@bw@social.lol

Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · 5d ago

Replying to @heydon@front-end.social

@heydon@front-end.social @neatnik@social.lol mind blown

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 29, 2026

Replying to @keydelk@fosstodon.org

@keydelk@fosstodon.org Thanks Keith, that's awesome!

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 29, 2026

I appreciate more and more that my otherwise incredibly dumb self in 2005 decided to get a domain name and start hosting a personal website. Every time a platform rises and falls, this becomes a better decision. If you are on the fence about getting a domain name and creating a personal website, just do it! If you think for some reason that it's too late, it's not. I always think about what @chriscoyier@front-end.social said about starting the CSS-Tricks blog back in the day. I once had an idea to start a blog about CSS. I sucked at writing. I sucked at designing. The vibe at the time was that everything important about CSS had already been written. Nobody told me. Even me quoting this after all these years is possible because he put it on his personal website! https://chriscoyier.net/2013/10/18/mediocre-ideas-showing-up-and-persistence/

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @neatnik@social.lol

@neatnik@social.lol @justincox@social.lol for what it's worth, I admire and appreciate that you are having this discussion in the open, rathrn than just announcing a policy. I'm also confident that whatever you choose to do will be well thought out and respectful and inclusive to everyone. You won't be able to please everyone. But I will do my best to comply with whatever you decide to do. I'm not going anywhere!

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @neatnik@social.lol

@neatnik@social.lol @justincox@social.lol Yeah I think the policy should be limited to 100% (or 90+?) genAI output. I'm sure opinions will be all over the place, but to me it's a bit burdensome and maybe even a bit icky to require someone to label content that may have used AI secondarily or tertiarily (this may not be a word, but I want it to be) upstream of the output. It's like, if I share a website I've made and I was using the Copilot auto-complete feature to help me code in VS Code, do I have to label my post with a hashtag? On the other hand, if what someone is sharing is essentially just output from an LLM, whether words or pictures or music, I think a hashtag policy is fair enough. (I probably need to blog about this but there's something that rubs me the wrong way with AI-shaming and I think it has to do with turning the focus on each other instead of the huge companies that make all this stuff and make all the decisions. It's like if someone uses a smartphone that's got cobalt in it—or has any cheap clothing bought at any large chain store—or uses gasoline—etc etc—I kind of don't want to hear them complain if I used some AI assists somewhere. We're kind of all part of the problem. The entire mass production economy has ethical dilemmas, but we're not ostracizing anyone and everyone who participates in it even a little bit. This opinion is still a work in progress lol)

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 23, 2026

Replying to @neatnik@social.lol

@neatnik@social.lol not only that but, inexplicably, you can host a static website with them! https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280141-How-to-set-up-a-website

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 22, 2026

Replying to @stefan@stefanbohacek.online

@stefan@stefanbohacek.online So cool. Every time I think about the Voyager probes, it blows my mind.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 21, 2026

Anyone have a recommended CMS that works with static site generators?

I know Build Awesome is coming and I know a little about CloudCannon and Contentful. Anything else?

For my personal sites, I just use markdown files, but if I were setting up a website for a business, I'm curious what my options are.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 19, 2026

Boosted by

Neatnik @neatnik@social.lol

I blogged about the SLAP stack (SQLite, Linux, Apache, PHP) and about my first time setting up a VPS. https://blakewatson.com/journal/the-slap-stack-is-the-last-server-stack-youll-ever-need/

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jul 14, 2026

RE: @bw@social.lol

SLAP stack blog post in progress...

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Jun 25, 2026

Replying to @neatnik@social.lol

@neatnik@social.lol you know what, I was worried you'd just increase a little to cover costs. This announcement reads like a renewed vigor for the service and I'm totally here for it! Easy for me to say since I can pay it, but I will continue to be a sponsor as long as I'm able to afford it.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · May 11, 2026

Replying to @ellane@pkm.social

@ellane@pkm.social Very cool! Do you think you would still use this system if you didn't have Obsidian?

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · May 08, 2026

I know someone who is interested in making apps. Right now, she only has experience with a service that essentially uses AI to build an app for you. She's planning on finishing college, but she's looking for resources right now to help her go beyond this vibe-apping.

