Olly

A post on Sebastian’s blog introduced me to Junited, a fun celebration of blogging started by Robert Birming in 2024. In Robert’s words:Junited is a little blog-loving adventure where the blogging community gets together to share posts they enjoy and discover new bloggers along the wayWhat a wonderful idea! I’ll be using this post to partake in it throughout June. I mean, I run an indie blogging platform myself so how could I not! 😊The posts and blogs I come across will appear here soon!

I didn't come across a whole lot of interesting links this month. Or maybe I did and just forgot to make a note of them? That's probably more likely. Either way, here are a few things I discovered and liked. As time passes, the larger our collection of digital stuff grows. Maybe whoami.wiki can help? "Your personal encyclopedia, written by agents". It's inevitable, but I'm not quite ready to hand it all over just yet. I visited New Orleans with work in 2023. I loved it and I want to go back and…

If you visit a website you should ... see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.— John…

People love 88x31 buttons in their blog footer, right? Having fun experimenting on a Friday afternoon...

I’ve been using Voi bikes around Edinburgh quite a lot over the past few weeks. Here are some initial observations. The rent-an-e-bike concept is fantastic and reasonably priced. I can cycle into town for less than it costs on the bus, and the experience is much nicer. So many people seem to be using them, it feels like a revolution! The package deals for Voi passes don’t get better with more time. Why is the 1-month one the same cost/min as the 1 day one? Sunny weather helps. A lot. e-bikes…

I just spent an hour or so tightening the Pagecord home page copy and the ordering of content sections. I'm not sure if this will make any difference, but I certainly prefer it. Do you? I need to redo the walkthrough video at some point as the current one is cringe and it pre-dates a bunch of features. I know Pagecord has product market fit because of customer feedback (I've been soliciting this) and conversion rates, and it's very feature-rich today, so my focus now has to be about getting…

I started blogging in 2005 when I set up my first company, a consultancy that was just me contracting myself (and my soul) into financial institutions to hand-write code in exchange for cash in the City of London. I had to wear smart trousers, shirts and shoes but I got away without a tie. People carried briefcases. It sounds almost Victorian, doesn't it? I was never a prolific blogger and many of the posts I wrote back in the day got binned because they were terrible (although some survived).…

Spotify rolled out a new (temporary) logo to celebrate their 20th anniversary. The internet is ablaze with rage because it looks terrible on a phone home screen, but I actually love it myself. It’s playful and fun, and we need more fun in our lives in this age of average. More of this! Spotify Logo Special disco edition for 20th anniversary

I’ve seen a lot of musicals over the years. I saw Waitress this evening and it’s a good one. I absolutely love Carrie Hope Fletcher, and her performance of She Used To Be Mine brought the house down.https://open.spotify.com/track/7CBrUf50mf2IqcRZla38by?si=ODGT1eKqQZyMYODgtmQ8TgIt’s on tour across the UK for the rest of the year. Check it out if you can, even if you don’t think you like musicals because maybe you actually do.

I’m not sure how Róisín Machine passed me by in 2020. I suppose a global pandemic didn’t help, did it? Either way, I’m utterly delighted to have come across it recently while digging in the virtual crates. It’s a modern electropop dream.

I was reading Mitchell Hashimoto’s article about moving Ghostty away from GitHub where he mentions he was GiHub user 1299, which led me to rediscover Caius’ app for finding your own user id: https://caius.github.io/github_id. I feel similar to Mitchell about GitHub. It was a companion to my career since the FreeAgent days when I moved the repo over from Subversion. I hope they can sort it out before it’s too late, but I fear the wheels of change are already in motion. (User #5447)

There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate. Cal Newport teaches us how to avoid ultra-processed digital content (short-form social media, basically) in the same way we've learned to avoid Frankenfoods. "Our current lack of contemplation is degrading our brains." One answer? Read. The bot situation on the internet is actually worse than you could imagine. Here's why. Even at Pagecord’s minuscule scale bots are a significant problem. Articles like this area great. Onwards! 🤺 A brief history of…

