The browser is striking back. Bloated stacks, fragile abstractions, bad defaults - it’s all catching up with us. I’ll dig into all of this at Web Directions Dev Summit, Nov 19–20 (Sydney + online). 💸 Codes: jonodevsummit25 / jonodevsummit25streaming webdirections.org/dev-summit

1999 - Notepad 2001 - Frontpage 2003 - Notepad++ 2005 - Dreamweaver 2008 - Sublime Text 2016 - VS Code 2025 - Cursor What does your Web Development journey look like?

How many HTML tags can you remember? No cheating! By Paul Foster codepen.io/plfstr/full/...

Great post from @erwinhofman.bsky.social on webperf Interop proposals: www.rumvision.com/blog/interop... Upvote your favourite ones to let us know which are important to you!

If I ever say "Playbook" non-ironically, you have permission to delete my social media.

The Times appears to have interviewed an 'ex Buckingham Palace cleaner' who supposedly divulges royal stain removal secrets but doesn't seem to exist, is possibly AI, and probably placed by a PR agency to boost SEO for a tiling brand. pressgazette.co.uk/news/royal-c...

WebFlow has built in support for LLMs.txt lol

“The name is misleading. no-cache actually means “store this, but revalidate before reusing it.” Finally finished @jono.id guide to caching, took me about a week 🤣 www.jonoalderson.com/performance/...

You’re loading fonts wrong (and it’s crippling your performance) - via @jono.id‬ #seo

It's sad that we've normalised SEO conferences - that claim to educate on best practices - being openly sponsored by parasitical link vendors. That’s not just tone deaf; it’s disengenuous, hypocritical, and sells our classrooms those least interested in education and evolution.

Most brand blogs are a waste of time. Not because content doesn’t work - but because you’re doing it wrong. Keyword sausage machines, “Admin” bylines, cautious filler… It’s industrialised mediocrity, and it serves no purpose. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

How much do you know about JavaScript in the age of AI search? Do you know which LLM bots can render JS? Test your knowledge and be the first to get the 2025 JavaScript & Search Report: bit.ly/4m5jKj7

all the best windows software in history is called something like "joe's thing doer". it does the thing and nothing else and is available on a html website in plain text and takes up under a megabyte of space and uses default windows ui elements and will work until the heat death of the universe

Great post and it's been a pleasure helping @krzksz.bsky.social and @yoav.ws get this working on Shopify. performance.shopify.com/blogs/blog/s...

Most devs don’t understand caching. And it shows. Slower sites. Fragile infra. Bigger bills. All because a few headers are misused or ignored. I wrote the complete guide to HTTP caching - every directive, pitfall & trick, from Cache-Control to Cloudflare quirks to the AI-mediated web.

95%?!? If it was any other organisational investment that failed to yield ROI on this scale, it would be toxic to even suggest implementing it in your business. Instead AI gets cheered on everywhere. We have collectively lost our fucking minds. www.axios.com/2025/08/21/a...

Most websites are loading fonts wrong. ❌ Google Fonts isn’t “free” (privacy + speed cost) ❌ Icon fonts were a mistake ❌ WOFF2 only - stop shipping TTF/WOFF ❌ Subset or bleed megabytes ❌ Fallbacks matter (and can be tuned!) www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/y...

Two pro webperf tips! Are you using Annotations in your performance traces? developer.chrome.com/docs/devtool... And even when not needing to annotate, Gemini AI auto-annotations can quickly give you an idea what a bit of the flame chart is doing without you needing to dig in yourself. Try it out!

AI search doesn’t just find facts - it rewrites history. If you’re not actively shaping that history, you’re already losing. How to protect your story. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/o...

There’s no such thing as a backlink. A link only has value in the relationship between its source and destination. “Backlink,” “DoFollow,” “niche edit” - all made-up terms to flatten complexity into something easy to sell. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/n...

This is so sad. Not because AOL is shutting down it's dial-up internet service, but because it didn't shut down a decade ago. It's 2025. Everyone in America should have access to affordable broadband. Even rural towns.

“Our traffic’s down… but nothing’s changed on our website.” That’s exactly the problem. The internet moves. Competitors launch. Markets shift. Culture tilts. Attention flows elsewhere. Standing still isn’t safe. It’s a countdown clock. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/s...

Markets you’ll never sell to are shaping your success in the ones you care about. Search and LLMs learn from the whole messy, multilingual web. If you’re not influencing the right places, you’re leaving your visibility to chance. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/l...

