Posts in "Links"

🔗 Curve boards

For anyone else interested in the trackside signage of Victorian railways. What got me looking was learning about coast boards. Seems to be instructions to the driver on what to set the train’s power output.

🔗 How to Write Docs People Read

Some interesting ideas on documentation from Allen Pike. I know for myself I tend to turn towards how-tos when I need to reference something. I’d be curious to know how this could work with technical documentation, which is usually dry and out of date.

🔗 Lens

A nice looking meta tag checker by Robb Knight. Finding a good meta tag checker that’s not riddled with ads is difficult. This might be the one I’ll use going forward. I also liked his blog post on how he built it.

🔗 If Not React, Then What?

Quite the condemation of React and “frameworkism” in frontend web development. I’m not a frontend guy, but I do poke through the code from time to time, and it’s mindboggling how complicated it is. And for what? Is it for any specific engineering decision that are relevant to us? Or is it just because “Facebook does it?”

Speaking of which, if you read anything from this post, read the “But” section. An excellent set of rebuttals for why React may not be a good default choice.

Oh, and also the first footnote. I had no idea that some of React’s design decisions came about because of IE 6. The ghost of Microsoft’s shitty browser continues to haunt us all.

🔗 Thought Detox

Someone on Micro.blog posted a link to this little web-app years ago, where you can write your thoughts and they float away into the ether, never to be seen again. I didn’t grab a link to it at the time, which I regretted. Well, I’m not making that mistake twice.

Via Anil Dash

🔗 Thinking About Recipe Formats More Than Anyone Should

Just looking at the formats in the post, it’s a bit of a shame that they’re little more than lists of ingredients and instructions. But I’m not sure there’s much that can be done about that, given how varied recipes can be.

The one exception, Cooklang, looks interesting. It seems a bit limited in the types of recipes it could be used for. But sometimes the best languages are the ones with a small, yet deep, focus on a problem space.

And of-course there’s an XML version. I opened this post expecting there to be an XML version. 😄