Cool Links Vol. 5: November, 2024

November has come and gone, and another year is nearing its end. Temperatures are getting higher and higher here, and my city's started to get empty during the weekends, with everyone taking a trip to the coast to enjoy the ocean.

How about some cool links to kick off this holiday season?

Apps and Fun

Horse Browser

(No, it's not something you use to browse horses. Unless that's what you want to use an internet browser for.)

I love highly-specialized software that tries to solve a problem without worrying about the "regular" use cases. The Horse Browser seems like a pretty neat thing for people doing researches - it remembers, organizes and allows you to export all the links you click when doing research (or just going down rabbit holes).

I can see it being useful when writing papers or even when trying to look for a solution to a nasty bug. It's definitely not something you'd want for regular browsing, but that's fine. There are plenty of other browsers to use for that end.

There's a neat review of this browser up on MacStories if you're interested.

Sill

The best part about Mastodon is the lack of a “For You” algorithm. That means nobody controls what you see (except for Time, I guess, since it’s chronological).

That is also the worst part of it. Sometimes I just can’t keep up with all the posts in there.

Sill is a neat little service that checks your timeline daily and sends you an email with the most shared links in your timeline. It works really well and it’s a neat way to make sure you didn’t miss a really cool project or article from your timeline even if you have skipped social media for a day (which you should really try). And, at least for now, it’s free!

Oh, it also works with BlueSky, though I haven’t tried it with that.

kirby vs. this blog post

Just a cute, fun and short blog post. What’s not to love?

Tech

Selfishness in AI, by Rodrigo Ghedin

Great analysis of how most uses of generative AIs (or at least what companies are trying to sell as use cases) are primarily selfish.

If you can't bother to do something yourself and instead ask a computer to do it, why should you expect someone to bother reading/watching it?

The corporate use cases for this are somewhat understandable - most content on the web is written for robots, not for people, for example (I know, sad). But Apple has been recently trying to sell it as a way to have a complete emotional detachment from your family as well. We truly live in the worst timeline.

Bluesky and enshittification, by Cory Doctorow

As Bluesky is gaining millions of users, this is an important reminder that, while it sells itself as something different, it hasn't proven itself to be yet, and is at a high risk of having the same issues every other commercial platform has - just like the one its new users are coming from.

Dev

A Framework for Evaluating Browser Support, by Josh Comeau

Josh has always been one of my favorite bloggers, and this blog post is awesome. You’ve probably seen me talking about Progressive Enhancement before, and this article talks about browser support and figuring out how and where to progressively enhance things.

CSS Popover + Anchor Positioning is Magical (video), by Kevin Powell

This is the best explanation of the new HTML/CSS popover API that I’ve seen. It still looks overly complex, mind you, and I’m not sure I like that API. But if you wanna find out about what it is and possible use cases, this video is a nice start!

Optimize resource loading with the Fetch Priority API

Optimizing the resources your website loads is the best way of making sure it loads faster for everyone. I've talked before about ways of doing that, but turns out there's a new, better way of telling browsers what they should load first!

The article has many examples of use cases, but these are my favorites:

• Hero images: “Images inside the viewport typically start at a Low priority. After the layout is complete, Chrome discovers that they're in the viewport and boosts their priority. This usually adds a significant delay to loading the critical images, like hero images.”
• Image Carousels: “For example, in an image carousel, only the first visible image needs a higher priority, and the others, typically offscreen initially can be set to have lower priority.”

Importing a frontend Javascript library without a build system, by Julian Evans

Nowadays it seems most packages and developers expect you to use a build system like Vite, Webpack, or anything with NodeJS to build websites.

That shouldn’t be true, but if you’re ever building a simple buildless website and want to use packages, Julia Evans explain how to do that and also a bit of how the different kinds of JS modules work.

Carving your space, by Heather Buchel

Great article reflecting on how job descriptions usually suck and how hard it is to find a job working with the things you want to work on, especially if your expertise is in the gap between two different job descriptions. Turns out the easiest way is to try and carve out a way into the work you do best.

baseline-status web component

A neat little web component that displays Baseline status of any web feature, that you can quickly add to any web page you want.

I might use this in future blog posts here!

Wrapping up

Phew, that was a bunch of links for this month! I'm assuming December won't have many, since I'm winding down a bit for the end of the year.

I'm starting to prep up my year-in-review post for 2024. These are always my favorite ones to write, as they make me reflect on everything I've seen and done this year. It was a good year, so hopefully that will turn into a good post!