Blog
More than you expected?
You're reading everything on my blog - including, among other things:
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notes (short, "toot-like" messages),
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reposts (links to other people's
work, sometimes with commentary),
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checkins (records of places I've
visited, often while geo*ing), and
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videos ("vloggy" content).
That might be more than you wanted to see, if you're only interested in 
articles (traditional long-form blog posts). Click a link to see just those posts, or
use the "Filters" menu to hide specific content types.
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Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing
"Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing." is a literal line in the source code of one of my favourite video games, blackle mori observes.
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Styling :visited links using hue-rotation
My new site theme offers a :visited link style, but for convenience it's based on a CSS hsl-transformation. Here's how it works...
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After months of minor tweaks, on-and-off, I finally bit the bullet and hit "publish" on my new theme for DanQ.me. It's not perfect; it's got all kinds of bugs... but what's the point of having a personal webite if you can't trash it once in a while with an ill-advised "fun" rework, right?
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Screenshot of DanQ.me with comic avatars of Dan, pride colours, and a 'fun'-feeling theme (plus semi-retro 'under construction' banner!).
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Here's a neat trick. I've got a web page with many HTML popovers, styled as modals to create a no-JS gallery/lightbox. But LCP suffers because the browser tries to reserve space for the images within (even though they're within not-yet-shown popovers).
This CSS one-liner saved the day. It basically says "skip over not-yet open popovers on initial page render" -
[popover]:not(:popover-open) {
content-visibility: hidden;
}I appreciate that Lighthouse isn't the last word in performance metrics, of course. But this change alone bumped an affected page's score from 76 to 100, so it's not nothing either!
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Polyday Politics workshop
Grant ran a workshop on politics (and law) around polyamory, at a recent event. I wasn't there, but enjoyed reading his notes after-the-fact... and wanted to use the opportunity to share some of my own thoughts and experiences.
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Browser vertical tabs are great (and they're older than you think!)
A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!
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Things Champ'd Up thinks are uniquely American
When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!
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Your phone is not the problem
Following the discussions in the blogsphere lately about our relationships with our phones, I'd like to echo Antonio Santos' sentiments, and add a few supporting thoughts of my own.
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Every time I see Sainsburys comparing the value-for-money of different brands of toilet roll, the abbreviation they use catches me out and I think they're telling me how much paper I should be "using".
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Online supermarket showing several brands of toilet paper with the price displayed alongside a breakdown showing the price (in pence) per hundred sheets (of toilet paper), but "sheet" is abbreviated to "sht" which looks like... a different word I associate with the product.
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WordArt is still supported... in Microsoft Outlook!
25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...
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F-Day plus 214
It's been 214 days since I had to evacuate my house following a flood, and repair work is (intermittently) underway. And there are so-many moving pieces to this dance that... it's little wonder that people are getting confused.
Like:
Our insurance company appointed a relocations specialist to handle our temporary accommodation needs (moving … -
A Postcard from a Labyrinth Artist
Another Postcard From The Internet landed on my doormat this week... and it's from a real-life labyrinth designer and artist based in Canada. So cool!
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On Publishing Your Salary
Kev Quirk observes that of folks who (like me) choose to share their salary online, there's likely to be a skew towards higher salaries. What can we do to better-contextualise that, I wonder?
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Re: How I made...
Noah S shared how he used some PHP code to block specific badly-behaved bots from his website. I've got a few suggestions to help him make his block faster, easier-to-maintain, and more-thorough, either using PHP code or webserver configuration.
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Did not find GC3C7FT Woodies
This checkin to GC3C7FT Woodies reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. After seeking (and finding, surprisingly) the 2026-09-13 51 -1 geohashpoint down in the Brook Hill nature reserve, the geohound and I came to try to find this cache, too. After finding the correct way into the nature reserve (access …