Well it's about three months late, but my review of 2025 (via the data captured largely through my website) is *finally* complete 🎉 theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/2025-b... #IndieWeb #YearInReview #DigitalHomesteading

Is there any way to subscribe to my bookmarks in Bluesky? Would be great if I could convert them into some kind of web feed (RSS, Atom, h-feed, whatever) so that I could pull them out into productivity tools like Readwise Reader. #BlueSkyHelp #Readwise #RSS

I am a luddite and to me there is a lot of joy in technology. In technology that we deploy for all our wellbeing. Solar panels and vaccines, high-speed rail and wikipedia. But they joy stems from the feeling of being able to be part of humanity in an embedded, meaningful way. Not from buying shit.

I feel like people think "birds are dinosaurs" is a weird fun fact that is "technically true" but I don't know how to emphasize that there are tens of thousands of species of theropod dinosaur on the planet with us right now. People keep them AS PETS. WE EAT THEM.

Did you know that when you use formatted text in a Bluesky message, assistive technology like Screen Readers can't understand it, so your text can be easily misunderstood. [No shade to the OP, just an example of how easy it is to create barriers to understanding for people who use assistive tech]

Fuck the Artists

Looking back at January, I am watching *way too much* YouTube, particularly Shorts 😬 I also haven't touched my feed reader in _months_. Let's see what happens in Feb if I delete the YouTube app on my phone, and reorder my apps so that Reader is where it was 🤞 #FeedReader #RSS #IndieWeb #YouTube

2025 marked a decade on the indie web, so I challenged myself to make 10 small improvements to my site(s). It turned into a bit more than that, so as the year ends, I decided to write up the various side quests I've been on: theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/the-ad... #IndieWeb #HappyNewYear #Blogging

For those who, like me, love speculative and alien evolution, there's a remarkable new book out, "Wildlife on the Planet Furaha" by Gert van Dijk. www.crowood.com/book/wildlif...

Frontend Devs of bsky, looking for community input: Are you using AI/LLMs in your day-to-day work? Are you all-in or only dabbling? What has been working well? What has been frustrating? How has your workflow changed? Do you feel more or less productive? Do you feel like a better dev?

We've already had a great response to this. Thank you everyone who took the time to make a ranking - I know there's a lot of proposals. If you haven't, there's still time! bsky.app/profile/fire...

Eurgh, just had two emails in the span of 30 minutes from two companies that I personally use announcing "new AI tools". Both are B Corps. I wonder how that certification is being updated to account for the energy/resource spike these tools are likely to produce? 😔

No, no, *you* spent slightly too much money at #DinoConUK 😅 A completely wonderful weekend and event! Will have to start saving for next year... 🦕 (And there were several things I missed out on buying too, due to forgetting to bring cash on day one!)

Had a brilliant first day at #DinoConUK, and even managed to take a wander around the very theme-appropriate campus grounds! Looking forward to doing it all over again tomorrow 🦕 (And slightly concerned for my wallet)

I have been back and forth over the span of 5 years about whether to publish this article. All opinions and experiences in this post are my own, or from people I personally know, backed up with recent reports and statistics.

Today is the day: 10 years of digital citizenship 🥳 It's a little indulgent, but I decided to mark the occasion by piecing together a rough timeline for my personal site. It ended up being quite the fun thread to pull on 😁 theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/ad-hoc... #IndieWeb #SmallWeb #PersonalSites

If I ever create a microblogging platform, I'd call it "The Void". Posts would be "shouts". Comments would be permanently disabled. Likes would just add an ever increasing number of eyes around the edge, staring at what you wrote from every angle 👀

Your periodic reminder that "fancy fonts" on places like Bluesky are unicode & are a nightmare for screen reader users. DON'T use for your name Not only that, good lucky having anyone search for you in the search bar by name. More examples in the original post on Masto: toot.cafe/@aardrian/11...

I encourage any of my UK followers to sign this. Transphobia is not only wrong in itself; it is a beachhead for fascism.

forcing employees to figure out how to use AI is definitely a move people make when they are confident, and not at all panicking about not having a path to profitability right before the bill is due

Kurt Vonnegut man

Had an amazing time at #SotB2025! Great to catch up with some #IndieWeb folks; chat about personal projects and general web dev; and watch some phenomenal talks. A wonderful community & great atmosphere. Massive thanks to @letorey.co.uk & everyone involved in putting it on. Will definitely be back!

Happy International Women's Day! Despite the efforts, while much more women enter scientific fields, due to numerous factors, few manage to remain in the field or secure senior positions. Support your coworkers, call out harmful systemic behaviour. 😘

Ok, so this is (I think) a first for BSky... I'm going to try and produced a megathread on #PrehistoricPlanet, specifically season 2. Previous megathreads at BSky have not worked the way they should so I'm a bit cautious. But here we go, please be patient as these take an age to put together....