Why publishers should worry about growing reliance on Google Discover. Great stuff from David Buttle, he nails all the problematics around Discover as a traffic source. pressgazette.co.uk/comment-anal...

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, 1984 blog.google/products/sea...

You wrote a great piece, quoted some great minds in the SEO industry and then slapped GEO on it and ruined everything 🤡 dejan.ai/blog/journal...

The web isn’t URL-shaped anymore. Machines rip your pages apart, extract the claims, and decide what to trust. SEO isn’t about pages now – it’s about the graph of meaning around your brand. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/u...

Google Ads just made branded search a conversion metric. This might finally forces advertisers to value brand, give SEO proof it drives conversions, and shift measurement to where growth really starts. support.google.com/google-ads/a...

I just built a Microsoft Notepad AI agent that opens the Notepad app with a fresh new document when I click on the icon. AMA.

Why are we still using full-page overlays with loading bars in 2025? 🤯 It's basically proof that the developer know almost nothing about SEO and web performance. If you need a loading bar to fix something as a web developer, then something is clearly wrong. 🧵 1/2

I visited the world’s first factory. The original cotton mill that changed the world. It changed everything - labour, time, identity. Now it's a quiet museum. And I can’t stop thinking about AI. Because this all feels very familiar. www.jonoalderson.com/misc/what-th...

Real-time, decentralized social apps — without running a single server. Here’s how to build and deploy an atproto app on Cloudflare Workers. blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-a...

Why are you shipping 3MB of JavaScript to animate a link? Modern CSS now handles seamless page transitions - natively. No routing hacks. No hydration tax. No excuse.

Modern HTML is a disaster. It’s bloated, semantically meaningless, and hostile to browsers, bots, and users. We’ve traded structure for utility, and performance is paying the price. Semantic HTML still matters - and here’s why. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/w...

What if the universe gave you everything you wanted… …so perfectly you never had to go anywhere again? The Hollow Universe is a story about convenience, control, and the slow death of discovery. www.jonoalderson.com/misc/the-hol...

Me after saying I wasn't gonna buy any more books for a while

llms.txt is probably a waste of time. But you know what isn't? Allllllllllllllllll of the other 'standards' files you should care about. Good job someone built a thing, eh? wordpress.org/plugins/well...

It's not enough to have the best content, or product, or pricing. You have to convince the systems that you're a good fit for a given search. ...When everyone else is trying to prove that they're a good fit, too. And they're not playing fair. Welcome to the hostile corpus.

This industry gives me a headache sometimes.

Your competitors have your playbook. You have theirs. Everyone's the same. Everyone's playing it safe. Now AI is learning from the average. And average is easy to ignore. I wrote about the sea of sameness we're all drowning in, and how to stand out. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/a...

Sounds awesome in theory, but: - The main people behind schema.org have left Google - Bing hasn't updated its guidelines in a decade - Google is actively reducing the amount of markup it supports - The only schema.org developments are around eCommerce; otherwise, the vocabulary has grown stale. 1/2

Every time I see next.js a shiver goes down my spine.

They call it nextjs because once you've built your site with it the next thing you have to do is make your nav crawlable

I got scammed in RuneScape when I was 13 and thats a lesson thats lived with me my whole life.

Marketing isn’t media buying. It isn’t CPA dashboards and ROAS targets. That’s advertising. Marketing is brand, product, story, strategy. When we conflate the two, we forget how to build anything that lasts. I wrote about it here 👉 www.jonoalderson.com/misc/perform...

"Everything is now opaque" is a very good piece by @jono.id "If you want to shape the model’s outputs, you must shape the culture that trains it." www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/e...

My favourite read of the day! "...they brought with them an architecture-first mindset: patterns, state management, dependency injection, abstracted logic." I repeat, from my talk last month, men are really out here building JS frameworks so they don't have to learn HTML and CSS.

This has gotten very little news relative to the impact it's going to cause, IMO. The publisher vs. LLM company war is only beginning: blog.cloudflare.com/content-inde...

SEO testing is a cover-up. Teams use it to dodge decisions. Meanwhile, sites stay broken. SEO is about bold moves and shipping fixes. Stop stalling. Start shipping. Don't be smart, be brave. jonoalderson.com/conjecture/stop-testing-start-shipping/

Launched another little WordPress plugin. wordpress.org/plugins/well...