She has an interest in UI, how apps work, and seems to have a good eye for when they are nice and smooth vs janky. She's not sure at the moment if she's interested more in code or design or project management. So I'm trying to think of resources I can send her to give her a taste of everything.

I think she has an admirable amount of hustle, but really just doesn't know where to start.

All of that said, does anyone have any recommendations of things I can send her? What I've got so far is Khan Academy's Hour of Code and FreeCodeCamp's responsive web design course.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · May 04, 2026

Showing all opened windows on macOS will always be "Exposé" to me.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 30, 2026

Replying to @csilverman@mastodon.social

@csilverman the metadata at the bottom is just a long-standing pattern that I've been doing for over a decade, regardless of which notetaking app I'm using at the time. Previously, I created it with a TextExpander snippet, but with Obsidian, I'm using a template to auto-generate it. The date and time is a little redundant because the template also adds created and modified fields in properties. But I've been doing it so long that I just keep doing it. If I were redoing it now, I'd probably put the tags at the top of the file instead of the bottom, but that ship has sailed lol. I'm using a community plugin called Calendar. Makes it easy to create daily notes on any day. I may have gone a little overboard with plugins (I should do the obligatory My Obsidian Setup blog post), but I'm not reliant on most of them. And then to top off all of this glorious nerdery, I have a CLI program that I made that lets me publish any note to my web server as a basic HTML page styled with Water.css. It doesn't happen often, but every now and then there will be something I want to share. Example: https://blakewatson.com/notes/951626b6/

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 30, 2026

Replying to @csilverman@mastodon.social

@csilverman Nice, that font is beautiful! I'm using the Baseline theme these days. In dark mode it's the Flexoki variant and in light mode it's the Notion variant. I have a little bit of CSS to make headings smaller. The font is Die Grotesk from Klim Type Foundry.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 30, 2026

Replying to @spartanatreyu@mastodon.social

@spartanatreyu Yeah, gruvbox is a great theme. I've been using it a lot as well. You are probably right when it comes to the differences in colors. I was looking for something with less color variety, so it doesn't bother me, but I do take the point.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @amber@front-end.social

@amber@front-end.social Hey @mhilltopple@mastodon.social someone feels your pain.:-P

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @csilverman@mastodon.social

@csilverman I'm really curious what your theme looks like. No pressure to reveal it though. :-)

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @hejchristian@front-end.social

@hejchristian I will say it looks like the Obsidian theme hasn't yet been added to the directory. Looks like there's a pull request from a month ago.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @csilverman@mastodon.social

@csilverman yeah, this is another good one and I used it for a while as well in VS Code. There is a really nice Obsidian theme called Baseline, which has a nice Flexoki variant. https://github.com/aaaaalexis/obsidian-baseline

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 29, 2026

Sometime within the last couple of years or so, I became totally burnt out (heh) on cool colors. I've started using color schemes and themes (in different apps that support them) that employ warm, earthy colors instead.

I recently found this one and one of the things I like about its theme for VS Codeht variant does as well, ensuring that all text meets WCAG AAA contrast standards.

It's rare to find a good light theme with solid contrast. Even more so to find a good one paired with a good dark one as well. I haven't been tempted to override any of the colors yet, which is saying something.

#linkblog

https://warmburnout.com/

social.lol

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 27, 2026

Replying to @kraft@kraft.blog

@kraft Wow, what a jump. I've been using a folder of files strategy where I'm able to use both Obsidian and iA Writer, but I don't use it for keeping scans, although I do need something for that. I previously used DEVONthink for this, but I found it a bit overwhelming for my taste. https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 26, 2026

I switched over to Numbers Creator Studio. It wrecked the alignment of a bunch of my tables in a file I've been using for years. I tried to fix it, but I finally got frustrated and moved it over to a Google Sheet. SAD!