The landing page for my new course features a hidden synthesizer, and that synth has a hidden “randomizer” button! Turns out, you can make some pretty cool experimental music by holding a single note and spamming that button. 😮 🎵 Audio on for this one plz:

I'm not sure our best practices for responsive & fluid #CSS typography are actually *the best*. On my own site, using the widely accepted approach, a user preference of 16px gives me ~24px font. A pref for 24px gives me ~36px. Where did we go wrong? https://www.oddbird.net/2025/02/12/fluid-type/

What's this, my (first) 2024 round-up post is out before March 2025!?! 😅 These self- / data-analysis posts are always some of my favourite to write! (This one also got stuck behind a broken build pipeline, so I've had to launch a partial redesign as well 👀) theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/2024-b...

HTML, CSS, JS & A11y course stack: - HTML For People by @blakewatson.com: htmlforpeople.com - Complete CSS by @piccalil.li: complete-css.com - Joy For JavaScript Developers by @joshwcomeau.com: www.joyforjs.com - Practical Accessibility by @sarasoueidan.com: practical-accessibility.today

Still not sure about this, but I've decided to move my birding/photography/realising/conservation interests to a new account, @gnaturegnome.bsky.social I always feel weird posting this stuff on this distinctly tech/career-focused handle. Time will tell if this works 😅

Seen today from the railway bridge at Bowling Green Marshes, Topsham. Not sure of ID? Third (bad) photo shows alongside a godwit that it was shadowing #DevonBirding #DevonBirds #UKBirding

Just looking over some photos taken in Cardiff, day before the big storm last weekend. Am I being deceived, or is this a water rail swimming along? Can't really believe it, but it looked odd in the field, hence the (terrible) phone photo. #UKBirding #WalesBirding

ps: look up what the term technoableism means

I hadn't realised how much of a sweet spot I find Mastodon's 500 character limit until using BlueSky more often, *particularly* for replies where nuance is often more useful. I rarely use all 500, but I also rarely have to hyper-edit anything. It's nice.. (I also clearly miss text formatting too 😂)

5000 signatures at my bed time. Thank you for all the support. We start again tomorrow. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/70...

“I’m keeping Twitter and using Bluesky too” Hear me out, the longer you stay on that platform the longer you amplify its power. Do not half use Bluesky hoping it will magically be like the Twitter you spent years cultivating. Invest in the change and cultivate here. You have a new garden!

Alright, CSS challenge: why do scrollable elements cause Grid "blowouts"? Nest a scrollable component within a Grid layout, & often the overflow value is ignored. Min. repro (toggle commented display): codepen.io/theadhocracy... Any fixes that can be applied to the scroll element? #CSS #FrontEnd

One of the weirder "goals" I set this year was listening to 10,000 songs. In 2023, I managed just shy of 9,000 ‒ still the most I've ever tracked! Today I crossed that line, completely accidentally and without any fanfare, whilst debugging an API issue. Not sure how to feel about that 😅 #LastFM

Venue and date info has been released for #DinoCon 2025 - we hope to see you there :) www.dinocon.co.uk

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Bean Dad on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched 30-50 feral hogs glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tweets on an ex-platform... Time for it to die.

Riffing on @bholmes.dev's thread: I've been using Zen full time for 3 months. I'm not switching back. Here's my experience so far 🧵

So anyways I use Netlify

For anyone else coming (back) to BlueSky, but missing some of the excellent apps and UIs that exist for Mastodon (Elk, Ivory, etc.), check out https://skybridge.fly.dev/. I have it running with Elk, and it seems pretty stable so far 🤞

a11y.coffee lives on!!!

Introducing the Bluesky Altometer: altometer.atdev.pro This is an project #atproto that tracks image posts for alt text. It keeps track of the percentage of posts it has seen (since the last database reset) that are *missing* alt text. The goal here is to increase the #accessibility of Bluesky.

@annaecook.bsky.social maintains a list of digital accessibility folk, if that's also helpful: bsky.app/profile/anna... I'm also excited that you're curious to learn more! It can be intimidating, but a hopefully helpful thought is that every little change compounds to make things better.

CEO feels like an obvious role to replace with AI. They ingest large amounts of surface-level info about a company/market, then make predictive guesses based on that data. LLMs are already decent at those tasks. And an LLM subscription is probably cheaper than most CEO salaries 😂

✍ After being stalled for several months, I've finally hit publish on my 2023 data review/collation. A more "raw data" feel this year. It made it easier to write, plus I could capture more data, from more varied sources, more easily. theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/2023-b... #IndieWeb #YearInReview

✍ I really enjoy working with Storybook, but I've found that it's very easy to end up repeating a component's arguments quite a bit. There is a better way! A DRYer way! (And I've reinvented it too often, so decided to write it down 😉) theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/no-mor... #StorybookJS #React

March's #IndieWeb Carnival was a good excuse to finally ship my European Accessibility Act deep-dive. It's a whopper, but hopefully useful 🤞 Very #WebDev focused. (If anyone notices anything wrong or incomplete, please let me know 🙏) theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/europe... #a11y #EAA #accessibility