Jeremy Keith

But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext

Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok—which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.

A Web Component UI library for people who love HTML | Go Make Things

I’m obviously biased, but I like the sound of what Chris is doing to create a library of HTML web components.

Back to the Crazebox! - Toons Back To A Website - Homestar Runner

Let’s go back to a website!

P&B: Jeremy Keith – Manu

In which I answer questions about blogging.

I’ve put a copy of this on my own site too.

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name is Jeremy Keith. I’m from Ireland. Cork, like. Now I live in Brighton on the south coast of England.

I play traditional Irish music on the mandolin. I also play bouzouki in the indie rock band Salter Cane.

I also make websites. I made a community website all about traditional Irish music that’s been going for decades. It’s called The Session.

Back in 2005 I co-founded a design agency called Clearleft. It’s still going strong twenty years later (I mean, as strong as any agency can be going in these volatile times).

Oh, and I’ve written some nerdy books about making websites. The one I’m most proud of is called Resilient Web Design.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I was living in Freiburg in southern Germany in the 1990s. That’s when I started making websites. My first ever website was for a band I was playing in at the time. My second ever website was for someone else’s band. Then I figured I should have my own website.

I didn’t want the domain name to be in German but I also didn’t want it to be in English. So I got adactio.com.

To begin with, it wasn’t a blog. It was more of a portfolio-type professional site. Although if you look at it now, it looks anything other than professional. Would ya look at that—the frameset still works!

Anyway, after moving to Brighton at the beginning of the 21st century, I decided I wanted to have one of those blogs that all the cool kids had. I thought I was very, very late to the game. This was in November 2001. That’s when I started my blog, though I just called it (and continue to call it) a journal.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Sometimes a thing will pop into my head and I’ll blog it straight away. More often, it bounces around inside my skull for a while. Sometimes it’s about spotting connections, like if if I’ve linked to a few different things that have some kind of connective thread, I’ll blog in order to point out the connections.

I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.

I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I mostly just blog from home, sitting at my laptop like I’m doing now. I have no idea whether there’s any connection between physical space and writing. That said, I do like writing on trains.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I use my own hand-rolled hodge-podge of PHP and MySQL that could only very generously be described as a content management system. It works for me. It might not be the most powerful system, but it’s fairly simple. I like having control over everything. If there’s some feature I want, it’s up to me to add it.

So yeah, it’s a nice boring LAMP stack—Linux Apache MySQL PHP. It’s currently hosted on Digital Ocean. I use DNSimple for all the DNS stuff and Fastmail for my email. I like keeping those things separate so that I don’t have a single point of failure.

I realise this all makes me sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been making websites for as long as I have, you come to understand that you can’t rely on anything sticking around in the long term so a certain amount of paranoia is justified.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I’m not sure. I’m not entirely comfortable about using a database. It feels more fragile than just having static files. But I do cache the blog posts as static HTML too, so I’m not entirely reliant on the database. And having a database allows me to do fun relational stuff like search.

If I were starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t end up making the same codebase I’ve got now, but I almost certainly would still be aiming to keep it as simple as possible. Cleverness isn’t good for code in the long term.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I’ve got hosting costs but that’s pretty much it. I don’t make any money from my website.

That Irish traditional music website I mentioned, The Session, that does accept donations to cover the costs. As well as hosting, there’s a newsletter to pay for, and third-party mapping services.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

You should absolutely check out Walknotes by Denise Wilton.

It’s about going out in the morning to pick up litter before work. From that simple premise you get some of the most beautiful writing on the web. Every week there’s a sentence that just stops me in my tracks. I love it.

We wife, Jessica Spengler, also has a wonderful blog, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

You know I mentioned that The Session is funded by donations? Well, actually, this month—April 2025—any donations go towards funding something different; bursary sponsorship places for young musicians to attend workshops at the Belfest Trad Fest who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go:

thesession.org/donate

So if you’ve ever liked something I’ve written on my blog, you can thank me by contributing a little something to that.

Cheers,
Jeremy

Petition · Defend the Internet Archive - United States · Change.org

Signed!

We, the undersigned, call on the record labels and members of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)—including UMG, Capitol Records, Concord Bicycle Assets, CMGI Recorded Music Assets, Sony Music Entertainment, and Arista Music—to drop your lawsuit against the Internet Archive.

Beach daydreams, lost at sea (Interconnected)

Matt’s beach thoughts are like a satisfying susurrus in my RSS reader.

I Hate Wasting Time on Identifying AI Slop • Buttondown

It’s an annoying cognitive task: detecting weird photo artifacts, bizarre movement in videos, impossible animals and body horror, and reading through reams of anodyne text to determine if the person who prompted the synthetic media machine cared enough to dedicate time and energy to the task of communicating to their audience.

I hate that this is the bleak future which venture capitalists and AI boosters have gleefully laid out for us, that they consider this to be a “democratizing” technology in any real sense of the word. Far from strengthening democracy, these are technologies more apt at propping up scam capitalism and multi-level marketing schemes. I would like my time and mental space back.

Hiding elements that require JavaScript without JavaScript :: dade

This is clever: putting CSS inside a noscript element to hide anything that requires JavaScript.

I was at the State Of The Browser event recently, which was great as always.

Manu gave a great talk about colour in CSS. A lot of it focused on OKLCH. I was already convinced of the benefits of this colour space after seeing a terrific talk by Anton Lovchikov a while back.

After Manu’s talk, someone mentioned that even though OKLCH is well supported in browsers now, it’s a shame that it isn’t (yet) in design tools like Figma. So designers are still handing over mock-ups with hex values.

I get the frustration, but in my experience it’s not that big a deal in practice. Here’s why: oklch() isn’t just a way of defining colours with lightness, chroma, and hue in CSS. It’s also a function. You can use the magical from keyword in this function to convert hex colours to l, c, and h:

--page-colour: oklch(from #49498D l c h);

So even if you’re being handed hex colour values, you can still use OKLCH in your CSS. Once you’re doing that, you can use all of the good stuff that comes with having those three values separated out—something that was theoretically possible with hsl, but problematic in practice.

Let’s say you want to encode something into your CSS like this: “if the user has specified that they prefer higher contrast, the background colour should be four times darker.”

@media (prefers-contrast: more) {
  --page-colour: oklch(from #49498D calc(l / 4) c h);
}

It’s really handy that you can use calc() within oklch()—functions within functions. And I haven’t even touched on the color-mix() function.

Hmmm …y’know, this is starting to sound an awful lot like functional programming:

Functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that map values to other values.

An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1 - Ars Technica

Here’s a fun account of the early days of the ARPANET.

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

You won’t be able to unsee this. It’s like the FedEx logo …if the arrow was an anus.

1. Circular shape (often with a gradient)
2. Central opening or focal point
3. Radiating elements from the center
4. Soft, organic curves

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s also an apt description of… well, you know.