hal

It's no secret that I do frontend web development for a living.

It's been my job for about a decade now, working for small agencies and (as of right now at least) big governments, with a particular focus on accessibility. As a hobby, I've been making websites for over two decades! It feels very weird to say that.

But in all that time, and with all the blogging I've done, I've basically never written anything trying to help others to learn or become more confident in doing frontend web development themselves.

I'd really quite like to, especially as many folks are turning sour towards algorithmically-determined social media, we seem to be entering a bit of a renaissance era of the personal website. I want to help folks build good web, but mostly, I just don't know where to start.

Are there any particular topics y'all'd find useful for me to talk about? They could be as technical or as broad strokes as you want, hyper specific "how do I do this?" to generalised introductory stuff. I just need to know what'd be useful!

My first attempt to answer a write-in question, and it was kind of a doozy. I have no idea if this is actually helpful knowledge or not. 😅

Thanks to @BappyDeerHooves for the prompt!

(I say this as someone in the field as well, I'll probably be pointing people to it next time i get asked tbh)

i also made some buttons a long long time ago i never published of a minimalist eggbug type thing, styled off of some other long fogotten button (here)

so here you go!

along with the Plus! version

the bulk of my posting is news articles, think pieces, and essays on current events. i've also discovered, to my horror, that many people do not have a system in place to check the news and/or happenings on the world outside social media or specific people passing on the links. please don't do that.

get an rss reader and populate it

my reader is fraidycat and it works for me. i've made folders within it to have all the sources reasonably organized and viewable. please see my short selection of sources below.

activism and justice

• YES Magazine
• ProPublica
• The 19th
• Truthout
• The Marshall Project

the world news

• Unrigged
• Sky News
• Capital B News
• TRT World
• APTN News

LGBTQ+

• them.
• Erasing 76 Crimes
• News Is Out
• Archer Magazine
• Alturi

• shrines: decorate some of your pages to be about your favourite media
• toybox: want to display pics, gifs, and widgets on your site but don't know where to put them? just make a new page dedicated to the random crap. no need to organize it.
• comments: you don't need wordpress or the like for them! i have disqus but you can shop around to see what you want.
• show off the stuff you have
• guestbook: like in old times. ise use 123guestbook but that's shutting down so you may have to look around. tip: a guestbook can literally just be a page dedicated to a comments widget.
• webgardens/greenhouse: this thing. create a 250x250 size bit of your website and let everyone embed it on theirs as an iframe
• EDIT: oh yeah, secrets and easter eggs! this share, with a related but different idea reminded me of those
• these ideas
• EDIT 2: a now page: mine is just a link to my media thread, my backloggd playing, and a bunch of widgets to pull in data from last.fm and goodreads so that I don't have to remember to update the page, but you might be fine with that.
• EDIT 2: credits! list what you used to make your website, from resources to tools. maybe also thank anyone who helped you.
• EDIT 3: links to other websites. this is kind of important do that people who find your website can find more. your friends, sites that look cool or have cool stuff, YouTube channels that you like, etc.
• EDIT 4: these 100 things, suggested by @noahtheduke

and of course, explore around neocities and nekoweb and see what else you can do!