Nerd about the fediverse, based in Portland, Oregon. 🌲 Nice to meet you! 👋

Blog & Podcast: jaredwhite.com
On Mastodon: @jaredwhite@indieweb.social

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2024

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  • My hot take is that short-term posture doesn’t matter all that much. If you have bad posture but you get up every 20 minutes and stretch/do chores/exercise for 5-10 minutes, you probably erase the original issues.

    My one-two punch, if you’re looking for advice: make sure you use a chair that makes good posture easy, with your keyboard+mouse & monitor height well separated on your desk (if computing’s the main thing you’re doing as you work). And then make sure you’re getting a lot of activity throughout the day. Spans of 2, 3, 4, etc. hours just sitting at your desk will be really bad for you, no matter how good your posture is.

    I guess what I’m saying is if you can either focus a lot on posture or focus a lot on physical activity routines, prioritize the latter. But both are certainly important.


  • Test in screen readers and see how content is being announced.

    Lists have certain semantics which are very useful. Definitely good in navigation (aka nav > ul > li).

    Grids are also useful BTW—we don’t have specific “grid” tags in HTML, but using ARIA attributes you can set up grids which might map onto div tags or even custom elements.

    Personally, I’m much less concerned about ul/li than I am “div tag soup” which is a plague upon modern web development. Use div tags sparingly, and almost always see if you can reach for either (a) a more semantic HTML tag (e.g., key/val pairs should probably be dl/dt/dd tags, not list tags), or (b) custom elements…yes, authoring tags with one or more hyphens which are purely for developer comprehension and hanging CSS off of is perfectly fine—recommended in fact—and in some cases if you need some JS component logic as well, then boom you have web components.







  • I all for removing barriers to entry in this space, and if you’re talking about self-hosting everything and wiring up all sorts of bits and bobs of various services together manually, yeah, it’s very technical and daunting. But somebody can get started on Ghost, or WordPress.com, or Buttondown, or ConvertKit or whatever. Lots of ways to write early and often online. Buzzsprout is pretty rad for podcasting as well.

    The problem usually boils down to distribution like Nilay said, not hosting. Fediverse seems like a real solution here. Honestly I’ve never been as successful at both blogging and podcasting as I am right now. This isn’t merely a glimpse of some old-school internet nostalgia trip. It’s a whole new world out there and it’s actually better. 🤩




  • Opt-out is bullshit, it’s unethical. Unless people specifically give their consent to their content being used for training data, and are compensated if they wish to be compensated for that privilege, then it’s just not morally defensible. Legally defensible? Sure, maybe so. But we don’t like to support companies who are merely abiding by the letter of the law, we want them to abide by the spirit of the law and of treating their customers with respect and consideration. This is not that at all. 😕


  • Someone in your organization needs to be in charge of frontend fidelity. I don’t mean an official job title, I just mean someone who has taken it upon themselves to have a “the buck stops here” mentality—better yet someone who is recognized by the rest of the team to have that priority.

    If nobody else fits the bill, then that person is you. And by all means, make all the stink you want about these issues. Nobody should ever be touching global stylesheets that affect multiple components or screens throughout the system without there being subsequent review or issues filed in a very visible way. Ideally, those sorts of breaking changes would never make it through code review in the first place.