The sun is out, like properly, in Scotland this week. Late April and May are generally some of the best months for sun so I plan to take full advantage and be outside as much as possible with camera in hand. This is a massively light-deprived country, so I'm literally gasping for sunlight right now - the winter here is ridiculous. I have a couple of small trips planned soon too, so hopefully the sun will be shining in those destinations as well. I've done quite a lot with Pagecord this year so…

I love the idea of Record Store Day but I no longer have a turntable, cassette deck or CD player despite the hundreds of vinyl records going mouldy in my garage (wanna buy them?). These days I want less stuff, not more. You’ll understand when you’re in your fifties. I love to buy albums digitally on Bandcamp (or Qobuz/7digital/Juno if it’s a major label) after using Spotify to try-before-you-buy, but it’s an underwhelming experience. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to do this...

I set out to make a photo zine of my favourite 2025 work, but it grew arms and legs and now it's a book. I love it! I wrote more about it on my photography blog if you're interested.

As a fan of the Pets since watching them play West End Girls on Top of the Pops, then getting Please on vinyl in 1986, having the chance to see them play an intimate show at the Electric Ballroom in Camden was a #lifegoals moment last night.For these five Obscure shows, they’re only playing B-sides and album tracks. I’m more of an old school 1980s PSB fan, so it was a total delight to hear three tracks from Please, a couple from Actually as well as Introspective and Behaviour.They’ve...

I commonly hear people claim that "blogging is dead" but I disagree. Yes, short-form video is eating the world and our attention spans have taken a direct hit, but long-form blogging is alive and well. The growth of the small web movement continues, and the rise of Substack is another case in point, but it's not all good news. There are too many forces pulling us away from focusing on the writing.Substack has been a major force in the blogging resurgence. It has generally been a good internet...

xinfluencer /ˈzɪnflʊənsə/ (ZIN-floo-en-ser)nounLoudmouth, right-leaning tech influencers who shitpost on X for cash.“My feed is just posts from lifemaxxing xinfluencers shitposting about beef, lifting, MRR and cottage cheese”Etymology: Mid 2020s. From X (formerly Twitter) + influencer (n.), one who monetises the performance of having opinions.See also: manosphere, griftosphere, engagement farming, main character syndrome.

Image Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky Watching the Artemis II launch last night was a blast from the past.NASA launches were a big part of my youth. I remember the big TV being wheeled into the classroom for the first Space Shuttle mission, the shock of watching the Challenger disaster, actually standing on Cocoa Beach at sunrise watching Columbia launch on STS-109 with my own eyes, then seeing the awful news when she never made it home. I love that NASA move slowly, more ca...

Links of note, unearthed from web surfing over the last few weeks. 🛰 Check out what the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes are looking at, in real time. https://spacetelescopelive.org 🖌️ A collection of beautiful web user interface designs, components and pages. Wonderful! https://detail.design 👩‍🎨 See how to write modern CSS vs the old way with this collection of snippets. Quaint, given that typing code into a text editor is quickly becoming a dying art. https://modern-css.com 🌱 Oat i...

I’m so old Apple Age Verification didn’t need me to do anything because I’ve had an Apple account for so long 💀

This is so on point 😂😭 @kaichoyce

In The 49MB Webpage, Shubham Bose describes how the New York Times website downloads 49MB of data across 422 (!) network requests. For one page! This is crazy to an old timer like me, but it’s the norm for most. We don’t have to live like this!John Gruber has done a much better job than I ever could in his write up about why this is so, and why it’s so bad for the survival of the web. Be sure to read it.I’ve been in this game since the web was hatched and while there’s a lot of nostalgia at p...

I could choose to pay a cloud service for a managed database but instead this week I chose to set up WAL-based continuous backup to R2 and point-in-time recovery for my Postgres instance. This would have been unthinkable for me a year ago but here we are.  All the processes are meticulously documented in a git repo, and I did a disaster recovery test today which spun up a new server and restored the DB. It was quick and seemingly seamless.   This experience has been encouraging and it’s c...