and confused about what you’re actually doing. Jeremy Felt, 'My first theme.json'
Open UI: Solving a Multi-Decade Problem
This presentation by Melanie Edwards and Greg Whitworth is a great introduction to the Open UI project and its goals. Today, component frameworks and design systems reinvent common web UI controls to give designers full control over their appearance and behavior. We hope to make it unnecessary to reinvent built-in UI controls, but for those who choose to do so, we expect that these design systems will benefit from Open UI's specifications and test suites.
We found rage in a hopeless place
With the sheer connectivity and externalization of interior emotion in the 21st century, there’s probably a sharper awareness of the grand totality of angers flowing around at any given moment, and what it’s like to feel, get indicted by, or caught up in them. The social platforms give us this neon cat’s-in-the-cradle paradigm where you can see how X leads to Y, and pulling here tightens this over there. Whatever problems existed before the pandemic, they just seem to have been frozen in time and deepened, along with all the new iterations.
How we win our readers (and help them too)
How we win our readers (and help them too) → Bookmarking this slide deck as a helpful resource for anyone who finds themselves in a content strategist role. Bobby Blanchard is the assistant director for audience at the Texas Tribune (where audience is everyone’s responsibility). Discovered via the most recent Upstatement newsletter.