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Talk: Let’s fix the web’s text size - Josh Tumath

I saw Josh give this talk at CSS Day. It’s a very useful explanation of the forthcoming text-scale addition to the meta element, and what you can do to prepare your site now.

It started in Dublin. Myself and Jessica got there in the afternoon and I went straight to The Cobblestone in Smithfield for some tunes.

Then I went up the street to the headquarters of Na Píobairí Uilleann, a beautiful Georgian building on Henrietta Street.

I was there to deliver my talk on the making of The Session. There weren’t that many people there in person but quite a few people watched it live online. You can watch the video of the talk if you want. I’m pretty pleased with it. The few times I played some tunes on my mandolin, the acoustics were lovely!

The next day we took the train down to Cork and onwards to my home town of Cobh. The town was looking its best. The weather was nice and the Queen Anne was docked at the deep water quay.

We spent a lovely weekend hanging out with my mother, including a trip to Cork to see Michael Keegan Dolan’s latest dance piece, Naoi Déag Seachtó Cúig. It was joyous! Normally I’d get irrated by someone in the seat behind me tapping their foot, but everyone was tapping along to the classic first album by The Bothy Band.

On Monday morning Jessica flew back to Brighton, leaving me to spend the week at the inaugural Irish Mandolin Gathering.

When I saw that this event was going to be happening, I thought “I’m going! Wherever it’s going to be, I’ll make my way there.” Then I saw it was happening in Little Island and I couldn’t believe my luck! Little Island is halfway between Cobh and Cork, easily reachable on the local trainline.

So I spent the week having a very pleasant commute. This was when the temperatures were getting dangerously high in England, but remained within reason in Ireland. Whenever anyone at the Mandolin gathering complained about the heat, I couldn’t help pointing out that we were actually in the coolest place in Europe for that week.

The mandolin nerdery was excellent. Lots of deep dives into technique, lots of trying out other people’s instruments, and of course, lots of playing tunes. Seán, Macdara, and Marla did a fantastic job, especially considering that this was the very first one!

The inaugural Irish Mandolin Gathering culminated with a concert at The White Horse in Ballincollig, which was excellent but every time it was mentioned, I had that John Spillane song in my head.

Now I’m back home and feeling recharged from a thoroughly enjoyable week in Ireland. Next time I’ll be there will be for a week of learning Irish at Oideas Gael in Donegal—táim ar bís!

Notes and Narratives on Vimeo

Here’s the talk I gave yesterday at Na Píobairí Uilleann in Dublin all about The Session. True to the title, I played some notes on my mandolin to accompany the narrative.

I few weeks back, I got an email with the subject line, Screenshot in an Exhibition:

I am currently developing an exhibition celebrating the thriving folk musics of these islands for the Royal College of Music Museum and one of the showcases looks at the Sharing of folk music and collections. As an incredible and heavily used repository of tune collections, I would like to print a graphic screenshot of a page from The Session to demonstrate digital dissemination, sharing and preservation of tune collections. Are you happy for me to do so?

I replied that I’d be honoured!

The exhibition opened on May 19th. I just happened to be in London a few days after that for the Gaeltacht cois Tamaise. So I arranged to have a little tour of the exhibition from its curator, Jennifer Brian.

It’s a really nice collection, and it was kind of surreal to see my website in amongst esteemed artifacts of folk music history.

I’m not used to The Session getting recognition from a museum, but I am used to getting kudos when I tell fellow trad musicians that I made the website. I joke that it’s my passport to free pints anywhere there’s a session happening, but it’s true.

The next night when I was playing in the session in the pub, Brendan The Navigator, I outed myself about halfway through the evening when I handed out some stickers for the website. Sure enough, someone immediately asked if they could buy me a pint.

I must admit it’s very gratifying when people appreciate the work that’s gone into building and maintaining The Session.

The exhibition at The Royal College of Music Museum is free and runs until October. If you’re in the neighbourhood, you should drop in and check it out.

Better Browser Caching with No-Vary-Search – CSS Wizardry

Handy! I’ve added this header to The Session.

In the latest issue of Matthias’s excellent Own Your Web series, he describes the recent betrayal by Google:

The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken.

He’s absolutely right.

But…

Have you ever clicked on a result from a search engine? Unless you’re lucky enough to land on a nice personal website, you’re more than likely to be confronted with pop-ups to allow tracking, or a desparate plea to subscribe to a newsletter, or just rubbish ads all accompanied by a slow page loading somewhere in the mix.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that what Google is doing is okay. But let’s not pretend that everything indexed by Google is just fine and dandy for people to visit.

And of course the main reason why websites are so terrible is because they’ve tied their business model to heaps of behavioral advertising driven by invasive tracking courtesy of …Google.

This reminds me of AMP. Remember Google AMP? It was a terrible solution to a real problem. Web pages were (and still are) bloated and slow. The correct solution would be to encourage people to fix that, but instead Google mandated a proprietary format for your content that had to be hosted on their servers.

AMP was a disaster, both in practical terms and in the reputational damage it did to Google’s developer relations.

Now they’re doing it again, powerwashing away any goodwill they ever had with site owners. Now Google doesn’t even send search engine traffic to the websites that host the ads that Google encouraged people to put on every page.

It’s almost as if Google is a company so large and with so many competing interests that it now suffers from an incurable split personality disorder.

Personally I think they’re missing a trick. They should be using “AI” summaries as a stick.

If your site is slow, or filled with user-hostile annoyances then it should be cockblocked by a hallucinated summary. But a nice fast respectful website? Send the traffic their way! Everyone wins—users, site owners, Google, the World Wide Web.

Could you imagine how quickly this would revolutionise the world of search engine optimisation? They’ve always told us that we should make websites for humans in order to get good Google juice. This would be a way of making it come true, without any of the over-engineered woefulness of AMP.

It’ll never happen of course. But I can dream.

The end of responsive images - Piccalilli

Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!

ByeDoom — Give a Link → Get a Feed

This looks very handy!

Add any public account from Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, TikTok or YouTube to quickly get a feed for your favorite reader.

Bonus: Add any website to quickly grab its existing feed as well.

The End : Focal Curve

I can’t remember the last time a blog post resonated with me this much.

Craig’s criteria on his job search:

• One: fuck offices
• Two: fuck AI
• Three: fuck React

And his conclusion:

Fuck work

What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays

The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.