Jim Nielsen

jimniels@mastodon.social

Designer, developer, blogger.Lover of food and websites.Icon-noisseur <a href="https://www.iosicongallery.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no">https://www.iosicongallery.com</a>Publisher of feeds. You should subscribe.

Posts

Post #3571815
&gt; They&#39;d say &gt; “Well, how could we have known?” &gt; I&#39;ll tell them: “It&#39;s not so hard to tell” Subtext of Jack Johnson lyrics hitting hard today lol
Post #3571814
📝 I published my story of my encounter with Om Malik. What a simple but indelible example of kindness and thoughtfulness. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/tribute-to-om/
Post #3571813
📝 Quite enjoyed this talk about how intelligence alone isn’t enough. Other human values are vital to collaborative efforts, like resilience and optimism — and, I might add, humor (which shines through in the talk). https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/intelligence-isnt-enough/
Post #3571812
Claude Science? When do we get Claude Religion?
Post #3571811
If you haven’t seen it yet, Mandy Brown’s new website is dope https://aworkinglibrary.com Lots of things to love. A few that stand out to me: - It&#39;s _fast_ - Every page has a “footer” that’s essentially just the home page — enthralled by this idea. - ❤️ the treatment for citations on post pages
Post #3571810
Negation is creative
Post #3571809
📝 In our age of generative AI, a blank page is a deliberate act! https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/intentionally-blank/
Post #2004563
📝 Post-mortem on my &quot;lots of little HTML pages&quot; approach — still like it. The browser&#39;s most basic feature is following a link. What if you built a site’s interactions around just that? e.g. a &quot;menu&quot; could just be: &lt;a href=&quot;/menu/&quot;&gt; and a dash of CSS view transitions for flair. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/small-html-pages/
Post #1940669
📝 I was trying to write a `:has()` selector with `:visited` and it wasn&#39;t working as expected. Turns out it wasn’t a bug, it was the browser telling what MDN calls “a little white lie” ha! https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/browsers-white-lies/
Post #1929393
There is so much to unpack in this image alone, I don&#39;t even know where to start https://mudmapmagazine.com/the-utopia-of-the-family-computer/
Post #1929392
Even in my own personal projects — let alone stuff at work — it is so incredibly hard to say &quot;no&quot;. Yet once again, I&#39;ve found that if I just cut more stuff out, things get better.
Post #1929391
Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains — Mary Oliver
Post #1929390
📝 Story about a family vacation when I was a teen and our car kept overheating and nobody could fix it without hooking it up to a computer. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/hook-it-up-to-the-machine/
Post #1929386
This is kind of a cool read, especially in an era where the excuse for most technology is “well you can’t un-invent it” you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can (willingly or not) forget how to summon him https://newsletters.feedbinusercontent.com/caa/caaada612102544292258341ec645342ec7829fc.html
Post #1929385
Let me tell you something: when it comes to software, it takes a lot of effort to choose to do so little.
Post #1929384
📝 Speed isn&#39;t everything, not even in a relay race. The interfaces between people (represented by the baton) can nullify whatever speed you have. Faster individuals don&#39;t necessarily make a faster team. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/collective-speed-isnt-the-sum-of%20individual-speed/
Post #1929383
Somebody asked me for a few sites I really enjoy looking at as well as reading. I figured I&#39;d repurpose my response as broadcast content :) https://anhvn.com/ https://robinrendle.com/ https://maggieappleton.com/ https://tylergaw.com/ https://chsmc.org/ https://rachsmith.com/ https://dbushell.com/ https://lynnandtonic.com/ https://ryanmulligan.dev/ https://www.nicchan.me/
Post #1450990
📝 I fixed a problem of my own making. I went to local builds/deploys for my notes site. So far I&#39;m digging it. Might do it with more of my sites. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/fewer-computers-fewer-problems/
Post #1132262
Adobe and /etc/hosts being in the news is reminding me of the good old days of cracked installers and ASCII readme files that instructed use of keygens and your own modifications of /etc/hosts to block Adobe phoning home.
Post #872032
📝 “Growth” is an interesting word. In the natural world, you tend to it. In the business world, you “hack” it, “engineer” it, and do everything you can to otherwise accelerate, manipulate, and manufacture it into existence. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/grow-like-a-tree-not-a-cancer/
Post #730471
I keep thinking of that phrase — something like, “They reduce the meaning of the word to that which their machines can achieve.” And now I just see it everywhere. - They made artificial &quot;intelligence&quot;. - They made a &quot;browser&quot; in a weekend. - They added “presence” to the UI. Rich human concepts narrowed to fit what a technology can achieve, then they lay claim to the name.
Post #622498
lol, in a cruel twist of fate, AI turned coders into the very thing they abhorred most: managers.
Post #553047
One thing I&#39;ve learned about me: if my spidey sense says “that’s a terrible idea for a business”, it’ll do well if somebody has the gall to do it.
Post #553045
UIs be like: --- Your choices: [Dropdown] --- lol, no I believe those are _your_ choices.
Post #553044
📝 Computers and the internet are a two-edged sword for me — thx for making me have to confront this realization before I was ready @davatron5000 lol https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/two-edged-sword-of-computers-and-internet/
Post #553043
RE: https://mastodon.social/@davatron5000/116143571331751241 I was not cool. Mine was the most mass-produced one ever made by Sony. But I didn&#39;t know that as an 8y/o so I thought it was friggin awesome. Now looking back, I see it was: &gt; cheap, plastic, often noisy, but fairly decent just like me! https://walkman.land/sony/wm-fx101
Post #553042
TFW previous you made the right abstraction, so the next chunk of work you need to do just slides right in
Post #553041
📝 Just me reflecting on a word choice I saw in a UI. No biggie. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/w0rdz-are-1mportant/
Post #553040
I hate when my music library drifts over time. Example: - Add &quot;Phantom of the Opera&quot; to my library - 3 years pass - Now there&#39;s 5 &quot;Phantom of the Opera&quot; albums in my library, each with only a partial set of songs. I guess the mistake here is calling it _my_ music library. It&#39;s not mine. It’s Apple’s. What’s mine are the pointers to Apple’s music catalog. Apple (&amp; rights holders) get to decide what constitutes an album — now and in...
Post #160171
I keep thinking of that phrase — something like, “They reduce the meaning of the word to that which their machines can achieve.” And now I just see it everywhere. - They made artificial "intelligence". - They made a "browser" in a weekend. - They added “presence” to the UI. Rich human concepts narrowed to fit what a technology can achieve, then they lay claim to the name.