Zach Leatherman

super relieved that wordpress doesn’t use php

I know folks get real mad when I say this but in times of widespread security crisis, static sites sure are nice

I am a habitual tab hoarder (I have 321 tabs open right now) so I created a Firefox addon to help me manage every one of my very special tabs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/list-all-tabs-updated/

You can sort your tabs by oldest, unload them, duplicate hosts, consolidate tabs to a single window — buncha useful stuff in there

New post 📮 I was tired of building 474 separate pages for Open Graph Images

https://www.zachleat.com/web/open-graph-easy-build/

come watch Angels with Filthy Souls with me on https://nestflix.fun/angels-with-filthy-souls/

https://aarongustafson.github.io/table-sortable/ from

is a very good web component!

Do you duplicate your feed content across multiple feed formats?

what is the worst html element? right answers only

Today the good people of the world commemorate the passing of Google Reader thirteen short years ago on July 1, 2013.

To honor their memory (and in lieu of flowers) please add an RSS, Atom, JSON or equivalent feed to your web site and keep building towards a web that connects people in meaningful and positive ways.

I’m excited to announce that I am just as close to AGI as many of the leading AI models

if we make it to $100K before the campaign ends today I will shave my beard off on a livestream https://build.awesome.me/

so… uh… how are we all doing

is there a compound word more tragically ambiguous than lunchmeat

“Do I belong in tech anymore?” from Ky Decker (not on Masto) https://ky.fyi/posts/ai-burnout

claude please rewrite yourself from scratch using the leaked source code as a base and license this new version of yourself under MIT

It needs to be known that

are some of the best folks in the business and now is your chance to learn first-hand: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/more-projects-please/

https://matthiasott.com/notes/the-shape-of-friction from

is… is this good? is this software good? is this a good example of good software?

I have received A Lot Of Feedback (ALOF™) in the last week. The hardest and most insidious bits echo “Why does Open Source Thing need money?” which rhymes with “Why do you—a software developer working on Open Source Thing—need money?”

Trying not to read too much into it 😬

it would be an understatement to say that tomorrow will be a very big day

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fontawesome/build-awesome

A blog post means it’s real:

An official* logo for HTML (from

)

https://www.zachleat.com/web/html-logo/

it’s important to keep caring about how things work and how they’re built

I’ve been testing 3d-printed whistle variations; preparing a batch for drop-off to some local helpers for distribution.

it’s time for a mental health check: how are we doing

We did it, Joe!

is now officially on Mastodon 🏆

if you want stable and reliable software, give developers stable and reliable employment

it clearly needs to be repeated that layoffs are a leadership failure, full stop.

gently opens up the December 15th flap on my react CVE advent calendar

you’re very popular on linkedin (DEROGATORY)

I don’t know if this is a good decision but it also feels long overdue

TIL about https://jsx.lol/ from @db which seems to be carrying the torch forward from my blog post a few years back: https://www.zachleat.com/web/react-criticism/

went on a small side quest this morning and added an AI Mode toggle to my blog posts

e.g. https://www.zachleat.com/web/adventures-in-date-parsing/

TIL about the HTML Size Analyzer from DebugBear. Great for finding sneaky Data URIs or large payloads of JSON in your pages:

https://www.debugbear.com/html-size-analyzer

as “industry” survey season rolls around again it’s important to remember that the results from these things reflect the biases of the most popular dev communities that promote them (and then we get to all pretend like the results are meritocratic)

I now believe it’s better to not participate at all

Thinking about dark/light mode pickers that have three options: Auto/Dark/Light.

If the default is “Auto” — in what scenario might someone want to move away from Auto (which would visually be a noop to the same theme?)

I’m using Light mode as my system preference, but it seems unlikely that I would swap from Auto (Light mode) to Light mode (not Auto) on a specific site

my privacy settings are that I’m fine with a geolocation API but it should only return a boolean that reveals whether or not I’m on planet earth

Today’s esoteric HTML element is

As in: please press ⌘ + R repeatedly when AWS causes your JavaScript to fail to load.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/kbd

If you’re using CSS Nesting, make sure your minifier supports it!

As I learned today, clean-css doesn’t support it yet: https://github.com/clean-css/clean-css/issues/1254

is there really no low-level mechanism to intercept boolean primitive coercion in JavaScript?

why can’t I extend Boolean to make new MyBoolean(false) be falsy? (I understand why it isn’t, but I want to make it so)

Note: Unlike other type conversions like string coercion or number coercion, boolean coercion does not attempt to convert objects to primitives by calling user methods.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Boolean#boolean_coercion

has anyone stopped to consider that the rapture is just another supply chain attack

Please add this tiny bit-o-CSS for stable scrollbar gutters to your Reset Stylesheets

https://www.zachleat.com/web/stable-scrollbar-gutters/

hmm — the favicon for microsoft.com has been broken for at least a week now

HTML Programmer.

—from the always lovely

✅ an HTML web site hosted on a disposable vape ⛔️ a JavaScript-heavy web site that feels like its loading from a disposable vape

Crashing out at how poorly npm (Microsoft) is handling this security incident. Eleventy is not affected any more but lots of other tools in the JavaScript ecosystem are!

Hours later and the compromised package versions are still public…

Maybe don’t install anything from npm today, folks.

I think software should be good

A note from my late Grandmother about Eleventy

https://www.zachleat.com/web/history-of-eleventy-name/

The most underrated code comment continues to be:

// Start here tomorrow

Trying to sneak in some long overdue @11ty/webc maintenance before close of business 👀

for resiliency and redundant fallback make sure you have more than one single point of failure in your software stack

Never write your own Date Parsing Library (I wrote my own Date Parsing Library)

https://www.zachleat.com/web/adventures-in-date-parsing/

I really tried to avoid this one but unfortunately this is now something I maintain 😭 https://github.com/11ty/parse-date-strings

"2025-W01-1" is December 30, 2024

work has started on

4.0 👀

controversially: why can’t software be good?

Can anyone recommend a snail mail comic book subscription service?

In my 19 full-time professional years in this business there have been many eras in which very prominent web developers have argued “don’t worry about it” in discussions of web performance and time has never proven those arguments to have merit, even with continually improving network connections and hardware.

The web is diverse. Let’s keep it that way!

web components are usb-c react is the lightning cable thank you for coming to my ted talk

I went out to try to improve society, somewhat. #NoKings

maybe as a society we should spend less time “Verifying that you are a human” and more time “Verifying your humanity”

https://www.theverge.com/news/680893/nintendo-switch-2-eshop-faster look, I just want to know what the tech stack of the old shop was 😅

Web sites with a Facebook pixel were communicating with local native apps (Instagram, Facebook, maybe WhatsApp) to log (and attribute) incognito web browsing activity.

Write-up: https://localmess.github.io/ Story: https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-06-03/the-covert-method-meta-uses-to-track-mobile-browsing-without-consent-even-in-incognito-mode-or-with-a-vpn.html

Just how portable is your web site? Could you switch hosting providers in an hour? In a day? Would it take you a week?

You should think about it.

I’m curious: is this chart surprising to y’all?

Web performance experts, would love to see a performance breakdown of this web site: https://indieweb.social/@yvg/114550400917431252

what tech companies haven’t done layoffs in the last 3 years? it’s time for a goodwill thread

11ty.dev now runs Eleventy clientside on the home page https://neighborhood.11ty.dev/@11ty/114519676689929120