I would love to just manage it as a CSV file, but I have a few niceties baked in that require a real spreadsheet app.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @kjv@mastodon.gamedev.place

@kjv i'm not aware of one, but I imagine there are some pretty good ones out there. HTML for People does have a bonus chapter called CSS Basics you can check out. https://htmlforpeople.com/css-basics/

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @puppyfag@mk.absturztau.be

@puppyfag Good luck! Let me know if you have any questions.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @kf7ccc@mastodon.radio

@kf7ccc Nice! Yeah a simple static site is underrated for sure.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 24, 2026

Replying to @stefan@stefanbohacek.online

@stefan Thanks a lot! I love your stuff as well. A lot of great resources and links to webby goodness.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 24, 2026

Replying to @brennan@social.lol

@brennan that's great to hear. Thanks a lot, Brennan!

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 24, 2026

When I wrote HTML for People, I envisioned non-tech people learning it because knowing HTML is a generally useful skill in information work. But AI kinda ruins that. Fewer non-tech people want to learn HTML. But it seems to have found a niche audience among people who still want to learn HTML despite having access to AI. That makes me feel better about it. I’m glad I wrote it when I did because I’m not sure I could have stayed motivated to write it in 2026 with the proliferation of AI options—whether for writing HTML or for learning it. https://htmlforpeople.com

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 17, 2026

If you are skilled with Python and Go and want to work on projects for NASA, we've got some openings at MRI.

https://mricompany.applicantpro.com/jobs/4055316

Check the full list of openings for security and cloud operations.

#FediHire #Jobs

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 10, 2026

Replying to @MASTERBOOTRECORD@mastodon.cloud

@MASTERBOOTRECORD @sysop wat did I just discover :-O

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 10, 2026

Replying to @eric@social.ericwbailey.website

@eric The hook brings you back. I ain't telling you no lie.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Apr 07, 2026

Replying to @adactio@mastodon.social

@adactio I just came across an app inspired by Quicksilver this past weekend. https://tunaformac.com/

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Mar 18, 2026

You face an undead wizard? I feel bad for you, son. I got 99 problems but a lich ain't one.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Mar 11, 2026

Replying to @jasonsantamaria@typo.social

@jasonsantamaria @adactio Yeah, I just bookmarked a handful of things. Some really neat tools mentioned in that post. Appreciate it!

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Dec 04, 2025

Replying to @shac@ioc.exchange

@shac @netopwibby Apply ice to (sick) burn.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 27, 2025

Replying to @Lowrain@sunny.garden

@Lowrain @mb21 One of the talks at the conference was totally D&D themed and it was great.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 23, 2025

I gave a talk at MagnoliaConf in Jackson, MS today about how I am sick of frontend build steps (and what to do instead). I'm probably going to turn it into a three-part blog series. But for now I do have my talk in text form. https://blakewatson.com/magnolia2025

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 11, 2024

Replying to @gharbeia@mastodon.social

@gharbeia@mastodon.social Here are a bunch of alternatives https://jamstack.org/generators/

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @crocodisle@woof.tech

@crocodisle@woof.tech I *think* I fixed that. Give it a hard refresh.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @crocodisle@woof.tech

@crocodisle@woof.tech Thanks! I just fixed that. I used some new-ish CSS syntax and didn’t do it right the first time around. 😅

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @dx@social.ridetrans.it

@dx@social.ridetrans.it I appreciate it! ❤️

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @Jessica@kitsunes.club

@Jessica@kitsunes.club We can thank @andycarolan@social.lol for that!

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @bewildergeist@indieweb.social

@bewildergeist@indieweb.social Thanks I just fixed it! I used some nested CSS which is a relatively new feature and I didn’t do it right in a few spots.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @pixelate@tweesecake.social

@pixelate@tweesecake.social Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Oftentimes I use an editor plugin that automatically formats the code when you save.

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @jzilversmit88@mastodon.social

@jzilversmit88@mastodon.social No purchase necessary, it’s free!

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @proactiveservices@fosstodon.org

@proactiveservices@fosstodon.org futzing with DNS is a rite of passage for sure 😅

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @starlord117@mastodon.online

@starlord117@mastodon.online @7sleepersmusic@mastodon.social This book is written in Markdown. I used Eleventy to generate the website from it. https://www.11ty.dev/

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Blake Watson

@bw@social.lol · Oct 10, 2024

Replying to @proactiveservices@fosstodon.org

@proactiveservices@fosstodon.org Thanks! Yeah, I had some DNS issues there for a bit, but I think I got them sorted out now.

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Blake Watson

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