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About 45% of those who have been a member of kottke.org are currently not active paying members. That’s a lot of churn! If even half of those folks would re-up, I could do some additional cool shit around here, I think. That said, the number of active members has remained relatively steady over time, which I’m thankful for.
You’ve just made a website, but now you’re unsure where to go from here. Here are some ideas for things to add and techniques to learn.
How Bear does analytics with CSS
when a person hovers their cursor over the page (or scrolls on mobile) it triggers
body:hoverwhich calls the URL for the post hit. I don’t think any bots hover and instead just use JS to interact with the page, so I can, with reasonable certainty, assume that this is a human reader.
Nice way to discover RSS feeds from your fediverse friends and neighbours.
How to make the most of the garlic you buy from the store!
[Feed soil with dry garlic skins.]
Anti-JavaScript could be called “antija”.
Purism kills pluralism.
[When someone always criticizes you: 1) ask if was meant for you or if they just wanted to hear it out loud; 2) ask “how am I supposed to do that?” to tease out whether they have actually thought about it practically; and 3) confirm that “what I’m hearing is…” to clarify if there’s anything constructive.]
Add one and a half times as much white vinegar as water to a pot and bring it to a boil. For every four cups of liquid, add a quarter cup salt and a quarter cup raw sugar, and simmer until they dissolve. Or don’t measure anything and add salt and sugar until the brine tastes like you want the vegetable you’ve preserved in it to: potent, salty, and just barely sweet.
Pickle brine is also the best place, other than cocktails, to put leftover brine from jars of capers and other pickles. If you have any, either add them to your own brine, or simply heat them all together, taste them, then add salt or sugar or water or straight vinegar until it tastes good.
[Serve your guests something that is best cooked in advance so you can spend more time with them instead of scrambling in another room.]
[Let guests pick herbs or slice bread instead of bringing salad, so that you can offer a meal as well as receive help and turn the kitchen into a collaborative space.]
A hyperlink is a triple where the subject is the page, the predicate is the link text, and the object is the thing being linked to.
Using the object name as link text could be wasteful.
Subtext explorations on Hashtags
Collecting into tagged buckets is not sense-making, only a coarse-grained first approximation. Sense-making should fold into Orientation, and make it possible to expand your repertoire of Actions. That means synthesizing collected information into new knowledge. This is something linking supports, and tags do not.
Let’s talk about what an iconic photo can tell us about Border Patrol….
Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.
It’s easier to trick people when they’re socially isolated, especially from one another.
Wikipedia places nearby you on a map.
[Add garlic to warm oil in a pan, immediately salt a little, and cook it piled in one corner to draw water and steam softly.]
[Add olive oil or butter whether the recipe calls for it or not.]
[Potato in soup pr sauce can absorb salt.]
[Start using an approach with obvious shortcomings and use the flywheel of growth to improve.]
[Starting simple creates low-hanging fruit for newcomers to get involved, which helps increase traction.]
what was it, aaron?
which atrocity drove your desperation to set your body on fire to match your burning spirit?
was it the baby starving to death on camera?
was it the children eating food for livestock?
was it the artillery shot towards children celebrating at the border?
was it the millionth mother grieving her dead baby?
or was it the silence?
Studying history is important if for no other reason that it makes it harder for people to lie to you. Most of the lies people tell are not new, and the propaganda of earlier times is always easier to see through than modern propaganda which we are always immersed in.
Showing your digital notes graph suffers from the same ‘infinitely expanding list’ problem of most ware: better to break things up around human fuzzy memory limits (maybe 5–12 things).
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Link in bio 💋