My first post on this site was in June 2020, and it really got rolling in July. I’m writing my first update since hitting the one year mark (well, first proper update) and I thought I’d take a bird’s eye view for a moment.

I have had one post submitted to Hacker News, and it sort of broke my ability to use my very polite analytics to guess at the rate of growth of y’all out there reading this. That single post aside, you remain a highly exclusive group.

My most popular page is alcohol. I am going to assume it’s because you all are very fastidious about beginning things alphabetically.

Setting aside the post that was Hacker Newsed, my most popular post is the one about CSS dithering. This seems about right, because while it required no expertise to connect the dots1, there was absolutely nothing out there on the internet on this. Which there possibly shouldn’t be, because it’s a bit nutty, but such is my stock-in-trade.

If a single one of you links to my site anywhere using one of my banners, please email or message me because it will make my day to find out.

blogroll

To celebrate the anniversary, I have put a truly silly amount of effort into my OPML blogroll.

Blogroll is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as

a list of links to blogs (= personal websites)

though I’m not sure we can trust their familiarity with such things, since they provide sample usages like

Listen up and update your blogroll because I have a new blogspace.

I actually put it together for display, though, because of the other part: it’s OPML. OPML is best understood as the standard way of storing a list of RSS feeds, though you can shove a bit more into it than that. I saw Ton Zylstra’s thing on how the same format an RSS reader import/exports can be sort of hydrated into a human friendly webpage, and… well…

insert RSS tangent

I’m really sick of people complaining that RSS is dead. RSS isn’t dead! There is a ton more stuff out there using RSS than there even was when you thought it was most alive! All the major blogging tools, all the major newsletter tools, they all have RSS by default, and you can just go ahead and keep using something that still works even when no one’s talking about it anymore.

Anyway. I do keep this as the version of my subscriptions my feed reader pulls from, with only a couple of private-access Patreon RSS feeds added on.

There is a system of tags behind the scenes, and I put in a half-assed attempt to order the lists of tags such that each entry’s first tag would make sense to interpret as a category, but you can see that it’s silly when there’s so much overlap. I have been perhaps overcautious in characterizing people as mutuals; if you wish to correct the record, I’ll be delighted to make the update.

the ordinary update rundown

I have been collecting odd screenshots for many years, and discovered a delightful practice of sharing these as the small found poems they are. Everest Pipkin’s is the original, this is how I found out about it, and this is mine. Unlike most of my stuff, it doesn’t have alt texts.

I added a page with some chocolate recommendations.

Added to my heraldry page:

There is a canonical system of representing the colors of heraldry in black and white, so I took a stab at making that look a bit like a woodcut with no defined edges:

Hatched version of Azure, a moon crescent argent environed of 12 mullets in annulo argent

I implemented a hacky thing to freeze GIFs in place on their first frame so I can use them to achieve a satisfyingly tacky effect without making people sick.

  1. As evidenced by my having been able to do it. ↩